Herein I compare myself to Vincent van Gogh. Or rather I compare everyone to Vincent van Gogh. I think about Vincent van Gogh and I think about creating things and its reward.
I walked around the Van Gogh Museum last week, and thought to myself "God damn, he did a lot of paintings, Vincent van Gogh". If there's anywhere you're going to think that, it's the large museum dedicated to the work of Vincent van Gogh. He really did though. I've seen a lot of his paintings elsewhere and yet here were floors and floors of the things.
That guy loved painting.
Didn't he?
I think, until this week, I'd slightly misunderstood the legend of van Gogh only selling one painting in his lifetime. Firstly, in thinking it true. It's not really true. There's only one painting he sold in his lifetime that all the details are known about (The Red Vineyard). But he definitely did sell other paintings. And he definitely swapped paintings with other artists, which is the same thing, really, especially if those artists are Gauguin and whoever else.
But I think I'd misunderstood whether van Gogh had any inkling, during his lifetime, that he was good and that people thought he was good. I think I thought the remarkable thing was that he fiercely devoted his life to painting without any but the smallest notion that he had any great gift for it and that other people thought so. But that's not true. He clearly was made aware that many people thought he was good, from family members to teachers and fellow artists including Monet.
But, even so, for not selling many paintings, that guy did a lot of paintings.
Some of them are really good. You should check them out.
However conscious he was of his own genius, van Gogh fulfils the myth for any unsuccessful creator that they too might be a misunderstood maestro whose work will be venerated beyond the grave.
This famous, rather lovely, scene from Doctor Who https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk garlands that myth.
Could happen to any of us, right? We could travel through time, meet Bill Nighy, and discover that we're the most beloved artist in the history of the world, or there and thereabouts? Find out that even the little things that probably only took us a few hours are stared at with wonder and awe and would probably cost a buyer several million quid?
Glad it all turned out good for VVG and that la tristesse didn't durere, hope that happens to me ...
It's good to create things. But, in all seriousness, kids, it's also good not to be tortured by creating things.
The creative thing I mainly do is write poems. I started doing it when I was, I think, 17, and although I may at times have laboured in the vineyard of delusion, I haven't for a long time (he said, deludedly).
Writing the kind of poems I write to the average standard I write them feels quite close to the Olympian ideal of art for art's sake. That's where Van Gogh comes in, or rather doesn't. As I was walking around the Van Gogh Museum, I did think "he just did all this because he felt compelled to and he loved to, that's amazing" but, in most artistic endeavours, where there is a potential reward which includes public acclaim, respect of one's peers, approval, and riches, and you know, in some sense, based on your own feelings and things that other people have told you, that those things are truly within your grasp ... if only ... that must be tortuous. Van Gogh had that problem. Nick Drake had that problem. Lots of people, whether accurately, or through delusion, have that problem. There is, nearly always, something to do it for other than its very self.
I don't have that problem, or, at least, I think, I have it, as regards my poems, to a pleasingly small extent. There is almost no possibility of any tangible effect on the world from my poems. This isn't some false modesty. I wouldn't write them if I thought they were, in and of them themselves, always terrible and without any merit.
So, there are several reasons I can be so relaxed and pessimistic. Firstly ... poems, right? Who reads poems? Or rather, who makes money from poems? A very small number of people, and often they are writing poems I have no aspiration or capability of writing. Next, who is my voice for? Almost nobody. People a bit like me. There really are not many people a bit like me, I have discovered. And especially not reading poetry. Next, how would I go about gaining the smallest amount of acclaim for my poems if they deserved it? By doing things that are completely beyond me. Putting myself out there, selling myself etc. Next, I do other work, which, as luck would have it, is creative work that is experienced by a lot of people. That specific itch is scratched (as I'll get to, that work does not scratch all itches.
Why do I write poems then? Because I want to write a good poem. Or maybe five, or maybe ten. I want to know it's good. But also, I just want to create things. And at times, sure, it has been to get something out of me, to bear my soul. And, early on, sure, I thought it might lead somewhere, that there was a purpose to it.
But now, it really is, mainly, because I want to write a good poem.
There remains something profound and beautiful in the fact that when the mood takes me to create a poem and the blank page is in front of me, there is the possibility that it will become the most perfect, beloved work of art ever created. That possibility survives even the first few words. I mean, you could even say it survives until the writer has completed the editing process, but we know that's pushing it. But still, that blank page is an incredible space.
I still don't think I've written a good poem - one which I would confidently place in front of any group of people and say "See, this is a good poem". That's pretty interesting to me, because I'm fairly good at my job, and my actual job does actually have more similarities to writing poems than most jobs have, so it is a good opportunity for self-examination when I consider why I'm good - in a truly effective, recognised way - at the one and not the other.
