verse – Page 3 – don't confuse the narrator

newsworthy

clarin-headline — clarin.com headline: Es noticia: ¡hay alguien que vive de la poesía!

I’ve often wondered whether there are places more or less conducive to life as a poet.

In the film El lado oscuro del corazón, the poet Oliveiro sells his poems on the street corners of Buenos Aires, and he does so with a lot more panache than the ragged beggars who hand out photocopied scraps of hand-written verse in the Madrid metro and from bar to bar around the Spanish capital.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, to find that it’s possible to make a living from poetry in la ciudad porteña, although, even there, it seems that doing so is sufficiently surprising that it rates a headline.
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non-existent blue

giant fennel plants silhouetted against blue sky and clouds

Adaptation

I could show you a planet where creatures
walk upright on two legs. Seeing
a non-existent blue, they name it sky, and stretch
towards stale light in ignorance. Oblivious
to gravity which anchors them, they carve
each step through swirling gas as if a vacuum
and breathe in toxins unaware. Insular
as paramecia, they can’t converse
with any of the other untold tenant species
of their world. They know no other life.

(I don’t know when I wrote this, but it turned up recently among a set of pieces I’ve been trying to organise. It doesn’t seem to belong there, so perhaps it belongs here.)

doggerel

Looking through my files for a poem with a dog in it to go with this photo, I am slightly surprised just how few there seem to be. There are plenty of cats. And then there are dog ends and dog shit, dog-tooth waistcoats and quite a bit of barking, but very few actual dogs.
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old poetry

It’s a bit disheartening to go away for a few days hoping to find new ideas only to realise that you have already written poems that correspond to almost everything you see. Sadly, that was what happened to me this week. Then again, it gives me an excuse to re-visit some older pieces.

Khayyam, again, and disappearing words

apple blossom — "...under the apple bough"

Yesterday’s post reminded me of a glosa – posted below – but then led me on in leaps and bounds to thinking about vocabulary. Specifically, about the word ‘bough’: when, and how, did I learn it?

It’s not exactly the sort of word that crops up in childhood conversation, so I’m pretty sure I must have read it. Which could either have been in a story or in a poem. Or, I suppose, at Christmas, when we “deck[ed] the halls with boughs of holly”. Perhaps that’s the most likely, as would explain how I learned to pronounce it, too.

The word ‘bough’ probably crops up in plenty of older stories and poems, but how much new writing contains such words?
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