Thursday, 2 October 2025

#2103 - here in the lower reaches

 



2103

6.276

3.x.25

here in the lower reaches

Gore Cove Track Series

 

past the equinox

whip birds in the dry call dusk

 

we gather like leaves along to

 

be in and with and by the creek

 

track of sand – time

its all four paws

 

calligraphy unseen

here’s everything the wind bent

old intentions grown over

 

stone stood

 

through a door of seasons

last slant golden to the throne

 

steps down into the dry bed

to get below breezes

 

breath of the harbor

city pulsing

 

come to another world

just where the tide comes in


 





Wednesday, 1 October 2025

#2102 - the elphant gets out of the room



2102

6.275

2.x.25

the elephant gets out of the room

 

it must have been too much

 

of course one has to wonder how

one might ask Archimedes

 

how was the elephant here to begin?

 

so many questions!

 

will a puddle of fruit ferment?

what to do with unflung dung?

 

who has four knees?

 

if no one sees was the forest felled?

 

how many elephants did that take?

make change

 

with a skin this thick

 

swish of the tail

comes crashing through the billboard  

 

who’ll say unsee what we’ll never forget?

 

the elephant’s brown shirt, the jackboots

all of this larger than life

 

imagine a stampede to follow

 

you can tell where the elephant’s been


How to write a long poem - #11

 



11.

The two-page (one opening) slow burn tough it out method

 

You need a big book of blank pages for this. One of those roughly 30cm x 20cm jobs. I think this is essential equipment for a poet in any case.  The busy book! No matter how much you may rely on screens for the making (and certainly the finishing) of poems, I think it’s important to stay in touch with ‘old school’ writing – with pen or pencil or paint or burnt stick. Doing this helps to keep your point of origin in poetry real (as opposed to virtual), anchored in the sensate experience of arriving on a piece of paper of some kind, the kind that functions through the longest outage. After all, on paper is where most of us want our finished efforts to arrive most of the time (blogs and e-zines notwithstanding). Of course things may be very different for succeeding generations.

littera scripta manet !

 

For this exercise, what I’m suggesting is using the facing (initially blank) pages of your notebook to let two distinct ideas or images or questions or assertions battle it out, or cosy up, as the case may be.

Your blank page is a canvas. Your work, in gathering (as opposed to drafting, which comes later) is to fill the canvas with – to the greatest extent possible – IMAGERY! It’s show first and let what you show do the telling!

So, going back to your stock of titles, first lines and last lines (and/or building on them now), head up each of your facing pages with a very different idea or image.

Over a few days, allow notes to accumulate under each heading, without any initial thought of the relation of what’s on one page to what’s on the other. Scratch down what is relevant when it comes to you. Don’t push it, but keep the heading line in the back of your head. Just collect. When you get an idea or image that absolutely doesn’t fit the brief, test it for the possibility of the long poetic leap and if it fails the test, then that’s a heading for your next page in the book.

(Once you get into the habit of letting what doesn’t fit spill on to a next page, you will be amazed at how usefully suggestive that can be for the next day.)

But back to our two facing pages.

Once you’ve done enough collecting on each page, make with the arrows! I mean start drawing lines to see what might connect with what and also to see what order things might go in. Keep an open mind. What you thought of as beginning might actually be an ending or vice versa.

Do this on each page separately to begin, and then try to draw some arrows over the gutter between the pages, always bearing in mind that you might really have two separate poems, and there’s no need to connect them.

But trying to can take things in an interesting and unexpected direction, much in the way material from a dream, if remembered, can take your thinking in an entirely new different direction. (But perhaps we’ll save that one for a later exercise!)

Once you’ve drawn all your arrows it’s time to start drafting – either on a fresh sheet of paper, a page in another book (for the purpose!). Or on the screen by means of keyboard. Or by voice recognition, to get the sound of what you’re drafting or through writing recognition to screen. Varying the mode of making is an excellent way to test if what you’re making works! (In the days of the manual typewriter, I would frequently go back and forth with drafts from handwritten to typewritten a number of times. I think we’ve got much more efficient and fun ways to go now… But whatever modes of production you use, often what you’ve made doesn’t work!  It doesn’t satisfy you. You don’t believe in it! What’s that thing Beckett says – try again, fail better!  Or James Joyce – ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery’.  It all depends how you look at it!

But when you feel that what you’ve done hasn’t worked, that’s when you give it a break (and come back later) or make something entirely new from scratch. Or paint a picture, draw, have a hack at the piano, torture a guitar, go for a walk, play ping pong.  Just keep the old pile around at least for a while (skip the wastepaper basket shooting with the ball of paper cliché … that’s strictly for novelists and playwrights).

This method may not lead to a poem initially (it may not ever lead to a poem)… but you’ll never know unless you give it a go.

 






























Tuesday, 30 September 2025

#2101 - septembering first

 


2101

6.274

1.x.25

septembering first

a pinch and a punch again

 

there's still someone in the wall 


morning is birdworthy

peopled with song and soon

 

pouring red belly out of the mulch box

there’s a deep breath

we go our ways

 

say spring because

and I, inside

 

woof woof of fences

or a fire takes off

 

21⁰ in the water

 

louder than light

little birds at the window

still want in

 

blowfly manages this

 

I look at the notes from the dream

I can make out all of the letters

I can’t understand a word













Monday, 29 September 2025

#2100 - see wonders

 


2100

6.273

30.ix.25

see wonders

 

take a jog around the place

not to see work

 

see wonders!

 

birds lit

leaf about

the pages of a tree

 

see up

and see the shadows fall

 

it’s everywhere

no time at all

 

friend it with the cloud

come on

 

watch your step as well

 

breathless for the pull, up hills

then half tumble down

 

day’s loud

with ink and pen

inscribe if, when

 

accept the all unmattering

how far we are in the vast

 

did you know that this all

               was never before

and never will again?


Sunday, 28 September 2025

I am becoming ... for Clark's workshop exercise


 


I am becoming

a little solipsism goes a long way

for Clark’s exercise

 

 

I am becoming

… most

(though perhaps it is immodest to say)

 

invisible, indivisible, impervious, omnipresent

omnipotent (within strict bounds)

risible, irresistible… and so on…

 

of course I am kidding myself

kidding you along

 

tragically, every day less in a sense

 

every day in every way, I’m

½ the what I was, 1/4, any advance on that?

 

out here on the spiral arm

little blue dot in the storm

on spec

 

place is completely surrounded

with all of the rest of the universe

(why stop at one?)

 

would you believe a poodle and a popgun?

 

I am becoming compost, ash, brittle

 

it’s thought by thought

 

closer to extinction

you too, I suspect

 

though some say there’s a wheel you don’t get off so easy

and some were born to cling

 

tug this loose thread, won’t you

 

I’m convinced that there’s a use-by for

 

every blade of grass

the tree to point stars

the stars themselves

 

though in another cosmos

time runs the other way

everyone’s immortal

no one gives death a second thought

(that would be unbecoming)

 

you see how still the mind runs on

I take the pills prescribed

there’s hope!

 

I may finally get over myself

when I am nothing at all






#2099 - set out

 



2099

6.272

29.ix.25

set out

 

to find myself in the picture

 

forget the otherworlds

make light

 

so as to test these assertions

 

duck for the leaf laden branch

 

set out to go under the radar

 

see what’s to see

what’s what

 

to be all among your words

set song

 

to go above and beyond

go in

go over the thing again

 

set out to lose myself

to break the map

let the fences away

 

run with the river

 

to be always somewhere else

 

just as the sun sets out to find us

 

pond shows a sky still as stone