Fragmentations and Acrostics

I don't write enough about the same things. There are too many tangents - at least as many as there are on the average circle and that is quite a lot. I cannot write prose, only poetry and some of you may disagree with that. It may be that I feel I don't have enough time to write anything and so I try to get in everything I have thought of as possible Blog entries. And now for something completely different. I found out how to make text scroll smoothly across the page yesterday and to test how long the text could be I used the poem "Walkie-Talkie" which I have mentioned before. (I am still on poetry so does this count as consistency?). I want to know whether I could link to the program I have created so I have just emailed Ralph Hoyte who wrote it, to ask him.

How do you turn from a poet into a writer of prose? There is a fine distinction anyway but do you suddenly just find that you want to write lots more? I wanted to write a whole story in poetry like The Golden Gate but I was not up to it; it rhymed and not in a good way either so I have gone away from the idea of any of my poems being anything other than descriptive. Narrative poems are all very well but after a while, it is a bit like being beaten over the head with a brick. (The Golden gate is an exception and manages to keep the feel of a short poem while still driving a story forward - Of course it is very "Californian" but being set there that is sort of OK). Having said all this it takes enough time to write any poems at the moment. I used to to just write them with no filter at all and now I try and do all the corrections as I go along. They seem to be more polished but they lack spirit. My notebooks were full of crossings out done as I re-read the poems ages later. Like I said yesterday you, as the author of a poem, can think it is wonderful one day and awful the next. I had a grand idea for a group of poems called "U-Boat Poetry" which I started with this effort :-

October 2001

U-Boat Poem

Every Metal wall has doors to paradise where English men may
Never find the pleasures which we seek
In this, our steel black forest home:
Grave errors may they propagate in seven oceans while
My love lives lost in all my letters.
All my desire flies and isolates itself,
Falling into me and this our ship;
And is at last released to sweet Atlantic air from this
Last numbered female of her noble class,
Left to molten cores and to Iceland
Singing once again, the Destroyer of us all.
(A detour here to foil the school of code.)

This is a canopy, a bower, a shaded vessel
For scientific capture of these winds,
The lives of Saints read saintly, perfumed
In their pious metric beat.
And I could die today with all this pattern
Pressed into me, a souvenir of breakers.
The cool, fermenting flowers climb their walls
In garden time, the pulse of Gnomon,
Great English goddess of tranquillity;
A sea of grass for stately voyages of childhood
In the safe and steady sunny harbour.

You may recognise the second section as I think I blogged it ages ago. I really disliked the first part right after I wrote it but the other bit I think is really good but that is probably because of the associations it has. All is full of love and - My God! It's full of stars. ( said with a breathy and incredulous voice). Down with the filter. Filter nothing except that which really deserves it.