'A buttercup is a flower that grows in the wrong place.'

I’ve begun to write a ‘Biography of a Buttercup’. What on earth is that you may ask? I’m not quite sure; I’m experimenting. The nature of experiment is not to know quite what it is you are doing. I’m mainly following an image, and the image has emerged from an older piece of writing about Ophelia. Hamlet has just crept in (that was bound to happen). But I’m not satisfied with it yet and it may turn out to be just another old ghost I’m waving at in passing.

I’ve been teaching Hamlet — everything is related — which brings me to this line above. Buttercups are categorised as weeds, as are many pretty flowers, and a weed is categorised as a flower that grows in the wrong place. My Ophelia piece is a balladic voice-piece which is reaching for statements about the experience of being discarded:

Look out upon the world: there are weeds and there are roses.

Ophelia is perhaps Shakespeare’s most painfully discarded character. That’s the emotion I’m stuck on. She isn’t in the right emotional category for Hamlet’s intense preoccupation with himself and his own biography, a story that has been harshly interrupted by the death of his father and the ascension of Claudius.

The plant world is full of categories, following the original Linnaean taxonomical system; the world of writing and publishing has its own rigid categories and it’s a struggle to push against these and allow yourself to experiment. Ideally, you don’t want to have to worry too much about a few abandoned forms along the way. You want to permit writing for writing’s sake and wander down whatever whimsical routes your imagination intuits as you go looking for new ground and a new vocabulary. From the vocabulary emerges the imagery and from the imagery the voice which is your dynamo.

So today I’ve started my buttercup biography which is a piece of whimsy written in free verse form but with darker hints of the subterranean world of my Ophelia ballad - a burial narrative - and Shakespeare’s Hamlet - another burial narrative. So I have two forms of ghost trailing me. What mainly preoccupies me is the subterranean world of plant roots, those creeping networks of translucent tubes that allow buttercups to run havoc over pastures and meadows as ranunculus repens. I see and sense the furious energy below ground of plants fighting to keep their nodal territories. There is an inter-state battle going on down there, equivalent to the fury in Hamlet’s mind when Claudius shows up as New King and Father. Not at all the genealogy that Hamlet has mapped out. I’m thinking about roots and deracination and aborted networks of kith and kin; interrupted families and genuses (or genera if you want to get fancy).

My buttercup biography is still too preoccupied with the silliness of those long latin words for very ordinary flowers: ranunculus, which sounds like something rather nasty running from your nose. Not at all suitable for a golden-orbed flower emitting golden dust: the lustrous buttercup. But, as it turns out, there are rather nasty things going on beneath that yellow sheen. The buttercup is poisonous to humans and animals; sometimes even a hint of that golden dust can cause a nasty reaction on the skin. Poison is of course what Hamlet rather suspects ends his father’s life; poison in the ear administered by that nasty puffed-up man, Claudius. Perhaps it was a ranunculus repens dressed up as a king that did him in.