The Nervous Purvis

Oh Norwich. Land of endless flatness, land of the same three pubs we go to over and over and over again, land of three starbucks in a two-minute radius and incongruous gatherings of goths and frankly, the silliest accents this side of Cornwall.

I still feel like–well, I still unquestionably am–an outsider in Norwich. I came here almost four years ago, to join the never-ending ranks of UEA poets, and I’ve…lingered. Norwich seems to do that to people.

It seems silly to try to define Norwich by talking about a non-Norwich place, but I feel like I kind of have to. I grew up in Fresno, a pretty big (500,000+) California city known for raisins, voting against-the-California-grain Republican, and crime. Norwich, if I may be blunt, still spins me out a little. It’s small, especially once you factor in my lifestyle–I go to UEA, I live in the golden triangle, I usually socialise in the city centre. I recognise that’s a tiny wedge of Norwich, but just the fact that I can live my life in that little chunk of town is bizarre to me. Here, I walk places. Where I grew up, you drove everywhere–you had to. From my parents’ house, you could walk to a strip mall with a gas station and a gun shop, and it’ll take you about fifteen minutes. There are no grocery stores within walking distance. There are no pharmacies. There is a bar (helpfully called The Bar), but you’re going to have to brave one of the main traffic arteries of Fresno to get to it, and trust me, you want that street of hurtling Jeep Cherokees in between you and The Bar’s patrons. Even the houses here are cozier–terraced housing is new to me, so the concept of living somewhere where you might actually hear your neighbours has taken getting used to. While I find this proximity comforting when I’m tucked in bed trying to figure out whether that noise downstairs is an axe murderer or not, sometimes it’s also a little stifling. (Note to my neighbors on the Unthank side: your bedroom door squeaks. Fix it.)

And it’s not just the neighbours and pubs and ex-students who insist on moving off-campus and into your goddamn neighbourhood, YOURS–Norwich history keeps crowding in at every turn. I feel this deserves a disclaimer: don’t worry, I’m not about to go on a horrible American dreamy-voiced digression about your history, and how it’s just so moving and I feel so close to my ancestors here!!! Norwich history is full of sheep, undrained bogs, and a rather unsettlingly popular Jewish massacre back in the (medieval) day. (Small wonder there’s still quite the BNP problem.) But…again, my background: the historic neighbourhoods of Fresno are from the 1930s. There’s a house downtown that was turned into a museum because it was build in the 1890s. To move somewhere with its own real used-to-be-live anchorite (check the picture of Julian that opened this post) is very cool. My contribution to Norwich history seems to be the gleeful retelling of every Black Plague-related anecdote I’ve ever heard. I don’t care if they’re true. I love that I live somewhere where I can tell them.

I suppose my final summing-up of Norwich is that I can’t, at least not yet. I think you have to be out of a place to properly write about it–which is probably why these anecdotes about Fresno are tripping through my keyboard so readily. I think Norwich will be the cramped, rainy, medieval heart of my poetry a few years from now, once I’ve left it. In the meantime, Norwich is the boring, tedious, everyday place I toddle through without really noticing. I complain about it. I joke about it. I blog it. April 23rd, 2009: sunny, the teenagers are out in force on the steps of the Forum. I went spelunking for fabric in the market. Bootsie, a neighbour’s enormous ugly cat, is sitting on my gas metre waiting for me to feed him. I’m home.

So, as promised, Andrew Motion is giving up his gig as Poet Laureate after a ten-year run. This article makes it sound like it wasn’t a lot of fun–writing poems on pointless anniversaries of people he doesn’t know, the inevitable run of “Poet Laureate Writes Poem: And It’s Crap!” articles from newspapers immediately following, etc etc. And I do sympathise; sitting down with a blank sheet of paper knowing I have to fill it with poetic, and very public, musings on the Queen’s Jubilee sounds like a special form of hell.

However. The problem is the sentence that opens the piece:

Andrew Motion, the first poet laureate to retire voluntarily in nearly 400 years, has admitted in a valedictory essay that the eight royal poems he wrote in his 10 years in the post were the most difficult of his life.

…eight? Eight poems in ten years? For 5,000 pounds a year? That works out to 6,250 pounds a poem! (NB: yes, my righteous indignance would be better highlighted by a pound symbol in front of those calculations; alas, my laptop is American, and I’m not dedicated enough to my rage to calculate the exchange to dollars.) Motion’s an established poet and all, so perhaps the trade-off between dignity and lucre is a bit more balanced on his scales, but for six grand a poem, I’ll write whatever the fuck you like. I’ll write a birthday poem for the Queen’s corgis.

I’ll refrain from expanding on my credit crunch howl, but one last buttress for my meanspiritedness: this is another quote from the article.

Motion says he has used the post to publicise poetry and to broaden the remit to write about other issues, such as homelessness, liberty, the Paddington rail disaster, 9/11 and Harry Patch, the last survivor from the trenches of the first world war.

–and there’s the rub. If Nikki Giovanni wanted to get up and bitch about writing poems for the queen, I’d probably be a bit more okay with it. But my line in the sand is that anyone who gets up and says with a straight face that they’ve written “a poem about liberty” is, frankly, a pretentious ne’er-do-well and not to be trusted.

Now to get my CV and that dog poem off in the post; I think “Ode to Corgiville Fair” is going to be a real corker.

That’s right, bitches, I’m back.

Watch this space.