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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| A prompt should open a hundred different gates to a thousand different paths. |
| Edward Thomas The Daily Poem today called for us to write of a favourite poet, preferably in the style of that poet. Naturally, I thought of Dylan Thomas, the master of free verse, and attempted a little something in as close as I can get to his style. But then I thought of the other Thomas, the one no one has ever heard of, that Edward Thomas who was encouraged by Robert Frost to turn his hand to poetry. At the time I discovered him, his work was as though tailor-made for me, angst-ridden teenager that I was, and I recognised a kindred spirit immediately. In the first poem of his that I read, The Unknown Bird, I fell under his spell of sad, introspective emotion. The other boys laughed at the words “La-la-la,” but I discerned more than just the sound. Thomas was young when he wrote his poems and he was killed in the Great War, just another statistic of the slaughter on the western front. Never a war poet (he had not the anger and resentment of poets like Sassoon or Graves), he is worth remembering even so. It was death that he was preparing for and it runs like a prophetic thread through all his poetry. Good on yer, Edward. Here’s a link to that poem, The Unknown Bird: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57206/the-unknown-bird Word Count: 231 |
| The greatness of a poet is all in your response to him. |
| Not Another Blog Post Well, it is and it isn’t. Obviously, it’s a blog post because it sits where blog posts go and has its own number that identifies it with the rest of the blog. But it isn’t really a blog post because its sole purpose is to crow about the fact that I’ve written a poem for no other reason than I wanted to. I debated what to do with it - whether to use it as a blog post and, hopefully (oh the optimism of youth), to garner a few more readers as a result, or to face the fact that blog posts have a very short life span and that it would be better to make it an item in the poetry folder. In the end, as you can see, I decided to do both. So, if you want to read the thing (and, after all, who wouldn’t?), the link to it follows:
Word Count: 152 |
| Norway and Other Matters I awoke this morning with thoughts of poetry running through my mind. Not thoughts about poetry, but actual lines, words and phrases, gluing themselves together into poetic shapes and working their way to a complete poem. Or several poems - it hadn’t developed far enough for that to become clear yet. It suddenly struck me. This never used to happen to me. In the past, I would wake up and my head would be filled with stories or solutions to problems I was having with the development of some tale or other. But never poetry. This was relatively new. With seventy (well, say fifty-fivish - I wasn’t interested in poetry until the age of about fifteen) years of having some form of relationship to poetry behind me, whether writing it, attempting to write it or just simply ignoring it, it is only recently that it has started to bother me at night. It’s as if poetry has been quietly bubbling away in my unconscious mind, like some weird witch’s brew, never making itself open to my awareness until it was ready. And ready it appears to be. I am thinking and writing better poetry than I have ever done before. I can say that as a dispassionate observation without fear of contradiction, since this is my blog and here my word is law. Some of the stuff I’ve written lately, especially the poems written purely from inspiration and not for a contest in WdC, is very good. Of course, you don’t understand how hard it is for me to say that, even here in the confines of a document that very few ever read. My Englishness is appalled that I should make such an inflated claim and jabbers away in the background, insisting that I tone it down. But I must resist since I’m trying to make a point here. You see, it’s this realisation of what my brain is doing that forces me to the conclusion that it’s not just WdC’s influence that has brought about this change. Yes, the contests, the prompts and the spurs to write have played their part in giving me the necessary practice to sharpen the basic poetry skills. But the thinking that goes on, this involuntary playing with poetic constructions and allowing poems to develop for no apparent reason in my brain, this is something entirely different. It has to be the witch’s brew thing. Recently, my wife said to me that she thinks that poetry will prove more important to me than prose. At first, that filled me with horror. One does not allow ambitions to be deflected overnight. But time has made me realise that she may have been right. Certainly, this blog post is the first bit of prose that has forced itself on me for a long time - it’s all been artificial pressure from outside otherwise. And what’s it about? Poetry, of course. Seems that I might as well resign myself to this poetry jag after all. It’s a bit of a bugger that there’s no money in poems but I doubt I was ever going to make much from anything I write anyway. And so we arrive at the other thought I woke up with this morning. And that’s about Norway, as promised in the title. The fact is that Norway is like skin. It’s Norway’s coastline, you see. With all those fjords and inlets and islands and suchlike, Norway has a length of coastline that is far out of proportion to its land area. So long is its coastline that, if we were to straighten it out into a simple shape, it would encompass an area probably big enough to contain the entire continent of Africa. And it’s the same with skin. Were we to iron out all the wrinkles and ins and outs and complications and crooks and nannies (this is the last time I’m going to explain any of these games that my mind plays with words - in future you’ll just have to slow down, work it out or remain puzzled - crooks and nannies, nooks and crannies, okay?), we would probably end up with a bag big enough to contain several elephants. And elephants, of course, have such wrinkled skin that, if we straighten them out, we could carry a few whales in them. Which is all just to prove that I am just as capable of thinking up nonsense as the next man. My oddities may occasionally prove useful in providing the impetus to creation but they are also the source of some of the most ridiculous things known to mankind. Truly, we are a piece of work and all the rest of that superb Shakespeare quotation from Hamlet. But I kinda like Hair’s version: What a piece of work is man How noble in reason How infinite in faculties In form and moving how express and admirable In action how like an angel In apprehension how like a god The beauty of the world The paragon of animals I have of late But wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth This goodly frame The earth seems to me a sterile promontory This most excellent canopy The air look you This brave o'erhanging firmament This majestical roof Fretted with golden fire Why it appears no other thing to me Than a foul and pestilent congregation Of vapors What a piece of work is man How noble in reason. Word Count: 903 |
