The second kind of nonsense I’m interested in is explored in my poems ‘With unction down the purple lane’ and ‘Down, Down and Down’. You might say that these poems make no sense at all, which is why I used to call them “utter nonsense” to distinguish them from the first kind.
When I wrote ‘The Shrimp and the Radiator’, I was thinking of Edward Lear. It was ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ that made me invent a mismatched duo, gloriously happy to live outside convention, but it was ‘There was an old man of Whitehaven’ that made me avoid a happy ending for my odd pair.
There’s a moving scene in Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil. O’Neil has just witnessed the birth of his first child. Alone in the hospital in the middle of the night, he makes calls to his relatives. Then he remembers his parents.
In the publishing world, the focus is often on the size of your audience. The more people buy your work, the more money you make. But there’s an alternative approach.
So one of the important things about biographies and autobiographies is that they claim to be true. But many works of fiction claim to be true as well. So how do we tell the difference?
