Clerk 1: That’s not my section. Mary — Trollope, boxed set?

Clerk 2: No, not in a boxed set. We’ve never sold any Trollope boxed sets.

Me: But I saw one here a few weeks ago. It was all six of the Palliser Novels.

Clerk 2: You’re mistaken, you must have seen that at another bookstore.

Me: No, I’m certain it was this one…

Clerk: Well, Trollope’s in my section and I buy all the books. We’ve never sold any six book box sets of Joanna Trollope.

Me: No, Anthony Trollope. Anthony. He wrote the Palliser Novels — Anthony Trollope.

Clerk 2: That doesn’t sound familiar. Have you checked the shelf?

Me: Yes. There’s lots of them there, but I’m looking for the Palliser box set.

Clerk 2: Really?

Me: He’s — yes. They’re right there. He’s — look. That whole shelf in Classics.

Clerk 2: Oh. That’s not my section.

Marcel Proust’s Journal, click to follow link to Tumblr

I recently came across a picture posted of one of Marcel Proust’s notebooks, marked for a redraft (above). It was very interesting and not at all surprising that just about everything he had written had been crossed through. Most professional writers are horrifically critical of their own work. Only maybe four or five writers in history have been able to get it right the first time. For the rest of us it’s a case of writing what you can and then taking out what’s bad later on.

So here’s a little glimpse into my working process — perhaps a little too intimate a glimpse. I never show anyone my early drafts… not my editors, not my family, not my friends who try to bribe me to try to know what happens next. But I really like redrafting — it’s an opportunity to make every- and anything better, and to add a little bit of awesome.

But here you can see the uncorrected, un-awesome-d rough draft pages along with my messy annotations and corrections. The changes I eventually make may not be these ones, and this will certainly not be the last draft I make. This is the prologue to The Ancient Earth Book 3 — The Fearful Gates — warts and all (with added warts).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999, Michael Hoffman)
This is one of my least favorite plays, but the movie is simply brilliant. The casting may seem a bit strange at first, but it’s inspired. The actors really spark off of each other, particularly the four lovers. The one who really carries it though is Kevin Kline as Bottom. The donkey-acting with prosthetics is neither here nor there, but he puts in a masterwork in the Pyramus and Thisbe set piece at the end of the movie which is genuinely funny and stays completely on text.

Much Ado About Nothing (1993, Kenneth Branagh)
I’ll be up front — Kenneth Branagh is going to crop up in this list more than a few times. He has tons of experience in Shakespeare, he founded his own company The Renaissance Theatre Company and was instrumental (along with others such as Richard Eyre) for developing Shakespeare performance into its modern form, removing a lot of the formality that actors and directors such as Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles approached it with. This is one of my favorites of his. It’s a straightforward presentation which nonetheless sparkles through its performances, particularly Michael Keaton and Emma Thompson.

As You Like It (2006, Kenneth Branagh)
I had trouble with As You Like it before I saw this version of it. It’s an oddly paced play and has all of the stereotypes about separations and cross-dressing. The movie is well conceived and the Imperial Japan setting gives it a fresh vibe. Also: ninjas. Ninjas in Shakespeare. How awesome is that?

Richard II – Hollow Crown, Episode 1 (2012, Rupert Goold)
This is one of my favorite plays, but I have never seen it well performed until last year. The Second Henriad is wonderful when contemplated as a long storyline, so I’m very glad that they were all adapted at the same time. Ben Wishaw gives a powerhouse portrayal of the fickle Richard who is almost completely ruled by whimsy. He is pitch-perfect throughout – and the scene with the monkey is profoundly outrageous.

Henry V (1989, Kenneth Branagh)
I remember watching this in school and just not getting it. At all. It was only after I’d watched his Hamlet a few times that I understood that the words people were saying could actually be understood and I came back to this and understood its brilliance. It’s powerful, but with such a light hand. Obviously a low-budget production, it is unhindered by empty, dimly-lit sets. The editing is excellent and the edits Branagh makes to the script are perfectly judged. The muddy battle at the end is one of my top movie moments ever, and Branagh the song, Non Nobis, Domine, which plays as Branagh triumphantly walks across a desolate battlefield (carrying a young Christian Bale!) is incredibly moving.

