Realtime Notes Volume Two

Realtime Notes Volume Two is out today. To mark the occasion, I have secured an interview with myself, which you can read below. Volume Two is available here for £10 plus p&p, or you can buy the two-volume set for £15.

Congratulations on releasing Volume Two of Realtime Notes. Can you incredibly briefly sum up the project?

Yes, it’s a series of poems written in rapid response to current events, both personal and political. I write at least one a day and haven’t missed a day in two years, two months and seven days. I post them on Instagram.

Do the books contain all the poems?

No, more like half of them. Volume One covers the first year, Volume Two covers the second. Including all of them would have made for two cumbersome tomes and a laborious read. Stripping it back means you keep the narrative flow, but tighten it up. The poems are in chronological order, so it’s like reliving the year as it happened.

Is Volume Two better than Volume One?

Maybe – it’s slightly thicker because I wanted to keep more poems in. And the plot lines are dramatic: US midterms, the release of the Mueller report, the fall of Theresa May, the rise of Boris Johnson, the testimony of Christine Blasey-Ford, the deaths of John McCain, Doris Day and Jamal Khashoggi, spies in Salisbury, shootings in Christchurch, a fire at Notre Dame and a trip to Trump Tower.

What are your favourite individual poems?

Hard to say, but I quite like this one I wrote on my birthday last year. I like poems that mix the mundane and humdrum with the existential and geopolitical.

In terms of likes, the most popular poems tend to be the angry ones, like this one I wrote when Boris Johnson was on the verge of winning the Tory leadership.

And the death poems are always popular, if that’s the right word. There’s something about writing and reading those poems in-the-moment that turns it into a different experience. (Sorry about the bad photos by the way.)

It doesn’t matter. So why should people buy these books?

I hope poetry and non-poetry people will get something from it. For anyone who thinks of poetry as difficult and impenetrable, it should be refreshing as most are quick to read as well as write. But I think it’s also a dense and rich text that’s full of wordplay and formal elements that reward repeat reading. Because of the nature of the project, it contains all the stuff of life – from putting the bins out to joining a protest march, sitting in a soft play centre to visiting Trump Tower. There’s comedy, slapstick, sadness, melancholy, joy, rage, love, loss. Plus lots of Brexit.

Will there be a Volume Three?

I don’t know. I’m still writing so I suppose those poems will have to go somewhere. I like doing it and feel like there’s more to do. It started in a random and unplanned way and I suspect it will end similarly.

How did you print them?

I bought a book in the Penguin Modern Classics paperback series and found a printer credit – a company called Clays in the UK. They’re surprisingly approachable and happy to work with indie publishers. I really like the production of the book – feels like pleasingly decent quality, but also functional and straightforward. The content is the main thing and the books are intended as a rough-and-ready vehicle for it.

Are the books available in all good bookshops?

No – only from asburyandasbury.com/shop. I haven’t figured out how distribution works and will happily take advice if there are any experts out there. The National Poetry Library and British Library have copies, so I have some baseline literary credibility.

Any events or readings coming up?

No – I did a talk at D&AD Manchester and the Off The Shelf Literature Festival in Sheffield and enjoyed both. So I’m looking for other opportunities and open to suggestions.

Thanks for making the time for this.

No problem. I’ll just go and take a bad photo of the Bercow poem to finish.

Bagpuss, Gump and Dancing Queen

I haven’t done one of these Realtime Roundups since the end of June, mainly because I’ve been busy working on a Realtime Notes website (see above) — a torturously slow process during which I’ve cursed myself many times for writing so many poems.

I’m hoping the site will be ready to share in the next week. I’ll keep doing these round-ups occasionally and post them on the new site. In the meantime, here’s a quick-ish roundup of the greatest hits of the last three months.

July saw Realtime Notes take briefly to the streets, with a placard against Trump.

But the best Trump poem was probably this one. Occasionally, I achieve escape velocity and nail a couple of good lines — the last two lines here would make a good blurb for the project as a whole.

As ever, there were plenty of realtime epitaphs to write. You’ll soon be able to read them all in the Deaths section of the website. (Hooray!)

