Please Welcome Author Spargo Postle!
Welcome to Immortality and Beyond. May I offer you a beverage? (frothy guiness, zesty zombie, tantalizing tea, vampires wine, mystic brew)
Guiness I have tried many times, frothy guiness will be a new experience so I will have one of those please.
Now that we're all settled in my lair, I'm de-bite-fully glad you stopped in.
You are most welcome and I have to say it is a real pleasure to be here.
BK: Please tell us a little bit about your current release...
Alone Among Many is a collection of poetry that has a theme of loneliness throughout… I hope that hasn’t put you off speaking to me, being a poet and talking about people who are alone can be a bit of a conversation stopper…
BK: What inspired this particular book?
The world can be a lonely place, no matter how many we are surrounded by... Even the internet, though it provides us with opportunities like this to reach out to many hundreds at a time, leaves us isolated... Once we press the off button and the hundreds flicker away we are left alone, unable to express to those that surround our real world what our life should have been like... If you do get someone to listen you can see their smiling disdain of your world, just before they turn and forget what you just said...
I'm a poet, so watching people is a voyeuristic compulsion that I have never been able to deny from the beginning of my time... Each poem is a little bit of me and a lot of who I see around me, but all of their worlds and mine get jumbled and messed with so that the world I see is the world I want it to be... So I wrote my thoughts in an attempt to reach out to those who are similar to me...
BK: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
The first time I heard the song Paperback Writer by the Beatles when I was very young… I know it sounds really corny, but I’m afraid it’s true…
BK: How do you keep your writing different from all the others that write in this particular genre?
I don't try to... I read other poets’ work, some is a little like mine some is nothing like mine to the point I don't understand it... I use my own voice, express my own thoughts... After all poetry is nothing more than thoughts that fall out of the mind of an individual... As a contemporary, or modern, poet the rules are available but best viewed as a guide of what some people like and not followed like some mythical tablet handed down since the dawn of yestermorrow...
BK: What was the hardest thing about writing this book?
Dragging up all the feelings you try to ignore is probably the hardest part of the book.
Each poem is in some ways like a chapter of a novel because you are trying to ensure there is form and structure that enables the reader to connect with the work... It has to have a tempo or rhythm that resonates not just with the written words but also how it will 'play' in the head of the reader as they mentally speak to themselves... If at all possible for the reader it should try and cause them to read out loud, without letting them stumble over some bullshit words that nobody ever heard of or don't understand... In my particular case I try to use as few words as I can as they are meant to feel like the reader is simply thinking out loud... And at the end, when the reader has finished, it has to become their poem... It should feel that they now own the meaning of the poem and not me... It has to make sense to them, not just me... (to those that read my work please let me know if I am simply talking bull or I am on the right track)...
BK: What character was your favorite to write for in this book? Why?
The main character in the poem Beauty Became the Beast, I couldn’t possibly give you her name… It is about someone I once saw in a nightclub, during my single years, who also happened to live down the road from me… Married, with young kids, in her late twenties to mid thirties… What fascinated me then and still does now in many respects is the fact that she always appeared to be so together when I saw her during the day but on Friday nights, in the club, she literally became an animal… She would quite literally paw at every man that went near her… Yet by the end of the night she would be sobbing her heart out, distraught…
She was my favourite because of the extreme duality of her life… If you set aside the so-called moral aspects I found her totally fascinating... Why did she sob at the end of a Friday night? How did she get on with her partner? What did her friends think? What….? For a while you could say that she became my Poetic heroin… Sometimes not knowing someone means that you can know so many others…
BK: Which was your favorite scene to write?
In the poem We’re Standing at the Edge of a Precipice I have attempted to paint a picture of how dark change can feel… This is a subject that only the reader can ever understand as change affects our personal emotion differently from person to person… I wrote it sitting in a hotel restaurant in a coastal town near Shanghai, China… Egypt had started its civil unrest and there were reports of other middle-east countries, including Libyia, heading down the same unknown path… Unrest was starting to secretly, quietly, bubble to the surface in China… So I wrote a poem… Depending on what side of the fence you are and if you are Egyptian or Libyian it will have a different meaning and context than if you are Chinese or Syrian…!!! In the same way that any single person who reads will get a totally different emotion from it based on their own experience or feelings about change…
BK: Will this become a series? If so, what inspired it to be a series?
