MINOR VARIATIONS AND CHANGE: AN INTRODUCTION

When I came to write the notes for the introduction to this book, I found myself in a markedly different position than on the previous occasion when I had come to write ‘'Remnants Of A Northern Dream'' The opening piece for 2008's collection of verse, ‘Buildings In A House Of Fire'.

Those notes were written in Sept 2007 and in the meantime I had undergone a number of unexpected personal and emotional changes. One of the most striking of these changes was the death of my mother in the summer of 2008. I feel some of the work contained within this book reflects upon the effects that the loss of both my parents, in a relatively short space of time, had on me - both emotionally and physically, as well as on my relationships with others in the following weeks and months after, firstly, my fathers death and then, just over 2 years later, my mothers.

While I do not wish to portray this work as some kind of book of mourning or monument to grief, I do feel it is important to provide some colour and a little background for those who have an interest or even a morbid fascination for details such as these.

Following the death of my father in 2006, I had envisaged a time of reflection; a time when there would be much to deal with emotionally and thus, for me, much to write about while coming to terms with the loss and sense of grief obviously associated with the death of a parent.

As a writer or indeed anyone with even the slightest pretensions of calling themselves a writer, one has to be aware that these harsh and sometimes brutally painful realms of personal reality are, in fact, the landscape and the wellspring from which much of your creative work will propel itself.

I imagine this applies itself in equal measures to poets, songwriters, playwrights, novelists, musicians, sculptors or painters - or indeed any other part of the creative pantheon that allows room for, or gives rise to, deep personal self-awareness and examination.

This perceived outpouring onto the page (imagined or otherwise) pretty much failed to materialise - at least in any great length, precision or detail. Perhaps it was still too soon to be dispassionately distancing myself from such a major life event in order to be able to write about it... writing about it being an obvious way or dealing with such powerful emotions - a very personal and literal type of therapy.

As someone who is of the mind to occasionally attempt to have published these meandering and sometimes disconnected trains of thought, I was keenly aware of the possibility that any poems written under these particular circumstances may simply resort to cliché or overtly maudlin sentimentality… and this was something I was obviously keen to avoid. It is of course worth pointing out at this point that it is for the reader to decide whether I have in any way achieved these objectives successfully or not. On other occasions I just felt like getting drunk and not concerning myself with such idle rigours as poetry.

One of the few poems that surfaced during the immediate aftermath of my fathers passing was, ‘The Journey' which was written in time to be featured in Buildings In A House Of Fire. A book which in many ways can be seen as a kind of companion collection to ‘Minor Variations and Change', dealing as it does with themes, thoughts, ideas and theories on the effects on the human psyche of love and loss, as well as the disconnection from the ideas and perceptions of the everyday identity of self which forms the very heart and concept of who we perceive ourselves to be as individuals.

There are other similarities between the two collections - a sense, poetically at least, of the tying up of a number of loose ends.

There are, within these pages, a number of poems risen from the distant clouds of time, poems written while still in my late teens and early twenties and these, when found, resonate with an already focussed sense of disdain, youthful anger and not a little naïve but well meaning political innocence… along with what seems now like naïve ideas on love romance and personal identity.

These poems I felt worthy of inclusion in my own personal journey and story are to remain ongoing and intact, a game of poetic snakes and ladders can be played, by those of a mind, when tracing any history or lineage.

It would be easy to name or categorise the age and distance in time of these poems in relation to each other, but I find the idea of ambiguity and mystery far more nourishing than that of simple cataloguing or chronology. Sometimes it pays to work a little harder if you hold such motivations to be important.

There are also a small number of poems dating back to the mid and late 1980's.

Firstly from a time when I had initially moved to the city of Glasgow from, what then seemed, the much more sedate and sleepier environs of the small coastal town of Cleethorpes on England's North-East Coast. These poems and indeed the writer are almost unrecognisable to me now as I attempt to write these notes well over 20 years later, yet somehow they still tell the part of the story so integral to the closing of this particular poetic circle, dealing as they do with a certain time of exploration and fragility.

The majority of this book was written between the years 2005 – 2010 and there are a number of poems that could quite easily have made ‘Buildings In A House Of Fire' in 2006-07 and perhaps the ones that didn't, though featuring now, felt too raw or too personal when the final cut came for that more thematic and specific collection.

The largest part of this third grouping of poetry began to form slowly, at first, throughout 2007- 2008. My mother died in the summer of 2008 after suffering a series of strokes and in the following months the flow of feelings and emotions that I had expected to permeate my writings after the death of my father finally began to coalesce into poetry and prose - detailing sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly with this peculiar life changing squaring of the circle, one it would seem that often leads to a very clear and time specific realisation of one's own mortality.

I moved house just a few short weeks after my mothers passing and this peculiarly timed new beginning (a shedding of the old and a wearing of the new) also had an effect upon my writing, with both diametrically opposed settling and unsettling consequences.

In 2008 I had begun working on a visual accompaniment to ‘Buildings In A House Of Fire' something that could perhaps be used in a live setting in order to represent a cut-up, distorted, cinematic stimulus to any planned future readings (This, as I write, remains for the most part an as yet unfulfilled concept).

I began firstly by filming the surroundings of my childhood and teenage years using a borrowed digital camera, I began collecting images of familiar places - side streets and back alleys, the derelict landscapes of dead or dying industry, the Grimsby fish docks, Scunthorpe steelworks, disused factories in South Yorkshire and Sheffield, places I had passed on train journeys as a teenager or as a child. All seemed relevant and purposeful.

