Worked well past midnight again on what I am now calling the “Poetry Project”, or “PP” for short. In the end, it may turn out exactly so. Hope not.
Charles Dickens is being quite helpful, albeit demanding and forceful. I decided to stay healthy for dinner last night and dropped the Pepperoni we had discussed from our pizza, opting for only assorted veggies instead. I think he was disappointed, mumbling something about wanting a “decently struck meat pie”. Hard to catch it all thru the accent at times, to be honest. Dickens was not well pleased with his trip to America in life, so we’ll have to see how this one turns out. The veggie pizza probably didn’t do much to further relations.
Maybe the poem collaboration will lead to a book in the end– “Charles Dickens and I”, or “Charles Dickens in My Head” or something, like the lady who wrote about she and Julia Child. Charles doesn’t cook or give out recipes of course, providing lines of poetry instead. Not sure how long he’s planning to stick around though. Perhaps a nice roast for the weekend may help. I don’t feel qualified to attempt a proper meat pie.
Woke up around 5am this morning with a few more lines to jot down. Two lines yesterday. A few more today. Like I said, this one’s going to take a while with other projects going on, too. Dickens is generally considered the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, so why he has appeared to drive along a poetry project instead of a renowned poet is beside me, although it’s not like he never wrote any poems either. Regardless, I am very grateful for the help and have found it best not to question who the Muses send.
I keep getting stand alone, disorganized, independent lines as they pop into my head, and in the end putting them together in a meaningful fashion may be like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle in a hurricane. Yeah, I’d better order that roast to keep Mr. Dickens around a while longer. At least until Shakespeare or Robert Frost show up.
In the meantime, here’s a photo of some of London’s East End street kids from Horace Warner, c 1901-02. He called them “Spitalfields Nippers”. Great term– “Spitalfield”. It might fit into it all somehow. With the lamp. Or not. Mr. Dickens liked to work in serial fashion, and I think he is having sport while serializing this poem into my head.
Anyway, wishing everyone a wonderful day! Off now, I hear Mr. Dickens calling again. Quite demanding, he is.
By the way– I suppose to be safe, if anyone has a proper recipe for a good meat pie, I’d appreciate your sending it along. Just in case.
“Spitalfields Nippers” by Horace Warner, c 1901-02,