I was just about to say no, I’m a poet… But the truth is that I will continually return to the overall theme of being alone as it is so comfortable to wear… Poetry becomes an addiction once you realise what it can communicate to the reader… That is not say I am any good as a poet, just that I can never imagine a time where I don’t think about turning a thought into a poem…
BK: Now for a little fun, and into your everyday life, What is a day in your life like?
It used to be that I travelled to China a lot as I worked for a very large Chinese vehicle manufacturer… Unfortunately I was made redundant from that job so now I spend my days researching… Don’t feel too sad for me because I have now realised who I really am…
BK: What do you like to do when you're not writing?
I love music and music videos, but I can’t play a note and am virtually tone deaf to my own poor voice… I try to draw but have the hands of a builder and the eyesight of a middle aged man… My garden is my guilty pleasure… And I watch people so much I’m surprised I haven’t been arrested or beaten to a pulp…
BK: What is one thing your readers would be most surprised to learn about you?
I believe that sometimes I feel the earth wobble, just a little... Then there tends to be an earthquake somewhere in the world within the following week... But please don't tell too many people they will think I'm mentally unstable...!!!
BK: What do you like to read? Who is your favorite author?
I love to read anything that lets me think, it doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, non-fiction, biography or poetry… My current favourite author is T.S. Eliot, he was an American poet who spent most of his adult life in England…
BK: Please tell us one piece of advice you were given as an author that you carry with you when you write?
“Don’t ever give up and have more confidence in your own inner voice, you can only be you.”
BK: What is one piece of advice you can give to aspiring writers/authors?
Sorry but it will have to be ‘one piece of advice’ twice…
1 - Learn all the rules you want but remember every writer of note tended to break the rules they had learnt... Rules usually provide the writer with a plan for how to be mediocre... The rules however are important because they usually provide you with advice on what readers like at the moment... So break the rules slowly, evenly, in service of the reader... You can be as smart-arse about your writing as you like but if a reader doesn't like your work they will not care about your sticking to the rules, or the perfect grammar, or the never used but ever-so-clever words that require a dictionary to understand...
2 - Once you have written your work and pass it to the reader it is no longer yours... So trust yourself to give the reader what you know they will want to enjoy...
BK: What are you currently working on?
I have started on a collection of poems with a mythical gods/entities/otherworld/guardians/ feel to them... Imagine if we did not have the bible or quran stories, or greek mythology, or egyption mythology, what would we have...
Now that I have told you there will probably be a dozen poets, novelists and short-story tellers who get their work out before me... Should have said nothing...!!!
BK: Where can readers connect with you?
They can simply email me at spargo.postle@btinternet.com... and yes I will get back to you, unless you want to discuss some sexual perversion, and then I will politely tell you to get lost... The eBook, just google Spargo Postle and there are a number of sites you can download from.
BIO:
Who am I…??? I am a 48 year old man who lives in Birmingham, England. I have three of my own children and a step-child with my new partner… I have one grandson and another due around Christmas… Having had a somewhat difficult upbringing, becoming a writer never presented itself as a viable opportunity... I never actually felt that life was difficult at any point during my life, but it was, funny that I only know that now I look back…
Synopsis:
Alone Among Many by Spargo Postle - Paperback & eBook - A collection of contemporary, modern poetry that tend to have a lonely, isolated, sometimes haunted slant to them. This book tries to articulate to a reader who is in some way lonely that there are others out there and that it is ok to be who we are. In some areas the poems can be deep but the language used is as simple and pragmatic as is possible because the poems are simply thoughts (of mine) that yearn to connect with others. We can be lonely in the most crowded of places and among the most loving of families...
Excerpt:
We are lonely… (Copyright Spargo Postle)
We are the ones that shy away,
set ourselves adrift,
nearly apart from others,
the solitary many.
You may think,
you may wonder,
you may say,
we are one of you.
But we are not!
We stand at the edge of your life,
neither in nor out.
Rarely speaking,
just seeing and hearing.
Don’t say you are sad,
we know you don’t care.
Just remember that we,
we many,
we are lonely...
Giveaway Time:
Spargo is kind enough to offer 5 of our readers who leave a comment a chance to win a copy of Alone Among Many! Simply leave a comment with your email address to enter and I will announce the winners December 9th.
Thank you so much for taking time to chat with me today Spargo. It's been such a pleasure and I wish you much success in the future.
