Swift Satire Poetry Competition Winner 2004

Swift Satire Poetry Competition 2004

Shortlisted Entrants: 2004

WINNER: Brian Lalor (under the pseudonym Brian ó'Brogáin)

On Publishing; A Rhapsody

Judges Comments

Published in THE SHOp literary magazine

On Publishing; A Rhapsody

A writer's life? Thrice-distilled folly,
Hours, years, aeons of melancholy,
That passionate joy of true creative vision
Reduced to product by shareholders' option.
Beckett's plays seen as merely bums on seats,
Obscene fixation with end-of-year receipts.

Your lover says she merely feeds you,
Children exclaim that they still need you,
Friends cease to call, your writing takes
Precedence over all their sakes.
Locked in a room of small dimensions,
Too hot, too cold, you reek pretentions
Of the grinding Grub Street trade,
A life unkempt, a bed unmade,
Sheets trashed in Tracey Emin squalor,
Here no coy mistress will devour
With kisses all your angst-wracked wishes,
She's downstairs now among the dishes.

Practitioners of those useful arts,
Plumbing and prostitution, torts,
Advance the cause of their professions
As hedges secure against recession;
Utility, propinquity and law provide
Attractions to the seeking kind
Of youthful aspirants who may discover
Promising careers, chameleon cover
For lifetimes spent in wealth or poverty,
Determing which-now that's the novelty.

The writer's trade appealed, its hours
Are flexible, its misty bowers
Attractive to reclusive spirits:
In bookshops no one keeps the minutes
Of conversations, languid, intellectual,
Involved, pellucid, polysexual,
Where 'book in all of us' would out
As secret name in Turandot
Without enduring Puccini's twist
Life sacrificed to conquer it.

Now banks send rude and threatening letters,
Your mortgaged soul exists in tatters,
Base economics for a writer
Involve the belt being always tighter.
You've sold your Shakespeare and Company edition
Of Ulysses, its Aegean blue and mint condition
Cover has always brought you joy,
Joyce now buys for schooling for your boys.
He would have doubtless empathised
That literature though vanquished, lives,
But then, possessed of silence, cunning,
With exile he made a Second Coming.

Manuscript complete, you heave a sigh,
Its writing, an eternity.
Exhausted, stressed and out of pocket,
You descend bleakly from your garret,
The laptop now can gather dust,
E-mails unread, for now you must
Attempt to act the penitent sinner
And cheerfully appear at dinner,
Remember each your children's names
Appease your lover's strong disdain
For all that marks the writer's trade,
Ego and absence, promises betrayed.

A year has passed, the manuscript sent
By agent to publishers of fair intent,
But back it comes; the editor doubts
A market for existential thoughts,
Suggests you write a book of riddles
For four-year-olds or witless ninnies.
Another thanks for your submission
Declines the honour; try revisions.

A scream escapes mid strangled swears
When agent soothingly declares
That Purloin Press, mandarin, august,
Are expanding their non-fiction list
And will accept your book profound
As codpiece to their New Age mound.
It might be worse, you can discern
No saviour on the horizon,
Ideal worlds would be more lavish
A Sylvia Beach in every parish.

A lunch at Smash, the guests are wined,
Agent and publisher, yourself resigned.
The contracts signed, advance arranged,
Now baseless optimism descends.
Your manuscript is praised by all;
We'll certainly publish in the Fall.
Smashed, into the night you wander,
A modest cheque on which to ponder
Warms in your wallet for a while,
You are, it seems, quite gullible.

Vanessa pert at twenty-five
Edits your manuscript at Verve,
(Coffee shop cacophony by Catatonia,
Mies van der Rohe chairs from Barcelona).
In margins narrowed for economy
Lays down laws like Deuteronomy.
In Weidenfeld she learned her letters,
Hiberno-English she dismisses:
She hates your prose, can't understand
Why anything you write should stand:
Even devotees of the Oxford Dictionary
Will not be familiar with your vocabulary,
Sentences should more simple be,
Cut every single par. by three.

Vanessa phones, now in a bar:
Your manuscript's too long by far:
Cut chapter seven, reduce nine,
I need revisions, Tuesday's fine:
By Tuesday, Vanessa is, it seems, 'unwell'
Or one too many drinkies tell,
On Thursday, e-mails she has 'revised
All of chapter twenty-five.'
Your hand goes to the telephone,
You only get a ringing tone.

