Tim Key - The Incomplete Tim Key: About 300 of His Poetical Gems and What-Nots

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Key is now 38 years old and has problems with his back, which began in April 2012 in Melbourne, Australia, when he kicked a bath in a rage. This snapped his toe, and his resultant new stance gradually gnawed away at his spine. In spite of his poor health he has plugged away with his poetry and his Instagram account is now booming. He has also wormed his way into Alan Partridges affections as Sidekick Simon and Radio 4s affections as himself, with a third series of Tim Keys Late Night Poetry Programme. He and his Dutch friend have continued to film short but sweet incarnations of his verse, which they are trying to get on YouTube. Amongst all of this he has been fisting various desks, demanding this paperback be made. So this object represents a huge victory for Key.

ALSO BY TIM KEY

25 Poems, 3 Recipes and 32 Other Suggestions. (An Inventory).

Instructions, Guidelines, Tutelage, Suggestions, Other Suggestions, and Examples Etc: An Attempted Book by Tim Key (And Descriptions/Conversations/A Piece About A Moth).

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

This digital edition published in 2015 by Canongate Books

Copyright Tim Key, 2015

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Fair play to the guy never easy to write a book.

www.canongate.tv

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78211 679 0
eISBN 978 0 85786 120 7

Some people go through their whole life without writing a book.

Illustration on

Illustrations on CSA Images/Archive

And even though its just poems, it still counts as a book.

To my decorator and his wife

CONTENTS

POEM#436

SUNDAY MORNING

I never shot her,

Ned lied.

Mr Ward cradled his dog in his arms.

His knees bent under the weight.

INTRODUCTION

P oetry, paperback. Paperback, poetry. They sound nice next to one another, dont they? The words poetry and paperback. Like cherries and jam. They make a merry couple.

And when the idea first came about to commit my poetry to print I have to say I dreamt immediately of the finished book being in paperback. There is a certain beauty, a timelessness about paperback books. I remember my father sitting me down and telling me tales of his paperback copy of Ted Hughes poetry. Hed go watery-eyed as he reminisced about long, hot summers days in the late 1950s cycling around the Fens with a slim copy of Hughess efforts tucked into the inside pocket of his blazer. The sun on his back, the wind in his hair, whizzing down country lanes, and occasionally stopping, breathless and exhilarated, and leaning against a tree.

Miles away from any civilisation and years away from things like Channel 4 or The Internet, the boughs of some docile oak splooshing him into shade, my father would pull his flask from his satchel, pour himself a cool squash and set about Hughes like a maniac. Then, once he was done, it would be a case of flask back into satchel, paperback back into pocket, backside back onto saddle, plimsoll back onto pedal and away. Back home to mother.

And that was how it was.

Poets spinning their yarns, humans like my father enjoying their words. But it wasnt just their words. No, it was also the format that my father and his contemporaries were beguiled by. They were in love with the wiles of the paperback. The softness, I suppose. The yield that the paperback brings to the table. The give. Thats what my father talks about the most. Hell sit there in floods these days, remembering how he could bend his Hughes clean in half. The give, hell sob. I appreciated the give.

So, when I originally put together this compilation of poems and thoughts in 2011, I had sky-high hopes that it, too, would be paperback. And you can imagine it was a little difficult to take when I was told my poems were going to be slung into a hardback. Of course, my publisher at the time was a lovely man and I dont blame him for it. His name was Nick and I can honestly say I have never enjoyed a mans company as much as I did Nicks. We went for maybe two full English breakfasts and something in the region of five coffees over the course of our poet/publisher relationship. But the fact was he was a slave to his industry. The situation was that there was pressure to make this thing a hardback. That was how it was gonna be and we just had to wear it. We had to, in his words, go hard first and we also had to, again in his words, suck it up.

But I didnt want it to be a hardback. So for me it was a hammer blow.

I hate hardbacks. Big, cumbersome old sods. They piss me off no end. I cant get inside the mindset of someone who likes hardbacks. Its like these pricks who drive around on tractors or wear armour. Why would you do that? They have no place in 21st Century Britain in my honest opinion. I dont know what irks me the most, the fact that the first thirty feet of most bookshops is dominated by those bulky great artefacts, or the fact that there are twats out there buying them. Anyhow, I put all this in an email to Nick and he wrote back reiterating that that would be how it would be and asking me to explain what I meant about the armour thing.

And so it was. We were going hard. And I compiled it. And Dave designed it. And someone whose name I dont know printed it all out, and then some absolute bastards glued hard bits all round it and it went into the shops. And that would have been where you saw it last. You probably picked it up, you might have leafed through it, you will have become angry at its weight and awkwardness and you will have slid it back into its position between Keats and Kipling. After that, God knows, maybe you will have waddled to the cookery section; leafed through an Oliver.

Either way, that was where the first chapter ended. The hardback phase. I am looking at one of those books now. It is on the coffee table in my Airbnb. A big, heavy, rancid piece of work. I push it around the table with my heel. My face is on the cover. I look down at my face. My face peers back up at me. Its four years down the line. Im moving on.

From nowhere, when it seemed for all the world that a paperback would never emerge from the hardbacks grim shadow, a lady by the name of Jenny stepped up and pulled the fat out of the fire. Smart and energetic, this Jenny has done the impossible. She has outwitted the book industry. Shes sent the right emails to the right people and shes nodded at the right times and shes winked at the right times and she has been a trooper. And, as a result of all of this, she has, from nowhere, magicked a paperback out of her arse!

And so here we are. Or rather here you are. Lucky enough to be clutching something svelte. In your hands are all the poems from the hardback, plus three new ones that I have eked out of my quill and dripped into the manuscript over the past three years, and all of it contained in this featherweight tome. This giving, yielding volume. This paperback.

INTRODUCTION

I am writing this introduction in a quaint little Airbnb in the Cotswoldshires, UK. Ive escaped. Ive wriggled free from the menacing clutches of London in order to track down some peace and quiet, and the best I could find is here. It is, in case you didnt know, crucial for a writer to find these favourable conditions. If he intends to write seven introductions and a new poem and generally reread and correct typos as he moves forward from hardback to paperback, it is