King Lear – Ran (1985, Akira Kurosawa)
This is not in my top five of Kurosawa movies, but it is the best Lear adaptation I’ve seen. Kurosawa is one of those special and rare directors who can deliver spectacle, and always puts at least one thing in each movie that no one has ever seen before. He was a famous Shakespeare fan himself and he made this labor of love at the age of 75. You don’t enjoy Shakespeare’s text with this movie, but visually it will be like little else you’ve ever seen.

Macbeth – Throne of Blood (1957, Akira Kurosawa)
This is Kurosawa’s first attempt at Shakespeare, and he plays it fairly loose. It’s mostly a reinterpretation of the plot while using the same themes and characters. Not so high in fidelity, but completely riveting — as anything with the immeasurable Toshiro Mifune is — and the small departures are not for no reason. I’ve seen it just a couple times, but every shot of the arrow scene at the end is engraved on my brain.

Othello – O (2001, Tim Blake Nelson)
This movie is everything that a modern Shakespeare retelling should be. Transferring the setting into a private high school is a brilliant move, heightening both drama and tension. The plot so tightly follows Shakespeare’s original, you can almost believe it’s a scene-by-scene adaptation, but the invented material — particularly the relationship between Hugo (Iago) and his father. There are some great, intense performances, particularly by Josh Hartnett. Julia Stiles is also commendable.

Hamlet (1996, Kennth Branagh)
You never lose your love of the work that opened Shakespeare up to you, and that’s what this was for me. I was so surprised that I was actually catching the gist of what was happening in the scenes for the first time — I could actually follow the plot, mostly. And that credit is due to Branagh — and all the more since it’s completely unabridged (which I think I read was the first movie adaptation of Hamlet to do so). It’s wonderfully directed and shot on 70mm film to give incredible panorama and depth to the scenes.

Romeo and Juliet – Romeo + Juliet (1996, Baz Lurman)
Romeo and Juliet is a pretty overexposed play, and this is the best edition of it. It’s flashy and over-the-top, but brought Shakespeare to a whole new generation of moody teenagers. Nice soundtrack.

Macbeth – Shakespeare Retold (2006, Mark Brozel)
The BBC Shakespeare Retold series was pretty good. Not all of them were hits, but The Taming of the Shrew worked well (Shirley Henderson needs to headline more stuff), and then there was Macbeth. James McAvoy plays a chef working in a celebrity cook’s star restaurant, making the dishes that his boss takes all the credit for. It’s a fast, intelligent, and emotional rollercoaster ride which doesn’t disappoint even if you know exactly what’s going to happen. And McAvoy butchers a pig’s head live on camera which, bizarrely, completely ties into the show’s theme.

Richard III (1995, Richard Loncraine)
There’s a lot about this adaptation that wouldn’t seem to work, on the face of it, but it all manages to hang together. Mostly because of Ian McKellan, of course, but the European civil war setting gives it a lively ambiance. Definitely one to put on your list.

The Taming of the Shrew – 10 Things I Hate About You (1999, Gil Junger)
You wouldn’t think that Shakespeare would make a good light teen rom-com, but it totally does. It all works fantastically. It is impeccably cast and rolls right along. If you don’t take it too seriously, it’s really quite delightful.

Titus Andronicus – Titus (1999, Julie Taymor)
This film suffers from a little too much artism. It’s grandly staged and the actors really trumpet out their performances, but it manages to stay just shy of way-too-much. It’s a good way to see an underperformed play. It stars Anthony Hopkins and he does a solid job.

The Merchant of Venice (2004, Michael Radford)
A by-the-numbers adaptation, but a decent one nonetheless.

That is all.

Coriolanus (2011, Ralph Fiennes)
I equivocated in including this one because at the moment it’s the play I love the most out of all of his, and I’m still not sure what I think about this take on it. Fiennes’ earnestness is laudable, but the tone never lets up; it needs a lighter touch in certain areas. Still, Coriolanus is awesome.

The Tempest – The Forbidden Planet (1957, Fred M Wilcox)
I’m going to round the list out with what is truly a cinematic cornerstone – Forbidden Planet! The movie that gave us Robby the Robot. Again, like the best modern retellings, it works just as well if you have no knowledge of the play whatsoever, as I didn’t when I saw it at the age of eight years old. That such a story can make an under-ten be completely fixated for an hour and half shows the immortal power of Shakespeare’s writings. In addition: Leslie Nielson. Need I say more?

