A Few Lines from Horace

Horace had had it.

He slumped back in his 'ergonomic' chair (falsely so called, the thing made his teeth ache), and stared at his boss's email with baleful incredulity.

'Horace, old boy,' it started, 'got just the thing for you. Read the guidelines for The Clarion's new poetry contest, and have a go at the submissions. We've promised each entrant a 'professional appraisal' of their writing talent by our crack team of poetry experts.

'That's you, of course. The submissions are in the public mail tool under 'Verse and Worse', that's in-house only, of course. A nice, encouraging answer is called for. Of course.

'Have fun! Oh, and we need them out ASAP, of course. The winners have already been picked by my lady wife. Thx, John.'

Horace pushed away from the creaky desk, grabbed his mug that said 'To be great is to be misunderstood (R.W. Emerson)', and headed for the tea urn, dodging the lucky many who were leaving the newspaper office already, it being five p.m. He poured himself a cup of the ghastly stuff that passed for tea around here, and stumped back to open the emails. Better get on with it. Perhaps there was a gem hidden in there, undiscovered by Deidre Farnham in her cherry-picking for prize material?

The first one was folksy. After scanning the first verse - which didn't - Horace decided that emergency measures were called for. Looking around to make sure that no one was watching (they weren't, being preoccupied with searching for umbrellas and Macs), he slipped a flask out of the side drawer and fortified Mrs Knightley's toxic tannin tonic with a dollop of Glenfiddich, where it lay like a pearl in the mud. He took a desperate swallow.

Thought: Such welcome and unwelcome things at once 'tis hard to reconcile...Pah! If I'm quoting the Scottish Play already, where will this end? To work! Feeling a little better, Horace looked at the 'poem' again.

'All in the merry month of May, when green buds all were a-swellin',
I sang a great rock roundelay to my best friend's ex-girlfriend, Mary Ellen,
Who in the town of Milton Keynes was all and all and all a-dwellin''

Horace grunted and looked at the email queue. 150 of the cursed things. One hundred and fifty, the number of the Psalms. Not dwelling on this - with or without Mary Ellen - was going to be the key to getting out of here by midnight. He hit Reply.

'Dear Entrant,
'Thank you for submitting your poem, 'The Ballad of Mary Ellen Sommersby and the Dudes Who Loved Her', to The Clarion's annual poetry contest, Clarion Call for Verse Writers.

Out of so many exciting entries, the choice of a winner was difficult. In a sense, all who entered are winners. Although your poem did not garner one of the top prizes, you will find attached an ecoupon for 20% off at the bookshop of your choice....'

So much for the boilerplate. Now for Horace's contribution, the 'expert opinion'. Horace took another sip - wrong, slug, of tea, decided it needed more Glenfiddich, applied remedy, put hands to home keys.

'Your poem is a splendid collocation of things old and new. The combination of ideas - the simple folk ballad style, redolent of Merry Olde England, and the cutting-edge daringness of Rock - is, in the experience of this writer, absolutely unique. The choice of picturesque location is particularly apt. A minor criticism: in stanza 15, are you sure that 'rocks off' and 'socks off', while certainly a valid rhyming pair, actually convey the image you want of a pair of star-crossed lovers?  

'Thank you for a great reading experience.  

'Yours,
'Horace Wallingford, Clarion poetry editor.

Horace hit the Send button with a sigh, and tried more tea. Interesting, the stuff was getting more palatable. Or his palate, like himself, was becoming inured to the slings and arrows of outrageous literary capitalism...on to the next hostage to fortune...

'Oh, Calcutta! Oh, Bombay!
Where is the Empire of yesterday?
Where the gymkhanas? The box-wallahs all?
When I yell for a chota peg, who answers my call?'

Horace chuckled. That's telling them, Colonel Sahib, he thought. He tapped out a message of encouragement, in which the words 'Queen and Country' actually passed his figurative lips, so shameless had he grown in his downward-spiralling career in literature. The next few entries passed almost unnoticed, and the tea mug was refilled (from both sources). Horace imagined that he might finish his Sisyphean task in time for the last train homeward and a soak. He was feeling almost no pain when...

'Ouch!' He glared at the latest submission.

