Waiting On

Doug Holder’s end of poetry

I Ain’t Gonna Wait For Godot, No More by Doug Holder

Doug Holder’s book is about time and chance. And drinking a little and thinking about things gone by. And the passage of time. Those things that befall every man. I’m old, the poet says. Maybe I’m ill. Left alone since the loss of my wife. Believe me, my friend, I’ve got nothing but time.

To be a poet is to wait, on occasion. To wait for the right words. Sometimes they arrive; sometimes you can dig them out of the ground with your fingernails. For poetry is not an easy business.

But more often than not, they escape. They get out the window somehow, or never calcify, never come together like clouds in the air and produce some cooling rain. Ideas elude you and you wonder where they could possibly be. Or — and here’s the worst of it — they are first said by someone else, at some other time, said by someone possibly long dead. That’s the trouble with poetry. Other people have had all the ideas long ago.

We might just as easily watch Citizen Kane over and over for thoughts on societal greed.

I’m chairman of the board, Mr Bernstein says — I’ve got nothing but time. As he sits in his empty office, in fine leather chairs, a portrait of his patron, now of course deceased, hanging large and heavy over the fireplace. The fire being lit.

This collection is inspired, but only partly inspired, by Beckett and by some of Beckett’s situations. Last tapes made by doomed protagonists, waiting around, kicking one’s heels ahead of the inevitable. Some of the poems here are little motes suspended in the stream of sunlit dust — not much going on, just a thing or two of note, one or two items it might be worth thinking about.

The permanence, at least the persistence, of fountains — pushing water forth in jets and spumes at least until the mechanism is turned off, as long as it lasts. The permanence of libraries — here, there and everywhere: look back and see something really old, sit down and wait between shelves past and present, ancient and modern.

The permanence of two or three consoling drinks, a few drinks succeeded in turn by thinking on a question or two of small matter.

The permanence, at least in pure theory, of music — of voices trapped forever in vinyl or midi files even as their originators age and age out — the feeling of hearing Etta James sing and thinking, at last, that I’ve finally cracked it, two or three drinks in, companionably considering what might happen next. Art is like that: it’s forever until it’s over and you always hope you’ve finally arrived at some kind of point.

We put on a record, we put on a film, we put up our feet and consider drifting away. If material reality, stubborn as it is with all its limits on our earthly frame, does not put a halt to proceedings as only it can.

The computers now, they check to see if you are human. You might have to do childish arithmetic for their android satisfaction, or perhaps complete the kind of visual puzzle that, if given to toddlers, would leave them frustrated and quite cross.

Not good when the eyes begin to fail, as fail they must. And not good, too, for those who are apt to ask the same question.

Am I really human? the poet may well wonder.

Just because a computer asked it first, that does not mean the thing is not worth pondering. Possibly it’s a reasonable question, worth giving some serious consideration.

Some pains will do that to you. The poet suffers annoyingly from sciatica, as so many of us do. Or will. A jolt of pain up the leg is rather like a jolt of pain anywhere else. Not only the sensation of it — but what it means. That I’m destined to be like this, to feel like this, so many more times — unless, of course, this is itself an internal bell ringing, a bell that can only signal concern, crisis, and then the end.

But there may be time yet. Time to consider things lost and missed, but also to revel. To revel with a little humour on events that blight the evenings — there was a pandemic lately: all wore cloth masks with elastic trimmings. Like some primate shapewear but only for the benefit and the faces of a few ugly customers.

We must bear with these emergencies, the poet writes: doing quizzes on Zoom and seeing the faces, the icons, of people you’d rather meet in person. Traipsing between non-event and non-event. Really, one might well say, at my age? And splutter and splutter bad, like some are apt to do on radio call-in shows during the day.

I’d like, the poet writes, to have one or two more supreme moments. A moment of soft-shoe dancing, perhaps, where I prove a marvel of dexterity, of choreographic wit. Really make a statement — put in an appearance; perhaps some manner of positively final appearance, like an operatic grande dame.

And there’s always the drink, of course. A touch of gaiety, a little libation, a remembrance of things past.

Put some music on. Have a little think about it all. It’ll all come right in the end, I assure you.