re-drafting – Page 4 – don't confuse the narrator

writing it slow

Years ago, I wrote a long and rambling free verse poem that started “My mother makes sloe gin”. It was a runner up in a poetry competition, but despite the minor success, I was aware that it was rather flabby; I think I’ve been trying to force it into some kind of form for near on a decade.

That said, I had completely forgotten this version, which I think must have been written some time last year for a sonnet competition and abandoned when it wouldn’t conform to the formal constraints. Since the sloe trees are in full bloom this weekend, it seems a good time to post it:
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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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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.

voices from the past **

My past has caught me up: this afternoon
I checked my e-mail, as I always do,
and found a message from an old flame who
I hadn’t seen since school. Out of the blue
a bolt that sends me tumbling through the years
to adolescent angst and teenage tears,
to poems scrawled in chalk while classmates jeer
and playground fights that fade when Sir appears.
I was his One True Love, there’d be no other.
At sixteen I was far too young: I fled.
But now he’s tracked me down; who needs the men
from Pinkerton’s when Google is your friend?
(Though Google’s failed me time and time again
in my attempts to trace his younger brother.)

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grey’ku

This morning, I waited in the half-light for a bus that finally arrived 40 minutes late: there was no one about, and the only noise was the rain, an occasional car and a few birds. It gave me plenty of time to think, though it was too wet to get a notebook out to try and capture any of the ideas.

(I suppose I could record memos on my phone, but how you’re supposed to skim through an audio file later, I don’t know.)

Mind you, I actually believe that writing a thought down too soon can ‘fix’ it before it is ready, and I may carry a phrase or image round in my head for days or weeks, occasionally even years, before I finally anchor it to the page.
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