writing and writers – Page 174 – don't confuse the narrator

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:

“All poetry is love poetry. But not in the conventional romantic approach; rather as seen in the impulse of desire towards an otherness…”

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omnibus edition

More thoughts and words on buses. Starting with my own:

Estación de autobuses

The bus belches, wheezes, shifts
on its haunches and sighs: tired
of waiting for the passengers. They
kick their heels, scuff gravel, grind
cigarette stubs into the ground: tired
of waiting for the bus. The driver
toma su café; se toma
su tiempo.

But, as Flanders and Swann sang, “We like to drive in conveys, we’re most gregarious,” so to make this a proper omnibus edition it seems appropriate to add a few more links.
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nothing new

I haven’t written anything new for a while, but am pleased to have polished some old poems and I actually sent off a competition entry today, which is the first I’ve managed in many months. I’ve also recently applied for a place on a course, and offered a workshop for another course, so it’s not that I’m not thinking about poetry, just that I don’t seem to have any new ideas.

So, I was wondering what I could post, and glancing back over the recent blog entries I saw the one about el conductor que más habla del mundo. Continue reading “nothing new”

write, write and write again

Having acquired new book cases, I have been sorting out some of the many piles of paper that I have in my studio; while doing so, I came across two versions of a poem laboriously written out for a competition back when I was a child.

The earlier version is just six lines long and starts: