2 thoughts on “September by Quentin S. Crisp”

  2. I have just realised that the dates of this book’s September do not match the days’ names themselves for September 2016 when I had set myself the pleasurable or anguished task of reading and reviewing this diary poem in a real-time day by day process. So I started reading it today and couldn’t put it down.
    In one fell sitting. The poem flows sweetly in enjambement about some less sweet existential and writerly and personal matters in South-Eastish London, but sweet, too. I had honest pangs that I was tapping this book, to extend my life, perhaps forever. You heard it here first. My dreamcatching reviews are a sort of vampiric supping of synchronicities and serendipities, the shards of random truth and fiction, untying the Ligottian knot, and this book has fed me more years than many others that I have similarly dreamcaught. It is life seen through tea-stained net curtains. It is this. It is that. It is easy to digest, but will I find it eventually difficult to expel? Death, too. And I hope the author or publisher does not mind me quoting one whole stanza out of many stanzas…
    “Literature’s function
    Is twofold. First to keep from
    Dying. Second, to
    Learn to die. Whatever I
    Write, I won’t keep from dying    .”
    But that last bit does not apply to whatever I READ, I’d suggest, having now seen a sudden Erithian gap in the curtain.

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