Jim Jim

Jim Jim Falls, Kakadu, Australia

Below is a recording of me reading 'Jim Jim Falls'.  Hearing myself always makes me cringe, but hearing this makes me dissatisfied with the poem.  I wanted to communicate how special the place was, and how diving into the water and swimming to the waterfall was indeed one of those rare, 'peak' experiences.  The trouble is, the actual experience was fraught with self-consciousness, with my knowledge that it was going to be, or should be, 'memorable'.  I think I wrote the poem in an attempt to memorialise and re-materialise the experience, but also, paradoxically, to point up that it was/is impossible to (re)capture it.  So why am I dissatisfied?  There's a phrase 'goosepimpling rule of my body' which I now find a bit awkward and lifeless.  It seems to add to my feeling that the whole poem sounds a little too stilted and considered.  It's a sonnet, of course.  Which means that it IS very considered.  Maybe I should just have read it faster, in more of a breathless gush...  I'd replace that phrase with, maybe, 'white-goosefleshed howl of my body' which is more dramatic, and reinforces the 'whoops' and 'echoes' already there. Also the repetition of 'wet grip guarantees that this is real' feels like a cop-out.  The last line of a poem demands more than a repetition, apt though it might be.  Maybe the last two lines should read something like:

I pull you up - our wet grip guarantees
how real this is, accretes to memories
we'll slip into, deeper, more still, than this.

though 'slip into' sounds weak, and 'accretes' ('accretes'?!) is obscure.  Bringing in the relationship aspect in these last lines, is also pitching the poem towards cheesiness.  Isn't it?  Aaaargh...help....! 

My friend Gary Spendlove, who recorded it when he was down a few weeks ago, and who did the brilliant version of 'Poem While Reading Frank O' Hara...' on the 'Audio' page, says he's going to send me some mashed-up takes of 'Jim Jim Falls'.  Looking forward to that.  I like the idea of poems being taken out of my hands, knocked around the head a few times, and reawakened in different clothes...   

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