Black Swan Green

“Beautiful words ruin your poetry. A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it into the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it can have no excellence. I am right?” “Sort of.” “Your ‘sort of’ is annoying. A yes, or a no, or a qualification, please. ‘Sort of’ is an idle loubard, an ignorant

“Money’s never a problem, not if you’ve got half a brain.” “No?” “Money? Course not. Identify a demand, handle its supply, make your customers grateful, kill off the opposition.”

“Ross Wilcox’s a prat, not a poet. But if you’re going to suggest that I write a poem to Dawn Madden, no way. I’d be the village laughingstock.” “Absolutely, if you compose derivative verses of cupids and cliché, Miss Madden will remain with her ‘prat’ and you will justly earn derision. But if a poem is beauty and truth, your Miss Madden will treas

“Damn. I’ll post you this collection of essays, Inside the Whale.” “Thanks.” I fluked an 8, a 9, a 10, and acted like it was nothing special.

“Good. I reply, verse is ‘made.’ But the word ‘make’ is unsufficient for a true poem. ‘Create’ is unsufficient. All words are insufficient. Because of this. The poem exists before it is written.” That, I didn’t get. “Where?” “T. S. Eliot expresses it so—the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him. Poems

Madame Crommelynck did a tobaccoey croon to show her delight. “You are a polite thirteen-year boy who is too timid to cut his umbilical cords! Except”—she gave the page a nasty poke—“here. Here in your poems you do what you do not dare to do”—she jabbed at the window—“here. In reality. To express what is here.” She jabbed my heart. It hurt.

“You are being quintessentially truthful.” “Anyone can be truthful.” “About superficialities, Jason, yes, is easy. About pain, no, is not. So you want a double life. One Jason Taylor who seeks approval of hairy barbarians. Another Jason Taylor is Eliot Bolivar, who seeks approval of the literary world.” “Is that so impossible?” “If you wish to be a

I felt giddy with importance that my words’d captured the attention of this exotic woman. Fear, too. If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, “When you’re ready.

Fitting words together makes time go through narrower pipes but faster.