poem – Page 72 – don't confuse the narrator

of shoe-cleaning and elephants

I’ve been back in the DCTN archives discussing narrators – first person and third person – and what’s ‘real’ in my poetry, and have just written that the inspiration for a poem is almost certainly something in my life, but it isn’t necessarily something real that actually happened to me.

The trigger may be a personal experience, or it may be something I read or overhear, or something from today that I connect through to something half remembered from the past etc. I then take that kernel of an idea and extrapolate it and link it with other images and ideas to create a poem. The same trigger can inspire different poems in different styles or forms and with different protagonists, and the information that fleshes it out may come from personal experience, research or imagination.
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time to stand and stare

Travelling in the UK, I seem to be in headless chicken mode, with no time to sit and think or write, and yet achieving very little. Yesterday, though, I took a walk , as it was a glorious, slightly blustery, English summer afternoon.

I’ve commented before on the monkey puzzle in my mother’s village, but I’d never seen it with cones before:

fragments

Two fragments from old poems written about the same time, and clearly written at this time of year:

From The language of flowers:

[…] Shocking pink
petunias shout aloud,
while pompom marigolds,
in shades of summer, shine
like a myriad cartoon suns.

From In due season:

The hennaed heads of marigolds
rubberneck from roundabouts
and corporation window boxes shout
with yellow pansies.

day of reflection

Today is a day of reflection prior to the Spanish elections tomorrow, and the Junta Electoral has reminded us that on such days la ley prohibe todo acto de propaganda – the law bans the staging of any act of propaganda or electoral campaigning.

That has been ruled to include the recent protest gatherings – las manifestaciones y concentraciones – across the country, so I suppose I must keep quiet and reflect. (But without concentrating.)

blank mirror with books — "I stare at the ceiling/ I look very wise"

more school memories

Yesterday I said that one of my school teachers seemed to believe that pleasure taken in the sound and general impression of poetry was more important than the ability to understand and explain the details of each word and image. Forty years later, I am very glad that was her attitude.

Another memory from that time at school was the context – or, more accurately, lack of context – for the poetry we were studying.
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