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Note
on
Confidential
I
was toying with the genres of pop culture.
A mark of the style here is the blend of high-brow and low-snarl;
in one place:
So I’m a pukey loner,—though at school
I had high grades. If
no one read about them...
and
in another:
We took the Camino Real through Hell and Heaven
which failed not of posting my dreams and horrors
on hazy billboards.
This
low-life killer expresses himself in Milwaukee Mandarin:
A gun that jerks with well-oiled motion into
my hand holding. My
own piece, curling smoke.
Delusion
of grandeur: isn’t that what serial murder is about? It’s a portrait, and if this character needs a
psychiatrist, then so do I for inventing him.
There’s an ever-popular fascination with the behaviour and
brains of sociopaths, but I haven’t yet worked out why that is, except
for the old explanation that we are in dreadful awe of the Mr Hyde, the
shadow of evil, in all of us.
It’s
not often I remember where I first read a poem to a group, or even where
I published it, if I ever did. But
I do recall doing this one as a workshop piece at Fleur Adcock’s.
Jack Carey and Hubert Witheford were the two other members.
See Adcock’s Poems 1960–2000 (Bloodaxe, 2000);
Carey’s The Cathedral (Workshop Press Ltd, 1973), Woods and
Mirrors (The Salamander Imprint, 1976); and Witheford’s The
Lightning Makes a Difference (The Brookside Press, 1962), A Blue
Monkey for the Tomb (Faber, 1994).
Alan
Marshfield
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