‘What’s He Building?’ by Tom Waits

I don’t know if anyone has ever proposed an analogue for the prose poem in the occasional spoken-word tracks you get on rock albums, but Tom Waits is a master of this resting-the-vocal-cords mode. He has said of this track, from Mule Variations(1999), that it was a tribute to the “word jazz” of Ken Nordine: “I wasn’t able to get it to fly as a song, so I just took the words and started saying them”. The result is an intimately creepy narration that wavers in and out of rhyming couplets, like the speaker of a Browning monologue gone to seed, revealing as much about his own paranoia as about the neighbour he is spying on: “What’s he building in there? I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not building a playhouse for the children”. I first heard it around 2001, when I briefly lived in the States, and its growling menace — delivered over a clanging soundscape of midnight DIY — seems prophetic of the domestic paranoia that would grip the country after 9/11. The way Waits stretches out the phrase “he used to have a consulting business in Indonesia” oozes bar-stool xenophobia. 

First released on the album Mule Variations, Anti-, 1999 and available here

‘Plight’ by Frances Leviston

Frances Leviston wrote one of my favourite books of British poetry of the last decade: Disinformation (2015). She hasn’t yet published another, but there has been a collection of stories — all about characters called Claire — written with the same descriptive acuity about the physical world, cunningly revealing the feelings that lie beneath placid surfaces. “Plight” depicts a young woman at the pinch point of a dangerously passive family dynamic, in which the male siblings — the eldest over-rational, the youngest over-impulsive — might be the Freudian superego and id, leaving Claire as the poor ego struggling for self-realisation in the middle. What lifts it all to another level is the way Leviston’s narration is interrupted by sensuous paragraphs on the history of felt as a textile, which seem to have come from Claire’s rejected “creative critical” Art History dissertation, and in which what is felt is also what is not said: “As you work it, the felt shrinks. Its edges turn wavy, ragged; it ripples and the dips fill up with foam. You think it’s ruined, and sometimes it is; but sometimes its only approaching its new form. You pour on more water to rinse the fulling suds away, and then, when it’s relatively clean, you stretch it out to dry on a great frame called a tenter, from which we get the phrase ‘to be on tenterhooks’, meaning ‘to be suspended’.”

First published in The Voice in My Ear, Jonathan Cape, 2020.

‘Art Doesn’t Own It’ by Will Harris

Prose poetry often gets rather meta towards the end, so I thought I’d end this Personal Anthology by nominating a text that is, literally, personal, in the sense that I am — sort of — one of its personae. Will Harris was our Poetry Fellow at UEA last year, and as part of his time here he gave a masterclass for the Poetry MA students, on a serene May evening, where he read from a prose work in progress and invited comment from the room. My contribution was to mention Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” — specifically, the bit where Benjamin compares a story from Herodotus to a seed that survives, dormant, for centuries, in an airtight pyramid. What preserves both story and seed, says Benjamin, is their dryness. My anonymous double in the retelling remembers it much more articulately than I did, though also doesn’t mention something I added — which is that Benjamin’s inspired simile of a seed surviving “for centuries” has been debunked. Does it matter, though? It’s a wonderful story about stories, as is this poetic essay, which is an elegant and reflective refashioning of an hour or so during which we kept a many-angled thought collectively alive (“this is the story we’re telling now, together”). These hours are why we have universities.

First published online in Too Little / Too Hard, issue 1, and available to read online here 

‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ by Herman Melville

This is an oft-anthologised story I know, but I still find the boldness and bravery of this mysterious scrivener as thrilling as when I first watched them play out—through the shocked eyes of our narrator, his disbelieving employer, who is of course fully tangled in the web of obligations and indignities that Bartleby so provocatively rejects. How fragile these systems really are, we might think. The motivations behind Bartleby’s refusals can be interpreted many ways, a mystery that’s part of the story’s pull, but we could do worse than keep him in mind through an era that continues to inspire dissent. All together now… we would prefer not to.

First published in Putnam’s Magazine, November-December 1853, and collected in The Piazza Tales, Dix & Edwards, 1856. Now widely available, including in Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories, Penguin Classics. Available online at Project Gutenberg

‘The Trojan War Museum’ by Ayse Papatya Bucak

An extraordinary story. The cover copy of Bucak’s collection (of which this is the title story) has this summary: “the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialise, and make sense of, generations of war.” A fragmented structure seems a good way of working with mythic material, and this story keeps those ancient gods suitably mighty and strange, while offering a unique empathetic perspective and crucial thread of humanity through a world of ongoing violence. A difficult read at the time of writing.

