Category: narrators

the narrator and me

There is a reason this blog is called “Don’t confuse the narrator”.

I post a lot of first person poetry, anecdotes and general prose, but I don’t guarantee the veracity of any of it. My world overlaps, and occasionally coincides with, the world described in my writing, but it is not the same world, and the narrator and I are not the same person.

Which makes this advert – which crops up regularly on my WordPress dashboard – more than a little ironic:

suugestion to buy domain dontconfusethenarrator-dot-me

Perhaps if the domain on offer was:
dontconfusethenarrator.possiblysomebodyelseentirely, it might be more tempting.

more home thoughts

tree with hanging roots, Alicante
putting down roots?

The topics of home and place cropped up several times during my brief trip south.

As I said yesterday, for me – and for several other writers there – “Where is home?” isn’t an easy question to answer.

In the discussion, someone rephrased it as, “Where would you want to be when you die?”. But, apart from the obvious suggestion of “somewhere else”, I can’t really see that it matters.

This is not meant to be a blog about me, so it seems slightly strange to be talking about personal information; I’m including it, though, because ‘place’ is very important to a lot of my writing, and the phrase poetry of place is one that crops up a lot on writing workshop and course listings.
Continue reading “more home thoughts”

more perseids

moon and cloud

One of the poems I submitted to the South Bank Poetry Magazine competition earlier this year was Getting Around on the Underground, a sort of reminiscence of romantic and risqué encounters around London by a female narrator.

Somewhere amid the rambling it contains the following:

                        […]the time we sneaked into St James’s Park
and lay at 2 a.m. in August dark, spaced out on meteor scatter,
cool grass at our backs, the universe heavy above us.[…]

Of course that scene was inspired by the memory I mentioned yesterday of watching the Perseids in Battersea Park back in the early Eighties.
Continue reading “more perseids”

‘genderally’ speaking

I mentioned two survey questions last week, which asked about reasons for reading and reasons for writing poetry. At the time, I didn’t say who was carrying out the survey, as I wasn’t sure it was relevant. But what is a survey without results? And now the results have been published, and they raise further points for discussion.

So I’d better go ahead and say that the survey was sent out by Mslexia, which is published with the tagline “the magazine for women who write”.
Continue reading “‘genderally’ speaking”

a ‘fuller’ understanding

I have finally had time to read the copy of the TLS that I bought over a month ago. There’s a piece entitled The brick-wall moment – What is poetry about? And other puzzles, which appears in a section labelled ‘Commentary’.

I’m not sure I’d have read it with quite the same attitude if I’d realised it was an edited extract from a book, but it was a lot more interesting than the formal review in the Independent of Who is Ozymandias? And other puzzles in poetry by John Fuller.
Continue reading “a ‘fuller’ understanding”