The four line version of the poem is the short version. The long version is forty-two lines long — seven stanzas of six lines each. It kind of takes the theme of the poem and develops it in more detail, being a bit more didactic with the moral and illustrating what it means. As a poem in and of itself, that’s fine, but forty-two lines is way too long for my book, at least for where I want this poem to be. Looking at the long poem in detail (I’m not going to post it here since it’s too long for even a blog, you’ll have to just take my word for what I say about it), there are three main meaning of the word ‘earth’ that it plays with. 1) Meaning mortal man, 2) meaning treasure (ie gold, diamonds, etc. 3) meaning workable land that gives food (food also meaning earth). The absolute maximum I think people would tolerate is three stanzas, if they weren’t too long. If I could get these three senses into three stanzas, then that would work great.

But there’s a fourth stanza I want to stick at the end to twist the theme of the poem around. I’ve already decided that it would be best for the story to stick this last stanza in another character’s mouth at a later point in the book. But that’s a problem too — by subverting the meaning of the original verses it may sound like a different poem altogether, and therefore a kind of cheat. There needs to be some way to tie it together with the rest of it — something like a recurring motif. I remember one of my favorite poems by e e cummings called “Jehova buried, Satan dead” which uses the same line at the end of each stanza, but in the last stanza those same words take on a completely different meaning. It would be great to borrow that trick. So now the last line has become the most important, so we should write that one first.

All that the poem is saying — long version or short — is that all that we are is earth, all that we value comes from the earth, and everything that we have and everything that we are will one day return to the earth. So to put the meaning in meter:

And so all that is earth to the earth will return.

Which is nice and neat. In technical terms this is ternary verse (three syllable groupings) in anapaest form (two unstressed followed by a stressed). If we kept to this meter, things would turn out fine. But it’s a little florid for my tastes, and kind of runs counter to the bareness of the poem’s subject. Could we maybe boil it down into iambic verse (two syllable groupings, one unstressed followed by a stressed)?

And all that’s earth to earth returns.

Yes, we can! We had to use a contraction, which isn’t great, but this is a much more forceful pace. It will work provided we can hang the rest of the poem around this structure. Let’s go back to the beginning and work it through. After about an hour, this is what I got:

The Earth takes earth from out of earth,
That’s earth that’s took with woe.
The earth will bring that earth to earth,
And to that earth will show.
And earth will lay earth in the ground
In earth will earth earth stow.
So what is earth to earth returns;
All earth to earth must go.

That’s a pretty solid and faithful reworking and I’ve kept strictly to my meter, but I can see a lot of problems with it anyway. For a start, it’s longer than the original, which I’m not overly happy with. The problem is that Middle English is not as efficient as Modern English, specifically with regards to articles and so we need to add more indicators to like ‘from’, ‘out of’, ‘that’, etc. I managed to make every other line only six syllables long instead of eight, but then had to reiterate the last line to round that out — which again isn’t great. I’ve also used the word ‘earth’ seventeen times in one stanza, and I’m asking myself serious if that’s too many times. And finally, I’ve chosen to rhyme one sound only — the ‘O’ every other line. If I want to keep this as it is, I’m going to need to stick to picking four words that rhyme together in the next two stanzas (if I’m to have three).

Which is the problem I’ll be facing tomorrow.

Book 3′s poetry needs to reflect the themes of this final book. A few months ago I came across a book published by the very excellent and noble Early English Texts Society, which contained about ten different versions of what apparently must have been a fairly popular poem called ‘Erthe upon Erthe’, or ‘Earth on Earth’. It is a very simple little ditty, but it deals with quite large universal themes. It fit the viewpoint of one of the characters of the book, and I found a place where it would put an interesting spin on the development of a certain set of  other characters.

Of course, it needs to be rewritten because it’s in Middle English  (circa 1307) which is a bit hard for most people to wrap their heads around. This is what the earliest form of that poem is.

Erþe toc of erþe erþe wyþ woh,
Erþe oþer erþe to þe erþe droh,
Erþe leyde erþe in erþene þroh,
Þo heuede erþe of erþe erþe ynoh.

If you sound it out, you can actually get the sense of what it is saying, and it’s got an absolutely lovely cadence. Remember that ‘þ’ is an unvoiced ‘th’ (like ‘thin’, not ‘then’), and that there are no silent ‘e’s — they should be pronounced with an unstressed ‘ah’ sound. Oh, and that last ‘u’ is really a ‘v’. Go ahead, and read it to yourself. I’ll wait.

