Category: writing and writers

house of cards

The second image that I wanted to talk about from my conversation with the poet Joan Margarit dealt with the writing process. (See yesterday’s post for the first.)

Joan described how the poet often writes early drafts of a poem to include more than is needed. We cram stuff in just to see if it fits. Subsequent drafts entail removing bits carefully, like pulling out cards one by one from a card house.

When the structure comes tumbling down, you know you’ve found the point at which you should have stopped.
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new every reading

Some years ago, I spent a very pleasant morning in a bar in Madrid talking to Joan Margarit, the Catalán poet. There are two particular images he used in the conversation that I remember. (Note that it was some eight years ago, we were speaking in Spanish, and I no longer have the notes I made at the time. So, the following is my take on what he said rather than direct quotation.)

Joan described poetry as being like a musical score that the poet writes; and he described the reader as the musician who then “interprets” the piece. Continue reading “new every reading”

back to the narrator

It’s been a while since I mentioned poets and narrators on the blog, but Google has prompted me to return to this hobby horse of mine as it seems that the ad selector is just as likely as the novice reader to confuse the writer with the narrator of a poem.

I’ve been looking through some old emails and found one a friend sent me a while back with a poem in it for me to comment on. The poem contained the phrase “slipped disc”.
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parenthetical pedantry

The more I read on-line, the more I think the mathematicians have it right. The meaning of 4+3*6 is perfectly well defined. You have to do the multiplication first.

If you want to force the addition to be be done first, you just slip in some parentheses: (4+3)*6.

Sadly, text isn’t like that. And with the internet encouraging writing by all and sundry, and forcing hurried writing by those who should know better, it’s easy to produce potentially ambiguous statements like this, from a piece about the need to encourage social inclusion by reading, on the London Book Fair site:

Not only are those who read less likely to be divorced, but they are less likely to smoke and be unemployed

My original reading of the first phrase parsed “those who read less” as a unit, and the phrase apparently claimed members of this group were “likely to be divorced”.
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competitions, compensation and closure

I had a friend who used to say that until a poem was published, it wasn’t complete.

I’m not sure whether he felt that once the poem had been accepted and approved by an editor it was fixed and he could stop tinkering with it, or whether the purpose of a poem was to reach a readership which only publication would provide. Whatever the reason, in some way, publication of the poem gave him ‘closure’.
Continue reading “competitions, compensation and closure”