[Dear Readers…
Iberio Ralda
Instead of writing an amusing piece, I am inspired by you, dear readers, to write about hope. Recently, I have received a number of letters from those of you who say that my novels give you hope about life, people, and the future. Of course, the incredibly gripping storylines, breathtaking suspense, dazzling prose, brilliantly developed characters, profound themes, and clever use of the semicolon are important aspects of my novels, which you have been kind enough to note when pressed during my follow-up phone calls.
In preparation of my last column I decided to re-read all the pieces I had written, and noted with a sense of pride that my first submission was on August 21, 2019, four years ago! Four years is a substantial time to write a regular column. I was struck by how candid some of the pieces were; more than once hinting at painful personal truths and bearing some significant soul. It made me recall a passage by the legendary Rabindranath Tagore about his writing. As I remember he said that he had told many untruths in his life but if readers wanted to know his truth, they should look for it in his writing. Because he had never lied in his writing. What was recorded in his written word was his unabashed truth. That passage has since been my marker for integrity of the written word.
And, so, as I type out this farewell piece for Bitter Chocolate, I thank you dear readers and the ever-patient editorial team for bearing with me and my truth for these past few years. If I seemed a bit too passionate or a bit too polemical, forgive me for my heart was in the right place. And as I honour the word limit for the first time in a hundred times, and type over the little head of my suckling newborn daughter, I think it was in fact time for me to say au revoir to you. Until we meet again in another column, please accept my pen salute!
I felt my enthusiasm return and I began to write. Friends commented on posts which encouraged me. April stats showed the second highest number of views since I began my blog which encouraged me even more. Although I originally started writing this blog just for my own travel record, it turns out readership is a big motivator. So thank you, dear readers, for getting me back on track.
If you're not familiar with Neely's work, hop online and search for CreasedComics, Baby Cakes, and The Professor Brothers ("Prisoner Christmas" is my hot tip.) Wizard People is straight from the depths of his sublime imagination.
According to Neely, the idea came one night in a bar, as he and a few mates watched a guy play pool alone while wearing headphones. "What could he possibly be listening to?" they wondered. Neely offered it could be a misinformed book on tape of The Philosopher's Stone. He joked he was going to rush home and record it that night: "Because I had not, and have not ever, read any Harry Potter books. Once I started making notes for it I realised that an audio track alone could get boring, so I decided to sync it with the movie. Then I took a week or two and made the damn thing. I love it."
Warning, dear reader: Wizard People is akin to a brain disease. Once you hear it, you can't unhear it. You'll spend the rest of your life quoting it. Quidditch will forever be "Cribbage," Dudley will forever be "Ragtime Roast-beefy," Snape aka "Snake" will forever be "that horrible woman," and Hedwig will forever be the "Turkish massage owl."
Wizard People Dear Reader may be the greatest postmodern text of the 21st century. Neely's language is rich and vain-gloriously poetic, his words collapse in on themselves, the narration drifts into soliloquy and then into stage direction as though James Joyce was writing DVD extras laced with 1980s pop culture references: "imagine music: la-de-da-de-da, alive and market-placey, and violins, taking a break up in the air with non-threatening amblings, and a wreath of tambourine, just lightly jangled."
The language is vivid, associative, yet wholly Neely's. It's high art, true literature. Lines like this are undeniably beautiful pieces of prose: "Her voice is chilling, like a piano made of frozen Windex." Passages like this are often immediately punctuated by hilariously anachronistic exclamations like "willickers!".
Neely's anhedonic Harry is a great tour guide to a cast of characters with heads like "a happy pizza, left in a chicken house, covered in feathery bird sweat and oily discharge. Yuckers." The Half Dead Dumbledore is a cryptkeeper obsessed with death, telling HP: "You and I shall drink tonight, Harry. We shall drink to life's confines, to life's pearly end, which is the nothingness of death, not the perpetual pansiness of Heaven!"
Ronny The Bear is more buddy cop than buddy, introducing himself as a "pot-of-coffee-by-day, bottle-of-wine-by-night type of guy" ("Triple that and you've got me," Harry replies.) The Wretched Harmony worked "a temp job playing piano in a jewellery store. Wisely, she wore a hood so as to not distract the customers with her hideous visage."