I had, in the creative aftermath of ‘Buildings In A House Of Fire', launched the ‘Ten Voices' project - inviting people to read any poem of their choosing from the book in any form or style they should see fit and the idea of incorporating cinematic images into taped versions of my work as read by other people began to appeal to my sense of the awkward, the perverse and the experimental. The idea of allowing technology (ancient or otherwise) to communicate the ideals and concepts of poetry seemed just suitably enough anti-establishment and entertainingly accessible all in the one go… a performance poet communicating through the recorded voices of others. The idea remains intensely appealing!

Eventually, a year or so on from the original idea, the Ten Voices project; in its pure spoken word form, went live online - the digital age creeping slowly into my own creative world.

In late 2008 and early 2009 I began seeking out other suitable images to go with my own hand-held footage, photographs and old bits of film that would reflect perfectly with the themes of disconnection and alienation that seemed both compelling and inevitable to me at that particular moment in time.

It was then, that throughout the last months of 2008 and early weeks of 2009, I began sifting through hour after hour of old news footage, music video, TV adverts, documentary footage of medical experiments, old horror movies and 70's sitcoms, endless images of war, death and the blind stupidity of human suffering - anything and everything that could be classed as bizarre, disturbing, surreal or offensive. Hour after hour watching and editing together everything from monkeys fucking to the war in Iraq.

By this time the project had mutated into a visual and musical collaboration between myself as visual artist and Glasgow band ‘Punch and The Apostles' as combative musical neophytes and with assistance from a friend in professional editing. The piece had now become a visual interpretation of both my own work as well as that of the band. This particular project finally came to fruition in the summer of 2009 with its first public performance accompanying the live debut of ‘Hymn To Death' .A 40 minute concept piece so out of step and out of time with today's current morass of lightweight musical banality as to render it from another world completely - a world where the seemingly benign celebration of the inane and the endlessly average might one day be interested and alive enough to be intoxicated by something with honesty truth and integrity.

These few short weeks seemed to reinvigorate my own creative energies, for the time being at least, and lead to a slow but steady stream of new poems. It is these, the final and arguably most cohesive group of poems contained within these pages, that are for me at least, the most coherent unit in this travelling army of words.

Written for the most part in the late winter months of 2009 and the early months of 2010, the majority of the pieces were composed while typing directly into the keyboard, sitting at my desk in front of my living room window as the cars and buses rumbled and creaked by below and the busy daily life of Scotland's largest city bled itself into my conscious thoughts.

This process involved little or no editing. Some were pieced together from notes made under a not inconsiderable haze of alcohol, often while sitting alone in a number of bars in Glasgow's West End, or on occasion, and it seems fitting, also sitting alone late in the evening listening to the likes of Miles Davis, Sinatra and Tony Bennett with Ralph Sharon and his Orchestra live at Carnegie Hall. Equally imbibed you might say. It felt like a long journey from Marc Bolan or The Sex Pistols. The process itself it seems is often unpleasant but seemingly necessary.

It is under these circumstances that I make no apologies for the ideals of repetition either in theory or in subject matter. Much distance and disconnection seemed to surround both myself and those around me at the time of writing. Distances measured geographically and physically as well as emotionally.

There was much to say about the condensing world of retentive negative existence - a place where many things, it seemed, were becoming calculated by a growing silence.

While there are large swathes of this book that are highly autobiographical in tone, there are also shades of observational perspective that I have attempted to undertake from within the minds eye of numerous others... an unrehearsed actor in another persons script so to speak. Those with a keen eye may recognise something of themselves, someone they know or maybe even work with, an old companion or a new enemy. Perhaps for others the affectionate memory of youth or an acceptance of the inevitability of time. Some, I hope, will find hidden and not so hidden lines of politics and positive outrage at the social disgraces that tyrannise our daily existence, along with the realisation that all pain is relative and suffering and injustice in the world knows no boundaries or shows the remotest signs of abating. It appears to me that no one is listening and while I myself can hear the voices, they no longer appear to be saying anything.

While I cannot claim my use or knowledge of language or even my technical ability with the nuances of poetry itself are in any tradition or high order, my command of the literal disciplines of writing are, at best, quite average and to some extent somewhat uneducated. I have been asked on numerous occasions in the past about the punctuation or lack of it contained within many of my poems. There is on one level a simple answer - poetry either needs punctuation or it doesn't! Also I like to think of the reader finding his or her own rhythm and pace when reading a poem. This may change and develop with different readings and for different people, a kind of free-flowing experiment in jazz rhythms with the musical notations and improvisations being replaced by the hidden rhythm of words.

Where I have felt it necessary or appropriate a number of poems are punctuated with wheezy full stops and stuttering commas. This is mainly to help facilitate the occasional and much maligned art of breathing or to help point out when the reader may wish to mix the minor, the major and the very much diminished.

I have tried to tell in essence a part of my own particular story as truthfully and honestly as I can. Though this book is not brimming with surreal leaps of humorous imagination, screeching guffaws or howling belly laughs, I promise to try and do better next time. There are jokes on the way. Honest!

Graham Tiler

Feb 2010

MINOR VARIATIONS AND CHANGE - PHOTO GALLERY