'The mind holds a memory, clouded and dim,
A vision of battle, sanguine and grim,
Where generals plotted, and young men died,
And nobody ever knew really which side
Was right...'

The painful part of this effusion was that Horace himself - long ago, as a hopeful child, he had always been a hopeful child - had once written much in this vein. Oh, the glory that was Greece...he drank more tea and addressed himself, fiercely, to the keyboard and his own demons, telling the writer what he wished someone had told him.

'Dear Entrant, blah-blah, This is your critic speaking. Step away from the computer. This is an official warning. Do not perpetrate cliches. Do not paper over real events with shabby, trite platitudes. Do NOT imagine that you know what it is like to fight a war because you have seen Henry V seventeen times. DO NOT. Stop it. Go away and do something useful with your life, like collecting stamps. Stamps do not have feelings. Yours sincerely, Horace W.'

Horace sat back, watching in detached awe as his index finger, seemingly independent of his sense of self-preservation, hit the Send button. There, that's done it. Honesty is the worst possible policy in this business. He was done for.

Immediately Horace began to feel better. Why not? I hate, loathe, and despise this wretched job. John Farnham is the worst editor in the English-speaking world. I have a bit of money saved, I could freelance. And finally, finally, finish that play I've been working at for donkey's years. I don't care what they say, the world IS ready for a play about funny Irishmen in outer space...

He grinned to himself. In for a penny, in for a pound, might as well be hanged for a sheep...yes, and all those other cliches and suchlike...

He grabbed the next poem, and went for the gusto.

'Books are so important to me,
They open the world, they let me see
Things that are important to me,
Things I like to know and see...'

'Dear Entrant, Are you over the age of fifteen? If so, you should be ashamed of yourself, because this poem reads like something my little sister wrote when she was eight.'

Phoebe's was better, he thought, even if Mother helped her with the last line.. He Sent it off, and grabbed the next one. This was fun.

'Dear Entrant, Anent your poem, 'Rhyme on the Impossibility of Understanding the Works of Michel Foucault': while the subject matter strikes a chord of recognition in all of us who find French philosophers tough going, your method of expression is an insult to the noble English language. Please submit your verse to Babelfish - preferably into Estonian and back again - before trying again. I think you will find the sense much improved thereby, as well as satisfying a postmodern imperative.'

Horace chuckled. As the list got shorter, the flask emptier, and the hour later, his feeling of elation rose. ..

Last one:

'On the wee, bonny banks of the Firth of the Forth,
Which is somewhere in Scotland, I haven't got a map but I think it is in the North...'

Horace pounced triumphantly. Yes, that is what his night had needed. The invocation of the Patron Saint, the Bard of All Bards, the Touchstone of All Bad Poetry (a Touchstone with no Audrey, alas...cut that out, unconscious)...

'Dear Entrant, You are treading here upon sacred ground. Back Off. I KNOW William Topaz McGonagall. YOU are no William Topaz McGonagall. That poet even has his works inscribed in cement, which is where they belong. McGonagall was a professional. Do not try this at home. Sincerely yours, Horace the Epigone.'

Aaaaand....Send!

Horace sank back in his awful chair, looking down into the lees of his mug with regret - but only for the fact that he had no more Glenfiddich at hand. Otherwise, he was completely satisfied with the deliberate trashing of his career with The Clarion. I know not what course others may take, he intoned inwardly, but as for me, give me freedom of metaphor or give me death! He toasted the silent pressroom with his almost-empty mug.

His celebratory mood was interrupted by the office LAN admin. 'Hey, Horace, don't you read your email? I've been trying to tell you for hours...your response-mail tool is down. Anything you sent out in the last, say, eight hours is lost...gone where the unpaired electrons go.' He grinned the grin all geeks grin, when they've just told you your life's work has been lost to Computer Error.

Horace surprised himself by grinning back. 'Sorry, I had the broken tool up, didn't see yours,' he explained. He shrugged. 'Oh, well, that's the evening wasted, then. I'll try again tomorrow.' He glanced at his watch. 'I can just make the last train.'

Shouldering his jacket and forgetting his umbrella, Horace headed for the door, remembering to place his mug carefully in the dishwasher on the way out.
Good night, sweet print, and printers' devils sing thee to thy rest.

He just made the train. And it wasn't raining.