Thursday, May 11, 2023

The Book of My Enemy

 


The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-praised effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities.
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book -
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys,
The sinkers, the clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yes, his slime volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the glare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed in by others,
His renowned abhorrences of all posturing and pretence,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quavering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun."

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy.
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error -
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

-Clive James

Clive James (1939-2019) was born in Australia, but lived most of his adult life in England. He was a cultural phenomenon: television, non-fiction books, poetry. 

The Other Reader promoted this poem for a while, but I resisted, though I also quite like it. But it is a lot of typing. But tonight, not feeling very imaginative, but willing to type, was its time...

On my way to the grocery store earlier, I passed the 'kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs' (BMV, for you locals) and could have stopped in to take a picture of 'great, square stacks of rejected books', (The Kung-Fu Cookbook, indeed) but didn't.

2 comments:

  1. It's long, but it's so great! I needed a laugh today, so thanks for posting this very humorous poem. :D

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    1. It wanted to spam your comment, but I wouldn't let it! (Never know why it does that...)

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