This three-month period started with Peter Firmin (above) and also included Steve Ditko, Saman Guman, Barry Chuckle, VS Naipaul, Aretha Franklin, Rachael Bland, Burt Reynolds, Chas Hodges, Charles Aznavour…

… and John McCain, whose passing inspired a national unity that included everyone except the president.

At the end of July, I had a brief falling-out with my keypad, maybe brought on by the fact that I was approaching an entire year of realtime writing.

The one-year anniversary of Realtime Notes came around on 17 August, and the poem above recounted a domestic scene that I think made for a good ending. ‘Everything might happen’ could be a collection title.

I had thought about finishing Realtime Notes altogether on the anniversary and wasn’t even sure on the day itself whether I’d keep going or not. As it turned out, I was glad I did, because the following week brought that crazy evening where Paul Manafort was found guilty and Michael Cohen took a plea deal.

I ended up writing five poems in the space of an hour, starting with this one about Michael Cohen…

… and culminating in a minor epiphany where I realised the entire story of America could be told in those two rhyming characters famous for their red caps.

I continued my recurring anagram obsession with this open letter to Ivanka Trump (in each pair of lines, the second is an anagram of the first).

And there was a moment of pure realtimeness when a fly landed on my computer screen and joined me in a collaborative poem that I broadcast live on Instagram Stories. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble retrieving it from my Instagram archive and it may be lost forever. It was really good.

Among September’s greatest hits were this response to conservative pundit Ben Shapiro…

…this reworking of Matthew 7:26…

… and this summation of the state of the Brexit talks. (This is the second draft with an improvement to one line. From now on, I’m going to pretend it’s the first draft.)

So far, October has brought Theresa May dancing onto the stage…

… and as we opened this roundup with Bagpuss, maybe we should finish it with Rainbow.

Thanks as always to anyone following along. I’ll write more when the website completes its slow trudge towards the internet.

How I wrote this poem wrong

(Latest monthly round-up of Realtime Notes on Instagram.)

I thought I'd start this month by talking about the process of writing one poem, and what typically goes right and wrong. 

So I normally get up at 7.23am and if it's my turn (we have a genius alternating system), I'll go down, stick his Go Jetters on, make two cups of tea, bring one up, go back down and get about 20 minutes to surface. I check my phone, see Peter Stringfellow has died and the mind inevitably starts ticking over. I tend to skim-read articles and let the mind alight on key words, and the second paragraph of the Guardian article included the sentence: "Stringfellow, who had cancer but wanted to keep his illness private, died early on Thursday after spending time in hospital." 

If you're in the mindset of writing a poem, it's not a huge mental leap to see a rhyme in cancer/dancer, but when I saw the word 'private' it felt like an idea – from the curtained booth of the nightclub to the curtained booth of a hospital ward. So I wrote the first line and then the word 'seedily' came to mind and line 3 happened before line 2. Then I wanted to mention the curtained booth, which led me to the rhyme with 'truth', which is a better word than I would have found if I hadn't needed it to rhyme. 

The 'needily/seedily' also set up a structure for 'shyly, slyly' and, having written the first stanza, I knew the second would have to follow the same structure, with lines 2 and 4 rhyming. By about 8am, I had the first stanza done and a rough version of the second. Then the morning routine kicks in – breakfast, getting ready for school etc. And this is where the writing isn't exactly 'real time' – there's still an internal editing process as your subconscious ticks over, and then you return to it fresh after a break. 

So by about 8.40am, I'm looking at it fresh again and making improvements in the second stanza, and feeling a certain urgency to get it done because I had other work to get on with.

But to be honest, I messed it up. I wanted to end with 'that's all you get dear', and I set up the rhyme with 'titillatingly tilting to cup your ear'. But for some reason I messed up the penultimate line – introducing 'young' is a whole different vowel sound, and the metre generally goes a bit clunky. Coming back to it now, even at a glance, I don't know why I didn't write 'her hot breath so young and near'. That would be an immediate improvement. 

So the question is – why don't I just slow down and write better poems? Sometimes I think I should, but I also think it's part of the bigger spirit of the project to keep the rough edges and embrace the highs and lows. When it goes right, it makes those moments better. And what you lose in craft, you gain in urgency – it's a different experience reading a poem in that 'breaking news' moment when the event takes place, rather than weeks later. And even reading it afterwards, it changes your perception to know it was written 'in the moment' – it alters what the poem is. (To some extent, I'm not sure how much I care about people reading it afterwards – even if 500 people see it fleetingly on Instagram, it's more people than read most poems.)

