About the Literary Works of Philip Goddard

• The works are exploratory in various ways. Usually there is an underlying spiritual quest - away from the restrictions of religious belief and towards realization of one's true, spiritual, nature.
• A strong satirical element: many aspects of 'normal' everyday life (including sexual mores, taboos and people's blindness to their own personal responsibility) are held up to the light, often in entertaining and challenging ways, which will occasionally 'shock' the uptight and the squeamish.
• A pervading sense of humour, which is at times described by readers as 'black' or Monty-Pythonesque, which greatly eases the flow and avoids heaviness in the darker and more serious parts.
• A degree of dream-like surrealism. Most of the works flow rather like dreams. There is always a logic about that flow, however, so that the impossible easily becomes the simple everyday reality. However, the works don't degenerate into unreadable 'modernist' gibberish.
• A structure and development based on symphonic music compositional techniques rather than any particular literary tradition. In many of the poems and most of the short stories and all of the novels, ideas, images and even mere turns of phrase (the latter especially in the poetry) are treated like melodic motifs in a complex symphony. The sort of symphony I'm thinking of is like late Sibelius or Holmboe, in which the structure of the work is more a process of organic evolution and metamorphosis rather than the more traditional 'classical' structures. Particularly in the novels there are many cross-connections of ideas and images, which can imbue what would otherwise be trivial details with considerable power. The reader doesn't have to know about all this, of course; the point is that this approach to structure and internal cross-references means that each work has a much greater and more profound effect than the simple sum of the narrative elements, just as a good symphony is something far greater than the sum of its tunes. In fact in many respects I regard my 5 completed novels as being my first 5 symphonies.

What are the works about?

I have always winced when asked this question. I do not regard any of my works, literary or musical, as being 'about' one thing or another, because that is a very limiting view that excludes the broader, multidimensional nature of what I communicate in my works. They are about many, many things, and I know that underlying much of what I write - in my literary writings as much as my music - are powerful scenarios from previous lifetimes of mine. I have not been aware of these at the time of writing, but they nonetheless show through and direct the particular images and scenarios which emerge in my works.

The Poetry

This was the field in which I developed the compositional techniques which later flourished in short stories, novels and eventually symphonic music. The poetry has received both bouquets and (sometimes heated) brickbats. Notable people who wrote to me praising my work (when I was very amateurishly self-publishing my poetry in the mid-1970s) were Sir John Betjeman, Brian Patten and the late Danish composer Vagn Holmboe. Rightly or wrongly, some people have gone as far as claiming that in some of my poetry (and indeed fiction) I have invented an altogether new genre of literature.

Particular distinguishing features of the poetry, in addition to those noted above for all my literary works, are:

• Any resemblance to regular rhyming verses is rare, the rhythmic element certainly being present but usually having a flowing, evolving character, like melodic elements in a symphony. Some but by no means all people, however, have great difficulty picking up the intended rhythm from certain of the works when they read them from the printed page, but the rhythm becomes apparent to them when I read them out.
• The echoing and often metamorphosis of phrases or sounds from line to line (not necessarily adjacent lines) is a commonly used structural feature, which is more versatile and potentially more powerful in effect than regular end-of-line rhyming. Again it is more like what occurs with melodic elements in many symphonies.
• Sometimes considerable liberties are taken with the English language. Phrases are often telescoped into one another; with various puns and multiple meanings and occasionally a feel of a sort of pidgin English. Despite this, the works are not really of the inaccessible 'modernistic' type.
• For the most part, these poems are of high-energy, high-profile character (a few could even be described as volcanic), in marked contrast with the hushed and precious nature of so much popular poetry. They are generally cosmic and universal rather than intimate in their view, and were written not to please poets or poetry groups, but to touch the hearts and souls of people and play some part in opening new horizons of consciousness for them.
• The subject matter of certain of the poems is particularly strong, occasionally touching on matters about which some people get very hot under the collar - especially as they expect poetry to be more or less 'nice'. You have been warned! The purpose of including occasional taboo subject matter here is compassion, and therefore I am totally unrepentant about it. Complainants merely demonstrate the very sort of inhuman unawareness that my work seeks to counter.
• That there is often a slight rough-edgedness in the feel of my poetry doesn't necessarily have anything to do with lack of craftsmanship. There are many poets who turn out marvellously crafted pieces - much slicker than mine - but very often if you look carefully at what they are communicating, the strongest part of their message is 'look what a clever poet I am!', which to me is quite a turn-off and indeed in my view is a serious squandering of their talent. With my 'organic' approach, I allow the potentialities of the initial idea(s) to determine the form of each piece, rather than any preconceived notion of what a poem should be like. There is thus always a sense of treading dangerously, breaking out into the unknown with directness and even urgency. In the same way, narrow minds have compared the music of Beethoven or Sibelius unfavourably against that of Haydn, Mozart and their various soundalikes, not understanding that a more outward-looking and exploratory approach can produce tremendous masterpieces despite and indeed sometimes partly because of the apparent flaws that are inherent in that modus operandi.