I’ve been looking through old files searching for poems that might be suitable to submit to a couple of competitions, as well as for a couple of projects that involve music, about which I will probably write at length at a later date.
Often, I have found numerous versions of the same poem and it isn’t always clear which is the latest, nor which is the best.
Continue reading “when to stop”
I said yesterday that when I lack inspiration I can always go back to old pieces and re-write them. There are, after all, hundreds of poems in my files, and I don’t suppose any of them is quite as good as it might be if I worked on it again now time has passed and I can be more objective.
Sometimes it’s a question of taking the same subject and looking at it from a new perspective; sometimes it’s changing the form – maybe seeing what happens if I remove all the line and stanza breaks and rejig, or maybe taking a free verse piece and putting it into a formal structure such as a sonnet.
Continue reading “know your onions”
Regular readers will probably have realised I rather like dandelions.
Well, not just dandelions, but catsears, hawksbeard and coltsfoot, and all the other wonderfully named, bright, yellow composite weeds with flowers like the radiant suns that dot the pages of children’s picture books.
I like the seed heads, too, with their downy parachutes counter-balanced by tiny elongated seeds.
Which probably explains why there are so many of them scattered across the pages of this blog. Perhaps not as many as there are on the wide green lawns in the park, but plenty, nonetheless.
Continue reading “perspectives”
Last Sunday I went for a walk in the sunshine to find some autumnal images, which resulted in the photographs of edible and inedible berries gathered together in the autumn berries post.
But there were also lots of flowers around, most of them in shades of pink and purple.
Continue reading “in the pink”
The problem with taking photos at a classic car gathering is not just the hordes of people who jostle your elbow or wander absent-mindedly into the frame.
Even when you get there before anyone else, there are far too many polished surfaces: you end up as the main feature of at least half the pictures you take, which might not be quite so bad if the surfaces didn’t act as distorting mirrors.
Another problem is that too many of the cars there are altogether too familiar and you start to reminisce…
Continue reading “squaring the circle”
don't confuse the narrator 