I ain't gonna have no filler in my poetry collections, man.
Don't even need it if I'm only going to be writing 120-150 poems in ten years.
You dig?
I can write a thousand conceptuals in that time ... with all my other creative activities, regular posts, songs, etc, too.
Look at this from Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings -
Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that problem
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
Someone who's only been interested in poetry for a day could write that. Anyone could write it. And a robot? Don't get me started.
However, the actual The Whitsun Weddings poem in the same collection (obviously) couldn't be written by most top poets. I mean, Seamus Heaney was alive at the same time as Larkin. He was a Nobel Prize winner. I don't see any of his poems being anywhere near The Whitsun Weddings.
So ...
Just saying, man. No filler! All killer!
Anyway ...
Oh!
And as for Eliot ...
What a missed opportunity!
After The Hollow Men ... he should have sat himself down and had a quiet word with himself: "Right, Tommy, son. You need to scrap all of your earlier poems, except The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Just keep that poem, with The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men. Burn the others. Whatever! Just don't republish them. And I shouldn't need to tell you this ... forget about being a playwright. That's a mug's game for you. I mean, you ain't gonna be no Shakespeare, man. And, uh ... cats? Cats?! Please, don't write about cats. It's beneath you. And, uh ... literary criticism? Christ! Let other people do that. People who ain't poets. All right? Now, what you need to do is ... write another ten poems as good as the last two. Just ten! You can do it. You've got the whole of your life ahead of you, FFS! And a word to the wise ... don't become a conservative Christian. That's not gonna help."
You see? That's the sort of word I'm able to have with myself. And it takes two things -
Massive self-awareness
Massive ambition
You dig?
'Nice one, Mikey!'
Yep.
Laters!