First published in Guernica, July 2019, and available to read here; collected in The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories, W. W. Norton, 2019

‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Angela Carter

What’s going on at the edges of the words in a Shakespeare play—or any great canonical text, for that matter? This story is like a guided tour of the strange truth behind the painted backdrop, the real characters underneath the pretend-poetry version, the waterlogged English wood sitting soggily beneath the theatrical pretence, the heart of darknesses (of patriarchy; of imperialism) at the play’s core. And yet it’s also a story of visions, that are poetic, and magic, and hilarious, and unknowable, in their own right.

First published in Black Venus, Chatto & Windus, 1985, and collected in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1995; Vintage, 2006

‘Words’ by A.L. Kennedy

I could have included any number of Kennedy’s short stories on this list but instead I am choosing to bend the remit a bit and mention Words: A One-Person Show, her solo comedy performance about language and love that I was lucky enough to see as a student. Kennedy is great onstage—as warm and witty and wise as the show itself—and it was an experience that helped me stay determined to keep working across the dual worlds of (fiction) writing and live performance. Give words the respect they are due and They. Will. Make. You. Shine.

First performed in 2009 and touring to various places across the UK and elsewhere with its final performance in Humboldt University, Berlin. The full text is reprinted in On Writing, Jonathan Cape, 2013

‘All At One Point’ by Italo Calvino

Most of this story takes place in the impossibly tiny cramped point that is pre-Big Bang existence, then suddenly bursts the desire to make pasta for everyone; and so, everything else must follow: the physics for the act of making must come into being; the chemicals and atoms of pasta have to pop into existence; there must be sunlight to ripen the wheat, so stars duly explode; even the concept of everyone has to become comprehensible, so matter must rush outwards to fill time and space. This life-affirming world-shaping desire to host and cook and gather is more gendered than I would prefer nowadays (it could easily be “friends, let’s have pasta!” rather than “boys, I’ll make you some pasta!”) but the humane philosophy at the core of this mind-expanding story is wonderful anyway and to read it is to be made happy.

First published in Italian in 1965 in Le cosmicomiche and in English in 1968 in Cosmicomics; reprinted in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin 2009

‘The Barnum Museum’ by Steven Millhauser

I love the impossibility of the place and the way its mysteries are narrated by a whole town. I don’t think you can read the story without wanting to visit the museum but its appeal goes deeper than that, I think. It’s a story about reading—it’s about going in, getting lost, exploring looking searching, letting yourself in for experiences, finding your way maybe, or perhaps never really knowing what the hell is going on but accepting the chance to wander through a hall of curios anyway, and with any luck accepting that maybe that’s the point. The story appears in Millhauser’s collection also called The Barnum Museum and it’s tempting to read it as a metaphor for the book as a whole, as a guide (or anti-guide) for any selection of wonders.

First published in Grand Street , Summer, 1987 and available to read via JSTOR here; collected in The Barnum Museum, Poseidon Press, 1990

‘The Advisability of Not Being Brought up in a Handbag: A Trivial Tragedy for Wonderful People (Fragment found between the St. James’s and Haymarket Theatres)’ by Ada Leverson

Who’s allowed to parody Oscar Wilde? Wilde wrote (in a letter to writer Walter Hamilton) that good parody needs “a light touch, and a fanciful treatment and, oddly enough, a love of the poet whom it caricatures” and he famously stated: “one’s disciples can parody one—nobody else.” Leverson had Wilde’s blessing and (imho) she remains the best. I’ve picked the Ernest parody for this list because it has some of my favourite lines but there’s not much in it—I also want to recommend ‘An Afternoon Party’ (available to read here) in which characters from a number of his works gather and chat.

(This is also my way of sneaking Wilde onto this list).

First published in Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 108, 2 March 1895. Available to read here

‘Humour, Genre & the One True Quest for a Missing Pillar’ by Shiv Ramdas

A tricksy fantasy labyrinth up to some very smart mischief. Part guidebook part purposeful obfuscation part playful agitation part scholarly article part absurdist adventure through a world of and about words, it’s a must-read for anyone interested in story structures, meta-textual pyrotechnics, interactive literary criticism, speculative architecture, genre thinking, jokes, doors, footnotes.

First published in Uncanny Magazine, 2021 and available to read online here

‘Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel’ by Shaenon K. Garrity

Borges’ concept of an infinite library remains inspirational to many and this story applies a rigorous-yet-playful SF-logic to ask “how might it work?” that gets great results. Garrity’s story is entertaining and smart and ultimately very moving, and the good news is, now this angle has been explored, there remains an infinite set of possibilities for anyone else to have a go.

(This is also my way of sneaking Borges onto this list).

First published in Strange Horizons Magazine, 2011, and available to read online here