| I heard that Google is bringing out a new version of Chromebook designed especially for witches. It'll be called Cronebook. |
| Shut Down and Reboot Those who say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result, never fixed a computer in their lives. |
| Of Lists and Buckets I never bothered with bucket lists - I just bought the first bucket I saw and left it at that. Word Count: 19 |
| Sociopath Explained A couple of days ago, I told another member of WdC that I didn’t agree with explaining art of any kind. If a piece requires that someone stand next to it, pointing out meaning and hidden subtleties, then it isn’t art. If the piece cannot stand alone, then who will speak up for it when this generation is dead and forgotten? It becomes dumb, without possibility of speaking to us. Call it karma or whatever you will, today I wrote something that urges me to add a note to explain it, insisting that they will miss its clever nuances. I resisted its blandishments but, moments before submitting it to the appropriate contest, I added just a pointer, a signpost about where to look. My note said this: punctuation or lack of it intended. But the poem still nags at me for a fuller exposition. The darn thing is tiny (it was written for the 24 Syllables Contest) but its meaning hinges on an important point that is too easily missed. I figure that here, in my blog that no one reads, it is safe to explain in full. Here’s the poem: Sociopath You need catharsis to empty the emotion from the depths within the cold voice responds, “And then?” The crux is that middle line, “from the depths within.” It is deliberately ambiguous, being able to be read, “to empty the emotions from the depths within,” or “from the depths within the cold voice responds.” Both meanings are intended, so the central line does the work of two, initially assisting what has gone before but then, like an optical illusion, joining forces with what follows to create an entirely new perspective. All that is needed to swap between the two meanings is a full stop (period) after “within.” But then, to preserve the ambiguity, the stop would have to flash on and off like a failing neon sign. I could, of course just repeat the line to make its dual nature quite clear, but that ignores the limitation of 24 syllables. In the end I am drawn to do exactly what I have done - to remove punctuation apart from an initial capital, a comma and the spoken question at the end. They won’t get it, I know. But principle dictates that I keep silent on the matter, apart from my hint about punctuation. It’s a pity in a way, since I’m beginning to quite like the little thing. Word Count: 408 |
| A Trident of Laws When I was young and had just half a novel and a collection of pretty awful poems behind me, I decided that no one had anything worth writing about until they were at least forty years old. This did not stop me from trying but it proved pretty true in my case - everything up to that age was basically teenage angst and getting rid of ideas that were as practical as a cardboard swimsuit. In my early twenties, I had a friend who was studying for his master’s degree in English Literature. He wrote a lot of poetry, even more than I did, and his stuff was beautifully constructed and polished, like a favourite old car lovingly attended to. I was less aware of it then but now, on looking back, I realise that the great weakness of his writing was that he didn’t really have anything to say. His poems were gorgeous constructions of delightful words but they contained nothing. I think my theory on writing and age was a subconscious recognition of this. At the same time, I had another friend, an artist aged just over forty. He was known as the finest painter in the country where we lived and his technique was indeed phenomenal. He had the ability to paint anything he could imagine. I understood this because I was in the last throes of trying to be the greatest painter in the world. It was partly my inability to reproduce the paintings in my head that stopped me in my ridiculous ambition and enabled me to turn to writing. There was a problem, however. Although my artist friend produced some brilliantly executed stuff, it was empty and pointless. He once admitted to me that his latest painting was based on an idea from a book his wife was reading. When your ideas are second- or third-hand, it’s time to find out what’s wrong. Everything became clear to me when the guy showed me some of the paintings from his youth. They were messy, imprecise and careless in style, but showed enormous passion and depth of emotion. They were far, far better than anything he had done in the last ten years and I suspect that he knew it. Certainly, he was aware that he had controlled his creative urges during that period while he schooled himself in technique. He wanted to be able to paint absolutely anything and was prepared to sacrifice the time to gain that ability. The trouble was, by the time he got there, he had forgotten what he wanted to say. It became clear that the road ahead was like a narrow path between two precipices - what mountain climbers call an arête. On the one side I should forget writing anything worthwhile until I was much older and, on the other, I should not chase after technique but allow it to come naturally through experience. To some extent, at least, I have kept to this intent. For many years I wrote very little creatively, although it has always been impossible to stop myself honing whatever writing I was doing, even business letters and notes to myself. They told me this blog should be informal and not to bother too much about grammar and spelling. Hah, as if that were possible. I suppose that I could say that I’m old enough now to have a few things to say. A very good internet friend of mine taught me that memory is a wonderfully rich mine of stories that others find interesting (to us, they’re just what happened). And the silly philosophies of youth are long buried in the long march through reality. At the same time, I have not been swayed to acquire technique and I still have no idea what the various names for poetic meter mean. One has to stay at least a little wild or become tamed and boring. And now, at the age of seventy-two, I find there’s another matter to be attended to. I learned it in the course of writing The Gabbler’s Testament twenty years ago but only recently have I understood it in relation to my other “laws.” There is a chapter in that book that required me to bare my soul in a way that I had never done before (it also required me to write the longest sentence known to mankind but that’s another story). It was pain to write it but resulted in the best chapter in the book. So I have a trident of laws for writing: leave it until you’re ancient and have something to say (check), don’t go running after perfect technique (check) and your heart, your deepest secrets, are where the best stories are (well, that one’s being checked). You’ll just have to read me if you want to find out if it all works. Word Count: 807 |
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