You agent councils patience, tact,
In your dim brain has dawned the fact
That editors can with impunity alter
That which you burnished to a wafer,
Destroy the harmony of your prose,
Make nonsense of your noted 'nose',
Render absurd your erudition,
Reduce your words to repetition,
Prefer a cliché to a well-turned phrase,
Annihilate your stylish ways,
Make ignorant your every utterance,
Accept your work merely on sufferance,
Tax simple thoughts with wordy dross,
Your editor, Coleridge's albatross.

Stella, eighteen, now joins the scene,
Intern, ambitious, faced with Gleam,
Vanessa's on maternity leave
And texts to Stella all her brief,
Who soon announces her opinion;
Your text is quite beneath derision.
To publisher, agent, you appeal;
Spare me this further round of hell.
Stella, retracts, but will decree
Your title must change, instantly.

Lemuel, copy -editor of Anglo mien
A Gaelgoir-fascist long has been,
His pukka rendering of your name
Not that your parents smiled upon;
I've gouged from your forename the fada
But four to your surname I have shackled.
Orthography rigid as Soviet diktat
Thought by a fool as a literary panache.
Language politics can like scorpions sting,
Locust swarms of fadas will not a Gaelic Ireland bring.

The proofs arrive with one week deadline:
Sooner if poss., Ibiza's divine.
The text showcases Stella's hand,
Typos to fill the space expand.
Vanessa left nothing to fortuity
And slashed your failing continuity.
Words which in other times had grace
Computer hyp-henated in each place
Which usuage, langauge, sense forbids,
You loudly mouth a Jeremiad;
Never, since English prose began
Did editors create 'parallelog-ram',
Nor wit permit a teenage doxy
Britannica to render proxy.

Chole, a nymph of fifty-three,
Your publicist, has a degree
In marketing, it might as well
Be toxic waste she has to sell,
Or condoms, doubtful potions for
Noisy bowel syndrome, roofing tar.
You shudder when she ethics utter,
Her standards hover near the gutter;
We pile 'em high, and sell 'em fast,
Spare me your 'Books are meant to last'
Delusion of the eighteenth century
Promoted by the leisured gentry:
You know the adage about the kitchen?
We have three months to sell t'edition,
Copies then will be advertised
In pound shops, almost nationwide.
The proofs complete, you've compromised
On everything just to survive,
Your text, now barely recognisable,
Its highbrow tone reduced to babble.

A publisher's aesthetic sense
Dictates a jacket's munificence;
Inept typography, a hideous image
As ordered as a rugger scrimmage.
Like camel of popular legend,
A horse, by committee intended,
The firm's directors sit enmasse
Make of your jacket a jackass.
Where professional wisdom would disdain,
Amateurism is the gain.
Unlettered in the visual arts,
They chose the worst in all its parts,
The world your work will greet with yawns,
Clad in uncouth and purblind tones.

Your book is launched, reviews peremptory,
C. Ricks in TLS, complimentary.
Media interviews are tricky,
You lose the run of self on Kenny.
Signings in Waterstones are slender,
A sales assistant blames the weather,
Then sales improve, the Irish Times
Best-seller list has numinous lines,
Your book is there at number two:
Next week--but fate can good undo,
Next week you drop to number five,
How does that wretched Truss survive?

Not chick-lit miss by fame beguiled
Nor eminent author of a tome on Wilde,
Nor youth whose modish, mannered prose
Has missed the Booker by a slender nose,
Nor scholar- you have read his paper
Cloacal witterings from Drapier?
Nor author dropped, his works endangered
And left in stacks to be remaindered,
Can hope, for all their sweated labour
And contract clauses in their favour,
That when their royalties are paid
The sum will buy a walking aid.

Then authors, in your vain attempts
A decent living to invent,
May sell your books on 'Connell Bridge
Or dump the volumes in a ditch,
But Irish publishers avoid,
Their soothing blandishments are cloyed,
To Thames or Hudson, Amazon go,
Your precious manuscripts in tow,
Display them not around the Liffey
And poorer grow with publishers iffy.

There published be in Stubbs Gazette
To rival authors merriment,
Defeated by your publishers' whims,
Incompetence, duplicity and madcap scams:
You often spoke of foreign tours,
Of books of yours which won awards,
They greet you now in Eason's window
'Two copies gratis with the 'Indo.'

Pride (they say) cometh before a fall,
The dole (they say) it leveleth all,
The best-sellers list is rigged (they say),
Be published, and be damned today.