The Incomplete Tim Key. Tim Key

       INTRODUCTION

      Poetry, paperback. Paperback, poetry. They sound nice next to one another, don’t they? The words ‘poetry’ and ‘paperback’. Like ‘cherries’ and ‘jam’. They make a merry couple.

      And when the idea first came about to commit my poetry to print I have to say I dreamt immediately of the finished book being in paperback. There is a certain beauty, a timelessness about paperback books. I remember my father sitting me down and telling me tales of his paperback copy of Ted Hughes poetry. He’d go watery-eyed as he reminisced about long, hot summer’s days in the late 1950s cycling around the Fens with a slim copy of Hughes’s efforts tucked into the inside pocket of his blazer. The sun on his back, the wind in his hair, whizzing down country lanes, and occasionally stopping, breathless and exhilarated, and leaning against a tree.

      Miles away from any civilisation and years away from things like Channel 4 or The Internet, the boughs of some docile oak splooshing him into shade, my father would pull his flask from his satchel, pour himself a cool squash and set about Hughes like a maniac. Then, once he was done, it would be a case of flask back into satchel, paperback back into pocket, backside back onto saddle, plimsoll back onto pedal and away. Back home to mother.

      And that was how it was.

      Poets spinning their yarns, humans – like my father – enjoying their words. But it wasn’t just their words. No, it was also the format that my father and his contemporaries were beguiled by. They were in love with the wiles of the paperback. The softness, I suppose. The yield that the paperback brings to the table. The give. That’s what my father talks about the most. He’ll sit there in floods these days, remembering how he could bend his Hughes clean in half. ‘The give,’ he’ll sob. ‘I appreciated the give.’

      So, when I originally put together this compilation of poems and thoughts in 2011, I had sky-high hopes that it, too, would be paperback. And you can imagine it was a little difficult to take when I was told my poems were going to be slung into a hardback. Of course, my publisher at the time was a lovely man and I don’t blame him for it. His name was Nick and I can honestly say I have never enjoyed a man’s company as much as I did Nick’s. We went for maybe two full English breakfasts and something in the region of five coffees over the course of our poet/publisher relationship. But the fact was he was a slave to his industry. The situation was that there was pressure to make this thing a hardback. That was how it was gonna be and we just had to wear it. We had to, in his words, ‘go hard first’ and we also had to, again in his words, ‘suck it up’.

      But I didn’t want it to be a hardback. So for me it was a hammer blow.

      I hate hardbacks. Big, cumbersome old sods. They piss me off no end. I can’t get inside the mindset of someone who likes hardbacks. It’s like these pricks who drive around on tractors or wear armour. Why would you do that? They have no place in 21st Century Britain in my honest opinion. I don’t know what irks me the most, the fact that the first thirty feet of most bookshops is dominated by those bulky great artefacts, or the fact that there are twats out there buying them. Anyhow, I put all this in an email to Nick and he wrote back reiterating that that would be how it would be and asking me to explain what I meant about the armour thing.

      And so it was. We were going hard. And I compiled it. And Dave designed it. And someone whose name I don’t know printed it all out, and then some absolute bastards glued hard bits all round it and it went into the shops. And that would have been where you saw it last. You probably picked it up, you might have leafed through it, you will have become angry at its weight and awkwardness and you will have slid it back into its position between Keats and Kipling. After that, God knows, maybe you will have waddled to the cookery section; leafed through an Oliver.

      Either way, that was where the first chapter ended. The hardback phase. I am looking at one of those books now. It is on the coffee table in my Airbnb. A big, heavy, rancid piece of work. I push it around the table with my heel. My face is on the cover. I look down at my face. My face peers back up at me. It’s four years down the line. I’m moving on.

      From nowhere, when it seemed for all the world that a paperback would never emerge from the hardback’s grim shadow, a lady by the name of Jenny stepped up and pulled the fat out of the fire. Smart and energetic, this Jenny has done the impossible. She has outwitted the book industry. She’s sent the right emails to the right people and she’s nodded at the right times and she’s winked at the right times and she has been a trooper. And, as a result of all of this, she has, from nowhere, magicked a paperback out of her arse!

      And so here we are. Or rather here you are. Lucky enough to be clutching something svelte. In your hands are all the poems from the hardback, plus three new ones that I have eked out of my quill and dripped into the manuscript over the past three years, and all of it contained in this featherweight tome. This giving, yielding volume. This paperback.