While I was in the south, I managed to get an hour or so to walk along the marine parade at Alicante, which is as good an excuse as any to post this old piece, written in response to a challenge to write a favourite joke as a poem:
Continue reading “sea sounds”
progress
Hemmed in by mountains,
they built church spires –
antennas to speak to God. Now,
high-rise office blocks and flats
impede the signal.
(The village in the photo has grown enormously since I first visited seven or eight years ago. The pine on the left of the picture kindly obscures the crane perched up on the heights in the north, while the one on the right obscures the modern apartment blocks that remain unfinished to the south east, victims, apparently, of the crisis in the Spanish construction industry.)
more home thoughts
The topics of home and place cropped up several times during my brief trip south.
As I said yesterday, for me – and for several other writers there – “Where is home?” isn’t an easy question to answer.
In the discussion, someone rephrased it as, “Where would you want to be when you die?”. But, apart from the obvious suggestion of “somewhere else”, I can’t really see that it matters.
This is not meant to be a blog about me, so it seems slightly strange to be talking about personal information; I’m including it, though, because ‘place’ is very important to a lot of my writing, and the phrase poetry of place is one that crops up a lot on writing workshop and course listings.
Continue reading “more home thoughts”
home thoughts
I’ve been in the south of Spain for a couple of days, and have been talking to other writers down here.
It’s natural to want to put other people into some kind of context, so I wasn’t surprised when, shortly after I met her, one woman asked me “Where is home?”
Without much thought, I answered, “Spain.”
Then that began to rankle. It simply didn’t feel like the right answer.
Home. It’s not simply where you live, is it? It has to do with family and friends and a sense of belonging.
Continue reading “home thoughts”
poems not bombs
I wrote recently about the automatic responses from WordPress when you publish a blog post, and how one of my posts was greeted with:
In the comments to that post, it was suggested that perhaps this was intended as an imperative, but I assure you I am not responsible for the story that prompted this blog post.
The original headline that is referred to comes from hoy.es and reads: Una poesía provoca una alerta por bomba – ‘poem causes bomb alert’ – a news story from Badajoz earlier this week. If your Spanish is up to it, please go and read the post on quadernodenotas, if not, you’ll have to make do with my hurried – and somewhat ‘creative’ – summary.
Continue reading “poems not bombs”
don't confuse the narrator 