readers – Page 2 – don't confuse the narrator

motivation II

The survey I mentioned yesterday also had a question that asked “What is most likely to motivate you to READ a poem?” It gave the following list of possible reasons, from which you were allowed to choose up to three:

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.
Continue reading “of shoe-cleaning and elephants”

small delights

After a frustrating meeting yesterday, I called in unannounced at the office where I worked briefly a couple of years ago. I was surprised to be greeted by one ex-colleague with “I was going to call you!” We had never been close while I was there, and our only contact had been through work, but her next sentence explained, “I bought one of your books.”

Not wanting to get my hopes up, I asked which one. (There is only one that is really mine, as the others are translations. I’m pleased to have my name on them, but it isn’t quite the same.)

“Pompas!”