He seemed like he wanted to be the next person to speak, but I held a sausage up to his mouth to shush him. ‘I’ll just choose the best three hundred,’ I continued. He started his next sentence with ‘But in terms of quality …’, but I shut him off; changed the subject to a discussion of where he thought the waiter was from. Nick was silent for a spell, but then adapted to our new topic, suggested maybe Scotland. And the question of ‘which poems’ remained in my court for the remainder of our relationship.
When I got home I started to pore through my poems. It’s difficult to select three hundred poems when you have such an intimidating stack. I know it’s a cliché, but they are all my babies. I write them all. I know that sounds unbelievable when you consider the standard and wealth of them, but it’s true. Of course I’ve considered farming them out. Hiring some whizz kid PA to squat at my desk, rattling them off from dawn till dusk, but that’s just not how this game works. Ask any poet and they’ll tell you the same thing: it’s important you have a stake in all your poems. A feeling of ownership. So I write them. And I become very attached to them. And so to just cast a thousand, fifteen hundred, more to one side – well, it’s tough. But that was the task, and so I necked maybe a quart of gin and I started hurling clumps of my poems over my head. Huge fistfuls of the sods.
It’s tough seeing them go, of course it is. Each poem takes time to conceive, to develop. I nurture them from acorn to oak, each and every one of them. I’ve got a whole chapter about the grim realities of drafting and redrafting the little urchins in this very book. If you think a poem can just be ‘spunked out’, or whatever the phrase it is you’re using, then you’re living in cloud cuckoo land, you really are. I happen to have an enormous amount of respect for my readership and I know that they know the difference between a poem that’s been dashed off in a second and one that’s had a few weeks of care and attention lavished upon it.
And so I just shut my eyes and flung out as many as I could bear. Carnage.
Those that were left I unfolded, ironed, stuck together into sheets, scanned and emailed to Nick. And it is those three hundred that make up this book. Three hundred out of two thousand. The cream. Or, more accurately, some of the cream. Dunked into chapters and positioned pleasingly on the page. They are just the tip, of course, of my poetry iceberg. But though I’ve sacrificed many in the purge, still enough remain. Or as Nick used to say, sometimes smiling, other times quite solemnly: ‘More than enough.’
INTRODUCTION
When the green light flashed go and my dream of cranking out a paperback became reality, I became aware of a certain major opportunity. Namely, if they were going to slide this thing through the printing presses again, surely there must be a chance I could slide an extra poem through with it.
I phoned my paperback publisher, Jenny, and asked her about this possibility. Jenny’s one of these people who instinctively knows how to deal with people like me. She listened to my idea and then I could hear her clicking the nib of her biro in and out and leafing through the hardback version of the book. She called my idea ‘interesting’, which was a boost. Then she asked whether I had more poems ready to go. ‘Just the two thousand,’ came my reply. ‘And are they like these ones?’ she asked. I said that they were and she was quiet for a bit. ‘You betcha they’re like those ones,’ I reiterated and she said either ‘mmm’ or ‘uh huh’. I can’t remember exactly which. Then there was another long silence. She was playing me like a fiddle, is what she was doing. ‘I mean, there’s a lot of poems in here already,’ she said and I said, ‘Thank you.’ I could hear the nib clicking in and out again. I could hear her whispering my idea to colleagues. I could hear them laughing. They, at least, were on board. ‘Just one?’ she asked and I made it clear that more than one would be easy, I had oodles – in fact, she was more than welcome to name her figure. ‘Just one,’ she said again, this time not as a question.
I was excited that Jenny had waved the idea through. I was now at liberty to rifle through all of my poems and choose one that I thought my fan base would appreciate seeing in black and white. My immediate attention turned to the poems I had written in between the hardback hitting the shelves and now: the advent of the paperback. I thought the poem I chose should be a fresh one. One that hadn’t been seen before. Like virgin snow, one that hadn’t had some great idiot’s welly stuck in it. Pristine, untouched. I plunged my huge nose into my sack of poems and started churning through all the ones I’d written in the past three years.
My God, they were good. Just to give you an idea of the standard, here are a couple that didn’t get the gig in the end:
POEM#1627
‘DOUSING’
Roy fixed a hose to his bell-end.
He roamed around looking for small fires.
And he put them out by pissing through his hose or draping his cloak over them.
POEM#2050
‘THE TATTOO’
Derreck got a tattoo done.
It said ‘I never think about Jessica any more’.
He showed it to his wife.
She asked him why he was getting tattoos done about Jessica.
‘Read the tattoo, love!’
Derreck yelled.
‘It says I don’t think about her! That’s the point I’m trying to make! I don’t think about her.’
Also, I really liked this one. I liked the idea of having David Platt somewhere in the book anyway. His swivelled volley in the last minute against Belgium at Italia 90 is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
POEM#1986
‘REEDUCATION’
David Platt had an idea.
He’d take a GCSE.
He got all the forms and tried to enrol.
But my God was it hard!
At night he would go to bed and have nightmares about these bloody application forms.
His wife held him.
‘You’ll be fine, Dave – you’ll fill out the forms – I’ll help you fill ’em out.’
Platt swallowed and clung to her flanks.
He loved his wife.
She made everything okay.
I sent my ideas to Jenny and followed up with a couple of phone calls and then another email and an email to a colleague of Jenny’s who I knew for a fact sat somewhere near Jenny’s desk. I was interested to know whether she felt these were the kind of poems that might capture people’s imaginations. The kind that would push the book further into the public’s consciousness. When the reply did come it was far from negative about the poems that I’d proposed. In fact she barely talked about those; more she expressed reservations about the idea of adding a poem, as a whole. Now that she’d thought about it some more, she wasn’t sure that there would be space in the newly configured paperback. Also, she wasn’t sure that people would necessarily have the appetite for another poem.
I explained that we could make