poetry – Page 118 – don't confuse the narrator

hazy thoughts

Yesterday I complained that the weather had taken a turn for the worse. In fact it turned out that really I was just up too early for my own good: once the sun got up, the wind blew most of the clouds away.

This reminded me of the times when we would be on holiday at the seaside when I was a child and the days almost always seemed to start off looking unpromising. I remember my parents assuring us it was “only a heat haze”, and it’s true it often seemed to burn off by middle morning.

It’s perfectly clear that yesterday’s cloud wasn’t a heat haze, but it got me thinking about weather, about how vocabulary is so often tied to location, and about how both weather and the words we use for it have personal connotations.
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collective cats

A warmth of newborn kittens;
a suckle of queen and her young;
a snooze of kittens in the sunshine;
a tumble of kittens in the violet patch;
a wheedle of felines in the morning
and a squabble at the feeding bowl;
a snuggle of siblings on the window sill;
a quarrel of cats in the moonlight.
(Da capo)

anthological exercise

I’m pretty sure I’ve read that Wordsworth wrote his poems while out walking, and that the rhythm of his strides helped him work out the metre. (Pause here for a link to Lynn Peters’ Why Dorothy Wordsworth is not as famous as her brother.)

I try and walk every day, even if it’s only down to the post office to check the mail box. I walk in the hope that I’ll get ideas to write about; I walk to iron out the pieces I am working on; and I walk for exercise. Yesterday was the first reasonable day for a while when I was free to take time for a longer walk, so I went round the reservoir.

I didn’t find any inspiration for new poems; I did, however, find a whole anthology of old favourites.
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writers, narrators, realism and reality

I’m a firm believer that poetry isn’t all about sunny situations and pleasant people, which is one reason why it’s particularly important to separate what’s said in the poem from the person who wrote it.

It is, however, often difficult to show a narrator’s inadequacies without the writer coming across as inadequate as a poet or as a person: if you create a convincingly weak character in your writing, it isn’t always clear that the weakness is intentional.
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love poetry

Well, it’s Valentine’s Day , so it seems a good day to post some love poetry. That concept always takes me back to something I read back in 2002 in an interview with Jenaro Talens in the El País literary supplement under the headline “Toda poesía es poesía de amor”. Although I don’t have the original newspaper any more, at the time I made a rough translation of the phrase that leapt out at me: