Category: writing and writers

newsworthy

clarin.com headline: Es noticia: ¡hay alguien que vive de la poesía!

I’ve often wondered whether there are places more or less conducive to life as a poet.

In the film El lado oscuro del corazón, the poet Oliveiro sells his poems on the street corners of Buenos Aires, and he does so with a lot more panache than the ragged beggars who hand out photocopied scraps of hand-written verse in the Madrid metro and from bar to bar around the Spanish capital.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, to find that it’s possible to make a living from poetry in la ciudad porteña, although, even there, it seems that doing so is sufficiently surprising that it rates a headline.
Continue reading “newsworthy”

non-existent blue

giant fennel plants silhouetted against blue sky and clouds

Adaptation

I could show you a planet where creatures
walk upright on two legs. Seeing
a non-existent blue, they name it sky, and stretch
towards stale light in ignorance. Oblivious
to gravity which anchors them, they carve
each step through swirling gas as if a vacuum
and breathe in toxins unaware. Insular
as paramecia, they can’t converse
with any of the other untold tenant species
of their world. They know no other life.

 

(I don’t know when I wrote this, but it turned up recently among a set of pieces I’ve been trying to organise. It doesn’t seem to belong there, so perhaps it belongs here.)

notes for a poem

I went for a walk beside a canal the other day and hope eventually to write a poem about the swans I saw there.

swan
Poems can take a long time to actually gel, though, so in the meantime, I’ll leave some preliminary notes here.
Continue reading “notes for a poem”

thinking

Once again, the poetry cogs in my brain don’t seem to be turning very fast.

sand dredger machinery close up
I wish I could believe that even when being unproductive my mind was as beautiful and as full of potential as the machinery in the photo.

misreading

full moon behind tree (winter)

I become more and more dependent on my glasses, but even when I am wearing them, letters dance on the page – and they do so even more when the text is on the screen.

The following sprang from a misreading of a perfectly normal expression:
 
 

Phrases of the moon

A single quotation mark
opens the discourse, which swells
to a full-mouthed ‘O’, then fades;
a silver comma follows, and then
silence.