Through a barrage of absurdism, Neely, no Potter-head, is able to distill Rowling's world to its basic elements. A chapter's worth of Rowling's prose and rickety mythopic-logic are brusquely deconstructed: "Harry puts up with the Wretch bickering with the Bear over the practicality of a hungry, three-headed, giant dog in a school full of tasty kids, when the Wretch points out that it had to be guarding something."
Wizard People, Dear Reader is a cultural artefact but, like all cult masterpieces, you either get it, or you don't. I cannot hear "Privet Drive" in anything but the gargled rasp of Brad Neely. It's become a litmus test I use to determine the future of relationships. It ran through my old workplace like a forest fire, a possessive demon we couldn't purge: We talked in Neely's accent, metaphors, intonations. My ex and I spoke it like a second language. There are two versions, and I personally prefer the first where Neely constantly corpses, but either way it is one of those galvanising experiences to have with your friends and loved ones. Watch and marvel as it fills your head like "Upfish's" (Neville Longbottom) cursed "blood-ball."
For me, Harry Potter will forever be as much Neely as Rowling. It's refreshing to let genuine weirdness into the wizarding world. After all, it was it not Rowling who said: "magical deeds are afoot, dear readers, magical darkness a must." Actually, that was Neely.
There is a beautiful depth to this poem, which is only 13 lines long. James Tate is addressing his reader directly, whoever they might be. Most importantly, he is contacting us to share a secret. There is a quiet breath of intimacy in each and every line as he explains to us what drives him as a poet. Indeed, as the poem works its way through a blizzard, we, the reader, come to understand that it is a poem dedicated to the nature of poetry and the audience, that most mercurial of relationships. It is a testament to the difficulty of poetry, but most importantly, to the ember of joy it can kindle if the poet gets it just right.
Our speaker begins with a strange image: a sealed coffin. Apparently, we, the audience, are dead. May we rest in peace. This may be intended to be immediately jarring, to shake the reader a little, and to ensure that attention and concentration are given. This would be typical of Tate. The more we read of this poem, the more solid that interpretation becomes.
The verb trying shows an effort being made by the speaker. That effort is not surprising, given that the speaker is attempting to use an oxymoron, a figure of speech that combines two seemingly contradictory elements to free us from our tomb (Hirsch 2017); this burning snowflake.
A poet never knows if their hard work will pay off. The trick the speaker is referring to is a piece of clever literary technique, a flourish of writing, and a bolt of wit to keep us engaged. Something that will forge connections between the creator and audience. If they can pull that off, then both poet and reader may bask in some kind of warmth: we can rub our hands together, maybe
The triplet now immediately follows on from the previous lines; maybe start a little fire. This serves to intensify the pace of the poem, that combined with the repetition of burning and warmth in the fires, slides us along and makes the new image Tate introduces all the more abrupt, so much so we almost slam into it: with our identification papers
Tate wants to force his dear readers to think, engaging with the work before them, so that his connection to us and, in turn, us to him burns all the brighter. He is not, by a long shot, the first poet to this. He follows a long, postmodern American tradition of jolting the reader to interaction, exemplified by the likes of E.E. Cummings (Cummings and Rocco 1998).
The identification papers themselves are almost a mystery, meaning-wise. My own interpretation is that, through his poetic magic, Tate is hoping to reshape his own image, or identity, in the eyes of the reader. Simultaneously, I believe he hopes that his trick will help the reader to think deeper, forging new parts of their own identity using poetry and, on a broader scale, art in general.
The speaker goes on to create a refrain, highlighting their own diligence and toil in the face of adversity once more. As before, it is a little insincere and reference the unknowable quality of success: I don't know but I keep working, working
Hello and welcome to Words That Burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This week\u2019s poem is Dear Reader by James Tate. It is beautifully written and simple in it\u2019s execution. As January closes in around us, I thought that the copious amounts of winter imagery were quite fitting. It is as close to the feeling of deep winter that a poem could reach, I think.
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