Anyway, apologies if all of this is more interesting to me than it is to you. The newsletter will now speed up.

If likes and shares are a good measure, I had some big hits this month. This one owes a debt to Shooting Stars. (Great to see how Bob Mortimer is now at national treasure status with Gone Fishing – his Athletico Mince stuff is operating at the highest possible level of humour.)

My biggest hit was this in-the-moment tribute to Christopher Chope – an example of a poem that I think is better because it was written quickly. Just not the same if you do it three weeks later. 

I do get sweary sometimes, so it's nice to balance it out with some gentle pastoral stuff. Some people think 'prose poem' is a contradiction, but I think it's a genuine 'thing' – doing away with the linebreaks, but retaining the heightened attention to musicality and rhyme that you get in a poem. 

This was another one with a domestic setting – you don't always need someone to die or a war to start for things to be realtime news. 

But, as ever, people did die, including Peter Stringfellow, Anthony Bourdain, Gena Turgel (the 'bride of Belsen') Jerry Maren (Wizard of Oz), Leslie Grantham and Kate Spade. Something touching and meaningful about the way a brand can outlive its founder.

Half-rhyme of the month was 'Stormy Daniels' and 'Attorney General's'. 

And it was the month the World Cup started – it's enjoyable trying to keep track of the mood in poems.

As our entire government is holed up in Chequers for 'crunch day', I'll finish with Brexit and a tribute to Mr Rees-Mogg (below).

Thanks for reading – July already looks pretty interesting and the moron is heading this way...

Yip, Witchell and stand-up

Further updates from Realtime Notes – Instagram poetry written in rapid response to current events. This month's newsletter is reproduced below.

I bought a new book this month (well done Nick) – a collection of verse by Yip Harburg, better known as the lyricist behind 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', 'Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?' and 'It's Only a Paper Moon' (inspiration for the poem above). 

I've always liked those great American lyricists – brilliant players with language and writers of some of the most romantic words ever written, but who always treated it essentially as a trade.

It turns out Yip Harburg was also a politically engaged writer with a lifelong commitment to social justice (you can tell from the Paper Moon lyrics quoted above, which is what got me Googling him). He channelled this into light verse, which was eventually collected into a book illustrated by the great Seymour Chwast.

It includes stuff like this:

And this:

That's nice, isn't it? Feels like it would slot straight into Instagram and Twitter if they had been around.

It's not a great revelation to find people have written light verse about topical subjects before. But it's good to know there were poets responding to Watergate in real time – and there is plenty to enjoy in the poems, long after they were written. In fact, they're better because you know he was writing in the thick of it (like many, his career was blighted by McCarthyist blacklisting – anti-truth, America-first hysteria has a long history). 

I like to think poems like the one above come from a similar spirit of verbal playfulness in response to serious times. The language of active shooter situations has become ritualistically familiar, but it's the 'active' that always gets me – in contrast to the political paralysis.

So, deaths. This month's roll call includes Tessa Jowell, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Margot Kidder – the picture of her with Christopher Reeve is a poem in itself when you consider what life brought them afterwards.

On a happier note, this month brought a royal wedding!

I feel like Nicholas Witchell didn't get enough airtime in the coverage, but this is the eternal Witchellian reality – his duty is to cover the royals until the big occasions when Huw Edwards steps in. Or Dermot O'Leary.

Anyway, I love writing poems about Nicholas Witchell. 

The moron continues to do what he does, and I continue to search for language in response. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

I quite liked this Harvey Weinstein poem – sometimes the form clicks into place when you're pondering the subject matter, and a handy New York / Perp Walk rhyme supplies itself. 

To finish on an indulgently self-analytical note (my favourite note), I've semi-consciously tried to stake out a territory with Realtime Notes that takes in Yip Harburg-style playful/formal versifying but extends to more surreal/dark experiments and sometimes loosens up into confessional, artfully casual semi-prose.

When the poems come out in a conversational style like the one above, I like the effect it creates – similar to a stand-up's delivery. I have a not-entirely-unserious plan to take up stand-up comedy when I get to the age of 70. I think everyone should try something new at that age, and my advancing senility will give me a good PR hook.

