Wrote a poem about it once …
I was thinking about Neil Young’s Archives II – how he said he wanted people to hear the good and the bad things he did – and I was wondering why he wanted to release these songs when no doubt he could listen to them any time? And I thought maybe it was because they were part of his mental landscape, once composed and recorded they existed and echoed for him, they sat there playing their part alongside the songs that had entered the world officially. They form a missing part of the jigsaw, there’s a gap that they fill, if something means something to Neil, if it locates something in his life, then there’s a gravity, a water pressure pushing it out into the world in the interests of seeing the whole picture.
And I thought – I have that – I have all these poems that I quote to myself, that have a place in my mind because of what they’re about (how they crystallised a moment or an insight for me) or the circumstances/what I was doing when I wrote them, or just because I can (and do) recite snatches of them to myself like any learned Victorian with screeds of verse at their fingertips, since any poetry I know by heart is as likely to have been written by me as some more feted and more published poet … celebrated or secret, known and unknown, my own efforts beside the gods of poetry – no difference in my landscape.
Some of these poems had published or performed outlets so long ago as to have been part of another distant world, most only I ever knew about and their sole life has been in a cardboard-fatigued document box and my memory.
So here they are, for better or worse, with a note for each (if it’s relevant) on the cosmology, the particular star in my night sky that some of them represent, or just a glance back at what I think the poet got right …
I should point out that in my dedicated poetry years I was committed, prolific and disciplined – as far as I could make out, the reason I was in the world was to write these poems, it wasn’t a hobby or a way of venting youthful angst, I worked at it every day with the aim of making myself as good a poet as I could possibly be.
In the end I chose to climb out of that tree, but for a long time that was where I lived …
One of the things that always tripped me up in trying to ‘make it’ as a poet was the selection aspect – the poetry world seemed to be all slim volumes and crystalline curations underpinned by the idea that the aim is to choose and marshal the finest of the finest … but the sheer number of poems I wrote and the wide variation of styles I wrote in mitigated against that kind of winnowing and decision-making – now I see the breadth and variegation of the work as a strength but back then it seemed to impede the kind of focus that a poet needed out in the world or in a shop window … who was I … who could tell?
Actually I contained multitudes – and I enjoyed restlessly roving – so what I see now is that the only way to really experience me as a poet is not in a forty-poem-tip-of-the-iceberg book but across something more expansive and sprawling, something that didn’t exist as an option back in those print-is-everything days but does now – so here (at last and finally) is the natural poem-home for all the fruits of my teeming brain from that distant earlier life (90% of what’s here was written before I turned 30) … a poem-a-day blog that all going well will run for 550 poems and a year and a half …
The poems here are not in any order, chronological or otherwise, just whatever took my eye next in sorting through the boxes. They’re selected from the wider pool of poetry I wrote (the full complement is perhaps three times what’s on this site) so these are the ones I still find interesting for whatever reason …
In terms of the audio for each poem – I’m not a performer but I’ve always thought the value in an author reading their work is that you get to hear the rhythms as they intended them to be – placed alongside reading on the page it’s a complementary way of coming at the truth of the poem …
… having said that, I once saw an album liner note that said don’t read the lyrics and listen to the music at the same time … I concur with that.
Hopefully I’ve set this website up to present an accurate rendering of the poems in terms of format, line breaks, spacings (which I was and still can be very particular about) when viewed on a computer or tablet.
If you’re reading on your phone then viewing horizontally should also give you the proper format – but vertical orientation will scramble the intended line breaks.
Hidden Valley refers to the imaginary geography and topography that together these poems comprise – the area in my mind they occupy which so far has only been fully accessible to me. It takes its name from a place talked about when I was a boy where my grandfather, father and uncle used to go deerstalking and which assumed some kind of imaginative status for me even though I’d never seen it … I see there’s now a summer festival north of Auckland with the same title …
Anyway, welcome to the valley, enjoy the view … take a wander …
One last thing – a kitten is not just for Christmas and a poem is not for reading once … if it’s any good it will give up more each time you return to it and while that’s happening it’s taking root, becoming part of the landscape in your mind – if you can be bothered, give these poems the time to do that, to echo back to you as they’ve done for me …
Ken