writing and writers – Page 177 – don't confuse the narrator

incubus

He comes to her at dawn,
sweet-nothings her awake
as he nuzzles past her ear,
whispering his desire, telling
how her sweat draws him, how
he would risk his life to serenade her,
to tangle through her hair and kiss
the smooth curve of her neck.

I’m not exactly bubbling over with new ideas at the moment, so I’m looking back over old notebooks and reviewing pieces that I never thought sufficiently polished to submit for comment and critique, let alone for publication. So this is still a draft, but it amuses me, as does the idea of writing a poem to a mosquito. Of course, if you’ve interpreted it as meaning something different, that’s your prerogative as reader.

images

There are times I can see the appeal of Twitter for a writer, particularly for poets. I often ‘find’ an image that I know will probably one day find its way into a poem, but that I don’t have time to think through and connect to other things right away.

So, in 140 characters – or less, to make it easily re-tweetable – I could capture that image in a kind of tweet’ku.

There again, I already spend enough time updating the blog, so perhaps I’m better off posting such things here, particularly as I can include the photo directly. Like this:

Cob nuts in mob caps

gentle reader

My partner just brought me home a reader – what more could any writer want?!

Well, no, it’s an e-reader, and it’s only on loan, but it’s still enormously interesting. I quote from the manual, with my own reactions and thoughts in italics:

Note on use:
Gentle reader,

• Replacement or repair of a broken or scratched touch panel is not covered by the warranty.
So you can touch, but you mustn’t scratch, prod, niggle or pick. Mind you, even touching is fairly libertine for this day and age.
Continue reading “gentle reader”

see saw

Another BBC website headline that interests me:

There’s nothing actually wrong with it, of course. It heads a story that starts:

Serial killer franchise Saw has been named the most successful horror movie series by the Guinness World Records.

But the phrasing demonstrates the problems of trying to write headlines that fit into a measured space on a web page (or printed page, for that matter.)
Continue reading “see saw”

…and counting

It’s hard to build a readership for a personal blog, particularly one which has no single connecting theme. After all, “first person poetry, prose and opinion” is pretty much what everybody else is doing with their own blogs.

Which makes it all the more gratifying to find that Dont Confuse the Narrator has had as many visits this year as it had in the whole of 2009.

So: Thank you to regular visitors and Welcome to new visitors. If you have any suggestions about what you would like to see here, please use the contact page to let me know.