rules & regulations – Page 2 – don't confuse the narrator

in the current circumstances

It’s been a long time since I wrote any poetry. But, despite the lack of inspiration, and the fact that it’s probably the longest “dry” spell I can remember, I don’t think I’d really thought I was suffering from writer’s block, nor was I particularly worried that the muse would never come back. It was just a question of waiting.

In the meantime, I’ve written some prose and a lot of articles and copy for clients and for my business. I’ve been working with some other writers on their books and have just brought out a new book for business professionals who want to become authors.

Still, though, there was no poetry.
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tangentially topical

The new General Data Protection Regulation came into force in the EU yesterday and the topic of security – albeit cyber security – has been in most people’s minds, which makes the photo at least slightly apposite.

The poem – written in Spain seven or eight years ago – is a repost, but it’s the best fit for the photograph – taken recently in England:

Camaraderie

In the greystone shadow
of the old jail, three men share
smokes and anecdotes. Two
wear drab and polished black,
the third raises his cigarette
between cupped hands.
Metal glints at his wrists.

smoke gets in your eyes

Yesterday, when I commented that at this time of year the air is full of a mixture of mist, cloud and bonfire smoke, I forgot two other factors that fog the village skies.

First of all, many of the older houses in the area rely on log fires for heating and their chimneys are belching smoke before the sun is up.

Then there’s the smoke from cigarettes and cigars. When I moved to Spain, the smell of cigarette smoke shocked me; I’ve just found this in an article I wrote about Madrid nearly ten years ago:

[cigarette smoke] drapes itself around you like an over-friendly drunk in bars; it shares your table uninvited in restaurants

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half found

First of all a picture of a spray of lilac. Because it’s April and it’s about time there were lilacs.

And now some talk of poetry. Because it’s April and even if I’m not managing a poem a day, I am trying to focus a bit more than I sometimes do.

I posted a ‘found poem’ in Spanish a few days ago (yesterday’s poem) along with an unsatisfactory translation into English. In fact the bus station notice about ‘security recommendations’ that the text was taken from used to be much longer and much more detailed. It had caught my attention in the past and I found an old copy of the complete version in my notebook.

This time I have taken more liberties with the ‘translation’, although none of the ideas in the poem are entirely mine: they all come from the Spanish original.
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eternal questions

I have been struggling with line breaks in my poetry for years. Even so, I am a bit taken aback by a friend’s email promising me a copy of a text “which should definitively answer the question of ‘Why did you put the […] line break there!?'”

In my last post (on the present poetic) and in follow up comments, I have been pondering some of the reasons behind choosing to write in the present tense (a subject I intend to revisit soon).

In other posts about first-person narrators I have considered the question of the writer/narrator dichotomy and why I so often write in the first person if I am not writing about myself.
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