Rewriting and non-binary

Friday 26th November, 2021

Hello.

With the weather getting colder and the nights darker it is somewhat ironic I have selected for my featured poem one called Ignore Poetic Sunlight

I recently came across this poem; I had written it around 1999, and when I read it now, I still liked it.  (This is often not the case when you look aback at something you have written years before.)  Its conciseness and simplicity seemed to still have power; and it felt as if it resonated today more than it did in 1999.

In 1999 I was being rather sniffy about the poet in the portrait, thinking of him as self-regarding.  But today it felt to be more about non-binary existence.  I needed to tweak it a bit to strengthen this view, and I tightened up the rhythms to make it a better poem.  It is now a much more generous poem, I show more empathy with the poet, and I like the ambivalence or open-endedness of the poem.  In short, it is a better poem; not everyone’s cup of tea, I’m sure, but a better poem.  I am at one with the Big Idea I am trying to communicate.

There is a big question though – how much meaning does it carry if you do not know the painting?  

The poem rhymes – abcb.  I wonder sometimes if I am being dangerously out of fashion writing rhyming poems – albeit only sometimes.  But in this poem, the simple four line, rhyming stanzas seems to communicate part of the meaning too.

I would be pleased to hear your views.

Reading

I am getting really angry about the Government’s sound bite of High wage, high skilled economy I’m all for high wages, the clear implication of this slogan, though, is that if you cannot get qualifications you do not deserve high wages.  It dumps just about half of our population on the rubbish heap.  This is filled out in a terrific book by Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit. I’ve also just finished H G Wells’ Kipps.  Funny, sad, happy – an excellent look at the Victorian class system.  Coming back to the Sandel book, are we replacing one class system with another?  

Surely we should work towards a society based on value or worth, rather than on learning and scale of earnings? 

Writing

In my previous blog, I wrote about a Clowning project I had been involved with.  I have just completed an article on the project – around Clowning and Wellbeing.  I am also fine-tuning a new, fairly long poem in the form of a duologue, based on merit v worth (see above.)  It is called Shit Shovelling; I do not expect it will be a featured poem . . . though you never know.  My Tuesday poem 23 November was about artists and sportspeople ‘disappearing’ in China.  I have a poem I’m working on, based on this theme, it is a monologue called Transfiguration.

And finally . . . 

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Thanks for reading this.