'The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.'
Daffodils. Selected Workings. Emperor Joseph II. Time. Crow. 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4,5,6,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. These are the days my friends.
I’m a Creative Director and poet. I’ve spent my life thinking about what writing can do. I work with exciting organisations to invent worlds, campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. I release new poetic objects every four months. I was the world’s second most awarded studio in the 2020 D&AD awards. This is a regular letter about my thinking and my work in progress.
‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’ said the poet Philip Larkin who really did enjoy being gloomy. His poems are subtle and shaded, but his letters are also worth your time. He found his character at an early age – a sort of jazz-aficionado Eeyore who has a talent for booking depressing holidays – and doggedly stuck to it.
(Later you’ll see this performative character in a letter he wrote.)
‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’ could mean two things. That his muse, the nagging subject which turns up again and again in his work, is a sense of stolen life, OR that his oeuvre was destined to be stereotyped by the public as all lack and loss, the way Wordsworth is forever wandering lonely as.
Only when you step back from a body of work can you see a muse hovering over it. My muses might be confused with my harpies there.
I released a pocket-sized paperback a couple of weeks ago which brings together a host of my dark romanticism writing from the last three years. £5. You can buy it here.
Reading the work trying to imagine how people coming to it completely fresh would respond, (you do that obsessively with your own writing, right?), I realised I’ve used a lot of ink on the subject of time. Theories of time. The one-way-ness of time. Love and time. The seasons in a village. Death and time. Lost time. The idea that space (the up, the down, the going along with it) is simply an emergent property of time, which turns out to be one of the few fundamental things.
I’ve talked about time and writing before in these letters and now I see that time might be my deprivation and my daffodils.
And I’ve had another thought about time which I’d like to share.
It began when, during a current branding project, a comment floated up from the client who described a piece as ‘too wordy’.
Feedback should be peeled back. There are always deeper layers of what people really mean. And in this case, yes, they mean ‘too wordy’, but deeper than that, they mean they don’t think their audience will invest the time it’s asking of them.
Emperor Joseph II in this scene from Amadeus offers Mozart a made up fact about the human ear only being able to hear a certain number of notes in a performance. The equivalent idea is that a piece of writing has too many words. Or is too long.
Right now, all over the world, people are scrolling Facebook or Twitter or Reddit and reading everything. Reading, reading, reading. For hours. People like reading.
Granted, they like reading conspiracy theories on Facebook more than they like reading statements from brands … but doesn’t everyone? My point being that ‘too long’ doesn’t exist if you’re interested.
Here’s my idea. We all spend a lot of time talking about different types of writing. Advertising. Journalism. Brand manifestos. Literary fiction. Pulp novels. Poetry. And we have countless, constant debates around whether specific pieces of writing fit into one or more of these definitions.
Think of the last piece of writing you wrote. How would you categorise it? And what is that categorisation based on? Whether you were paid or not? The kind of person who paid you? Layout on the page? The label someone else gives it so it sells?
All meaningless. Advertising can be poetry. High-literature versus pulp is merely a matter of taste and gatekeeping and cultural milieus. Journalism can be novelistic.
For example, the piece of mine below has just been shortlisted in D&AD Writing for Design. Is it an advert or is it poetry? It’s promoting an attraction – so advert – but I’ve subsequently included it in my Selected Workings – so poetry. I was paid by the brand to write it – so it lives in the service of Mammon – but a couple chose to have it read at their winter solstice wedding – so Aphrodite borrowed it that day. Advertising or poetry? The answer is … it doesn’t matter. It never did. It’s all just writing.
What if we were to only ever categorise writing by how much time we expect someone to spend with it? How much of their life will someone give to your work? Which is a tough question, yet its starkness gets to the point better than most briefs.
I will give those long-form Jack Daniels adverts you see on the London Underground, the ones being all charmingly backwoodsy American, absolutely no amount of my life ever. Not because they are too wordy, but because I have zero interest in whisky.
On the other hand I have a barrel-fat volume of poet Geoffrey Hill’s complete works and I intend to give it the rest of my life. Geoffrey Hill’s poetry is complex, meta, academic and drunk on the dictionary. It’s hard. I don’t even know if I like it that much. But I know there’ll be rewards in returning regularly to it. He can have my time. Whisky ads can’t.
For those of us who work on commercial projects maybe the only useful question to ask at the outset of a project is … how much time do we think our audience will give to what we write?
Presuming most people don’t really care about finance brands but do have soft spots for museums they visited on a date … our time question means insurance companies will have to be honest with themselves about how much they should actually say … and deeply-loved cultural institutions can stop thinking the normal, make-adverts-short, marketing rules apply to them.
What do you think? Using the time writing asks of you as the basis of categorisation, and the time people are prepared to dedicate as the basis of briefs. Shall we all give it a try?
Let’s time-travel.
Here’s that letter from Philip Larkin. He wrote on the 19th September 1967 to Monica, his partner.
Dearest Bun,
A nice-ish evening, have eaten all I want of a good macaroni cheese (not too thick, not too thin), read most of the second half of ‘Laurels are Poison’ (I think the chapter entitled ‘Iddy Umpty Iddy Umpty Iddy’ the most remarkable, and in a way the most creepy, in modern detective fiction) and am now awaiting the broadcast of the flyweight championship of the world (9.15pm). Wonder what Ted Hughes is doing?
As I said, some time ago, Larkin played a character all his life. Fussy, small, unadventurous. He disliked Ted Hughes, or at least he disliked his poetry and its intense, dark mythologies, finding it embarrassing. Larkin was a beautiful writer of the commonplace. And he knew they lived very different lives.
I find his letter full of longing about other ways of living, wrapped up in a fiddly, but witty, refusal to change. In 76 words Larkin has told a deep deep story about what we do with our time. (And about inter-writer rivalry, but that’s a different topic.)
Until writing this letter to you today though, it never crossed my mind to actually work out what Ted Hughes was doing. I dug into his letters and biographies.
Mid-September 1967 his current lover, Assia, had just left him and returned to London with their very young daughter. Hughes though was just starting an affair in Devon with Carol, who would become his second wife. An emotional tangle which would end tragically.
He was also questioning his writing. To quote Jonathan Bate’s biography ‘wondering whether he should write more like Thomas Hardy than W.B. Yeats: instead of turning the real into an imagined world, life into a myth and his inner self into a symbolic persona, he should ground his writing in reality, in experience.’
The battle we always face as writers.
Hughes’ questioning related to two poetic projects. He was mid-way through writing Crow, that raw terrifying apocalyptic maelstrom of a trickster origin story which is myth all the way down. Yeatsian. Here from ‘Crow’s First Lesson’.
And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.
And woman's vulva dropped over man's neck and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
God struggled to part them, cursed, wept--
Crow flew guiltily off.
He was also having intense dreams about his first wife, Sylvia Plath, dreams which would form the basis of ‘The Offers’ a poem released in the week of his death in 1998 and part of the Hardyesque sequence ‘The Birthday Letters’.
There’s the answer Larkin. You were pottering, Hughes was thrashing. Writing, like time, is relative. How we spend our days is what we end up creating.
Which is a topic for a future letter.
The quote in the title of this letter is by Einstein. Here’s the two hour forty-four minute performance of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s ‘Einstein On The Beach’ over a three year time lapse film of a Czech lodge. How much time will you give it?
P.S. Western male. Western male. Western male. Western male. I’m a product of the canon I grew up in. Please send me new reference points. I’m particularly interested in outsider artists and discovering 20th century non-Western poets.