For now, it's on with the poems. 628 poems and 290 days into this now.

I'll leave the last word to Yip – this could easily be a Realtime Note about the renationalisation of the East Coast line.

Realtime Notes continues on Instagram. 

Triptychs, ruts and skim-writing

[This is from the latest Realtime Roundup newsletter, reviewing what I've been up to on Realtime Notes throughout the month of April.]

Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific – and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien. 

John Keats wrote that about the first time he read Chapman's Homer. I include it here because it's how I felt when I realised you can paste images directly into Notes.

I've used images before in Realtime Notes, as accompanying material when they add context to the poem, but this is the first time I've made them directly part of the 'thing' itself. It led directly to a couple of 'triptych' poems – firstly, the anagram one above. 

And secondly this commentary on Amber Rudd's resignation, following Damien Green's departure a few months back – my bid for a Private Eye front cover.

Are they poems though? Well, in a way, no – they're more like witty cartoons. But I still think of them as poems, and they're part of a poetry project – that's the context in which they were produced.

It's fun to open up a new dimension in the project, especially now I'm over 8 months in. But I'm also slightly wary of heading too much in a visual direction.

There's a great tradition of merging images and poems into one artistic thing – the original versions of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience come to mind. The mega-Instapoets like Rupi Kaur continue this tradition by presenting poems as visual artworks with decorative illustrations. But I still find myself suspicious of it – like it indicates a lack of faith in the words themselves, or seeks to shape the way you respond by creating an air of preciousness around them. For better or worse, I think of Realtime Notes (and poetry generally) as words grappling directly with the world. The visual is part of that (and words themselves are visual objects), but I like the textiness of the Notes app and the way it presents the words raw. It probably gets me fewer Instagram followers, but they're all the nice, intelligent, good-looking ones. 

This month started pretty rockily – I struggled for a few days to write anything. So far, I've posted at least one poem every day since I started last 17 August and I feel I have to keep that up for at least a year. On 2 April I had nothing with midnight looming, but at least I managed to retrieve the little observation above – a poem about not having written a poem.

The rut continued for a while, but fortunately the news keeps providing little moments of inspiration. 

This month saw a couple of milestones. Firstly, I passed the 500 mark on Realtime Notes – about 240 days in, so that's a decent rate of at least two poems a day. All about quantity not quality.

And secondly we celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary with a trip to Grasmere and the church where we were married. This is a tactical point at which to insert a formal apology to my better half for always staring at my phone too much.

To be fair, she stares at her own canvas quite a lot – follow her @sueasbury.

OK, deaths time. Ray Wilkins, Eric Bristow and Barbara Bush all left us this month, as did Dale Winton. If I ever wind down Realtime Notes, maybe I'll keep the obituaries going.

But I'm not planning to wind down yet. I'm still enjoying the little daily alchemy that takes place when you turn the news, and your feelings about it, into some bundle of words that has form and meaning. The one above was written when I woke up too early one morning and had that vague out-of-time feeling that you sometimes get early in the morning. I like the alliteration running through it – the m's and s's and t's. Not that it's a highly crafted work in terms of time spent, but some poems come out with more craft than others, and it feels like it captured whatever mood I was in. 

I've been thinking more than usual this month about the worth of this project, and it was nice to hear I'm on roughly the same page as Kanye West.

I've said before in this newsletter that I consider 'time' as one of the last formal constraints in poetry – you're expected to spend time crafting a poem, and spend time reading it. I still think that's a definitively valuable quality in poetry and I'll go back to it one day, but I think there's fertile territory in pushing against it.

Here's an idea I'll run past you. You know how a lot of people skim-read these days? It's often the way I read the news – lightly scanning my eyes down the page, picking up the gist, moving onto the next thing. Skim-reading is often seen as the enemy of the writer, like it's our job to get people to slow down. But I've decided to think of Realtime Notes as a turning of the tables. My new word for it is skim-writing.

If you're going to skim-read, then I'm going to skim-write. I think that's a good deal.

I'll finish this particularly long round-up by saying I went to a particularly long place this month. The hardest place in the UK to write about in real time.

Thanks for reading – makes the whole project worthwhile. See you back in realtime.