don't confuse the narrator

of death and celandines

The past week has been less than positive in many ways and, judging from the screenshot below, I’m not the only person to feel that way.

BBC headlines May 3 2013 - it's all about death

Of the headlines for the top ten most popular stories, five contain a variant of the word ‘death’.

Whether the local election results (stories 1 and 2) have anything to do with the BBC readers’ apparent morbid obsession, I don’t know.

Perhaps they’ve been unable to get through to the new NHS 111 service (story 10) and while waiting for their urgent but non-life-threatening health problems to be attended to they have felt the need to console themselves with reading how things could be worse.

The screenshot is from a couple of days ago (“thanks!” to the reader who sent it to me) and it suited this week’s aura of negativity.

I was beginning to feel things were never going to improve.
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clearing away the clouds

First kiss

It’s there in the air between them.

As hands sketch fragmented curves,
fingertips graze its surface.

They worry it with words,
map points along the borders.

Their tongues taste the edges
of possibility until they find its shape

in the space where their lips meet.

I came across an earlier draft of the above in a stack of papers I was about to throw away, but I can’t find any trace of it on my computer. I don’t think I’d deliberately discarded it, but it definitely needed work.

There’s still a way to go, but it’s given me something to think – and write – about.
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towers & translations

I still haven’t explored all the functions of my new digital camera, which means that I occasionally press the wrong button and change the settings by mistake. Suddenly, for example, I find I’ve taken a whole series of pictures of a stationary subject, like this set of the Houses of Parliament.

Frustrating as this is, it has made me start thinking again about the different versions of a poem that arise from the translation process.
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through the square window

The view while I waited for a bus yesterday evening was pretty, but the wooden bus shelter added new perspectives as each separate frame of the window offered a different story:

multi-frame bus-stop window looking out onto fields

verses and versions

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been re-visiting some old poems and re-drafting, revising and re-writing.

Some of the changes are substantial – whole stanzas, refurbished, renovated, knocked in together or removed completely. With changes like this it’s usually clear whether the result is an improvement.

Other changes, though, are less clear cut. I feel like Oscar Wilde when he said he’d been hard at work all day on a poem: “This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.”

I know that every little detail of a poem is important, but sometimes I feel that recognising the exact best version is like trying to find the prettiest flower in a patch like the one in the picture.