Both things involve words, patterns of words, order and reorder, set structures, misdirection, opacity turning to clarity (or not), keeping to rules and learning where it works to break rules. Some people, including me, occasionally, find some OC questions beautiful. When I've written one that's gone well, I have had the satisfaction of knowing that 2.5 million people will see it and think it good, some of them will specifically think "wow, those clever people who write the questions for this clever and entertaining show". And I'm good at that, and prolific. I've got 100s and 100s of those.
This is good for me, but I'd much rather write one good poem. Still, I've come to enjoy that writing poems is a seemingly unwinnable battle against my limitations. As a quiz writer, I don't have that many limitations. I definitely have some. I have weak subjects, I don't type as fast as some people, I'm not as natural at creating high quality puzzles as some people, but I know a lot of stuff across a fairly wide range of subjects, my mind moves fluently between topics, I know how to structure a question, without being mega-funny I understand pretty well how low-level comic structure works, I know better than most, through years of experience, what different demographics do and don't know, and I can work pretty hard when I need to.
Some of those skills are quite useful in writing poems, but some of them aren't. I read poems by other people and, look, sometimes there are successful and well-liked poems which I don't think are that great, both from the past and present, but when I read a good one, particularly a good modern one, I do say "shoot, there it is, that's what I don't have". Feelings I don't feel, images I don't see, care I can't quite take, words I'd never put together, daring I can't show, experiences I haven't had, space I can't leave. Those things. How wonderful and frustrating sometimes to read truly magical poems, just as unreachable as singing like Marvin Gaye or bowling like Shane Warne. And yet, and yet, when something as blunt and basic as If by Rudyard Kipling was voted the nation's favourite poem, as it was a few years ago ...
Something that is fascinating about poems is that sometimes you can, to all intents and purposes, do a good job and end up with a big fat blob of nothing. There have been plenty where I've decided what to write about, which I think is a fairly interesting topic or happening, I've decided to use a rhyme and metrical structure, I've stuck to that nicely, I've chosen my words carefully, I've told a story, set a scene, I've worked hard, I've enjoyed writing it, and, at the end (or at let's say looking back on it a time later) realised it is nothing that any person would ever want to read.
So, saying all that, I work within my limitations, sometimes try to stretch beyond them. I don't write poems in a vacuum. I used to, and they were worse. My poems have improved since I have, to a small extent, engaged with the idea of a reader. I post them on a poetry site called Allpoetry, which is useful but frustrating. Most people on it are American. Your poems get given an instant score by an algorithm (I know!), which also tells you about "weak words" and "strong words" and "too many capitals" and stuff like that. You can ignore all that, which I do, but a higher score means a poem is more likely to be posted on the site's front page, which means more people will read it and comment on it. All of this is to be taken with a pinch of salt, but, still, I'm glad the site's there.
I've never attempted to get a poem published, or submitted a poem to a competition, but I did, a few years ago, participate in a zoom workshop, which was kind of excruciating, particularly in reinforcing how overbearing i can appear even when I'm trying my hardest not to be. The people were nice but I defintely thought "I'm not like these people, none of them know how many test centuries Brian Lara scored" and I don't think I was a great presence in the group, so won't be doing anything like that again, I don't think.
I did learn, or confirm, some interesting things though, which is that people did not like the quizziness/puzzliness of some poems, they did not like that there were certain things I'd written based on factual, or legendary, things which to me were assumed people would know about a bit, and that was offputting to people. People don't really like having to work out poems and feeling stupid if they don't, which is fair enough, and a bit like quizzes, but different from quizzes. And my inability not to do that without being extremely stolid is a good explanation for why I'm good at writing quizzes and less so at poems
Going back to Vincent van Gogh - as Bill Nighy accurately says in the Doctor Who clip, van Gogh is the "most popular great painter of all time", and anyone who knows the smallest bit about art recognises his style and knows a decent number of his paintings. He is, I guess, the Shakespeare, or at least the Dickens, of painting. He's as quotable as they come.
But, being honest, in what form does poetry survive, even to arty, smarty people, to all but true enthusiasts? Even some of the greatest poets are widely known not even for one whole poem but for a couple of quotable lines from a poem. Poetry is still popular in some sense, but like everything, even more than other things, it's often reduced to soundbites.
So, in a weird way, that's where my delusion can harmlessly remain. Because, sometimes, late at night, or early in the morning, a line that I've written comes into my head and won't leave, maybe something I wrote a couple of years before, where I can't remember much else of the poem, but just a snatch of what is, at least in that moment to that one person, even if that's the person that wrote it, memorable. I don't know if that's enough reward, but it's some.