Isn’t that delightful? It has a natural swing to it, like a nursery rhyme. Here’s a sense translation in modern English. It’s not a lot different (except no pleasant swing).

Earth took from earth earth with woe,
Earth other earth to the earth drew,
Earth laid earth in an earthen trough,
So had earth of earth earth enough.

There is some mild debate over the origin of the poem, and current opinion seems to insist it comes from Latin, and it may have originated there — we ultimately just don’t know. However, although it rhymes, it is also laid out in alliterative verse — the exclusive poetical form of Old English –where the word ‘earth’ is the only alliterated word. Its ambiguous treatment of the word ‘earth’, which means at different times in this poem 1) a man, 2) the ground, 3) treasure, and 4) a burial pit (the earthen trough), is very reminiscent of Old English riddles. If the idea came from Latin, the Anglo-Saxons certainly made it their own, and even though it is now written in Middle English there are only 16 different words in it, most of those have very similar OE analogues or are identical (for example, the ME ‘erthe’ = OE ‘eorthe’, ME ‘droh’ = OE ‘droh’). If I were to lay money on it, I would say that there is a lost and forgotten Old English version of this poem/riddle that this one is based on, which was later expanded on (more on that in the next post).

The subject matter also seems a straight line from Ecclesiastes 12:7  (‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.’) and the whole ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’ bit from funeral services, which I’ve just found out isn’t actually from the bible. But the poem doesn’t have any sort of redemptive spiritual aspect, as it stands, so it’s as likely that this Anglo-Saxon/pre-Anglo-Saxon notion influenced the English burial service as the other way around.

None of which actually helps me with rewriting the poem, but I find it interesting, and does make me feel better about giving it to a character that was present during the Anglo-Saxon period, but who skipped out on the Medieval one altogether.

Now that I’ve pulled the meaning apart, I have to reassemble it back into a poem again.

So says G K Chesterton, who did many things but rarely did them badly. He isn’t saying that we should not strive to do things well, but only that if something worth doing, then it should be done regardless of our capacity to do it well or not.

However, I have found that there is something to be said for doing something deliberately badly. Writing poetry is a natural compulsion for me, but I have rarely enjoyed it so much as when I deliberately wrote bad poetry. The poetic artform is in a bad position at the moment, enlarged and glutted on its own importance, swelled with hot air as the stream of consciousness and the unstaunched flow of mere surface thought has replaced artistic constraint and rigorous reworking. Generations of children in schools have been drilled in poetic appreciation — and this is exactly where the trouble originates. They are taught everything about poetry except how to say ‘I don’t like this one’. Individual taste is denegrated — if you don’t like it, then you don’t understand it. Personal opinion is obliterated, and without prefence there can be no true appreciation.

What’s the remedy? Bad poetry. Only by writing truly awful verse can we rectify this situation. Hold up poetry that is indisputably awful for everyone to ridicule and revile, and the balance may be reset. The tools used to recognise bad poetry are a good many of the ones to recognise good poetry. And so it was with this aim that my writing partner Russell Thompson and I began to write The Colour Papers, almost four years ago now. And we created the characters of David White and Horace Greene in order to bring not just humour and satire, but also a light of objective sanity into the world of poetry. Bad poetry, unlike good, must be completely indiscriminate and we found ourselves lampooning the poets we admire as much as the ones that we don’t, and found a greater appreciation for both.

Volume 1

We published the first Colour Papers book ourselves, at the end of 2009. We had a big launch, sold a couple hundred copies, and actually managed to break even on the costs, which would have been beyond the dreams of our fictional alter egos. We then immediately started writing book two, and while we did we decided that such complete artless awfulness could not only be kept between the two of us and some few hundred of our nearest friends — its true home was the internet! And so, we’ve decided to serialise volume two on its own dedicated webpage, posting the letters at two week intervals, all of them for free to read online. Volume one is now available to buy as a hardcopy and for the first time also to download as an ebook. A preview of the first two chapters can be found here.

Please read our bad poetry and the absurd correspondences that attempt to justify it, and seriously consider passing what you read on. You can join the facebook fan page through this link, and get updates through twitter by following this one.

Not all poetry is good. Much of it is very, very bad. And it has been sobering to find that a great deal of poetry is even worse than we can intentionally write it, but that will not stop us from trying even harder, and going to even greater lengths, to write the very worst poetry possible.