Poetry
by Peter Zelaskowski
Most, if not all, of my poems were written during my
twenties (so no teenage angst here, okay!) at a time when I’d just moved to
London, was squatting, on the dole, scavenging food from New Covent Garden
Wholesale fruit, vegetable and flower market in Vauxhall and, as always,
looking for love, some way of escaping from the girlfriend I couldn’t unattach
myself from (although she tried her best to move on) and some clearer idea of
myself. Poetry, was a means of
expressing and articulating, giving some shape and form to, things I couldn’t
otherwise express. I had real trouble
knowing what I felt, let alone expressing what I felt. I wasn’t interested in the traditional forms
of poetry, in fact, I enjoyed the anti-establishment subversive thrill that
went with spontaneously free associating in the only way I could. I just didn’t have it in me to learn the
higher arts of peotic form. I wanted
rhyme and verse to come and go. I could
just about insinuate structures without fully using them. Clarity of meaning and the freedom to
express myself meant more to me than structure. I’d knock off a poem in minutes.
I remember I used to regularly travel between Finsbury park and Vauxhall
and try and start and finish a poem in the time it took the Victoria line train
to stutter and start me to my destination.
Through Mike (crazy, hippy, macrobiotic and comfortably middle class) I
got involved in the London performance poetry scene and quickly became a
troubadour, hanging out at the Troubadour Coffee House in Earls Court, where
every Monday evening a group of us, plus small but shivering audience, would
gather in the cafe’s damp cellar and chuck our latest offerings at each
other. Legend had it that Bob Dylan,
amongst other greats, had performed at the Troubadour, so we (Jeff the fish,
Mad Sam, lisping Dave...) felt part of a great historical tradition, despite
the fact that much of what we performed was total crap! I had a repertoire of poems I performed
regularly, to which I would add new untried scribbles and rants. Here’s a couple from the repertoire, that I
enjoyed performing then and still like now.
I like them because they’re verbally playful, combine food and
philosophy and seem to touch themes of the search for love and identity that
dominated that period of my life.
Let’s eat
Paper tigers
Then there was my gay poem, although for a long while
(extraordinary when I read it now) it simply represented some sense of personal
liberation that I was in search of.
Actually, it was kind of like my signature tune, as for a period I’d
start each performance with it. Then
fat Sam (looked like father xmas in a white boiler suit) started requesting it,
and before I knew it he was asking me to go with him to a late night piano bar. I was aghast at my own lack of insight into
my own poetry!!
I wrote a number of poems that read now as signposts for
the direction I wanted to go, i.e., towards psychotherapy. ‘New and Now’ I wrote way before I knew
about the ‘here and now’ of therapy. It
articulates elements of the existential metaphysics (I read Sartre, Camus,
Kafka, Husserl .... at University) that dominated my intellectual life at the
time. ‘True Silence’ was written with
the dysthymic blood of Samuel Becket’s Trilogy pulsing through my veins.
And then there were poems like this. Self-conscious, uncomfortable to read now,
classic teenage angst and looking to please.
I remember writing this with my feminist girlfriends in mind. A young man, overly prone to guilt, at a
time when in my cultural milieu it was okay to say that all men were
(potential) rapists. I wanted to be
noticed for the nice guy I was, not held responsible for all the crimes of my
gender.
I wrote these poems in response to the death, from cancer in 1983, of my brother Jan. The first makes reference to the actual attempt he made to get out of his bed just minutes before he died – this haunted me for some time after. The second refers to the misspelling of his (our) name on the coffin.
This poem
emerged unintentionally with an epic mood.
I was on a beautiful stretch of coast in the Highlands of Scotland
where, and the poem makes no direct reference, a new relationship was just
beginning.
More recently,
I wrote this when Ana was working abroad for a week. This was early (pre-children) in our relationship and graphically
captures the painful anxiety that I was experiencing during that separation. A
familiar theme in my life.
