Poetry

Comes in many different forms. I love it when you hear words that, whether technically poetry or not, just do it for you.

There is an Anglo-Saxon riddle that always makes me shiver:

I am fire-fretted and I flirt with Wind
and my limbs are light-freighted and I am lapped in flame
and I am storm-stacked and I strain to fly
and I am a grove leaf-bearing and a glowing ember.

I love the rhythmn and the soft alliteration. When I read through my own work I'm often surprised how much alliteration slips in. But, I find it works best when it is unintentional. When I use it on purpose it sounds forced and unwieldy, and turns into clumsy tongue twisters.

I heard a Willie Nelson song on the radio tonight (as you inevitably do when tuned to Radio 2, which has become our weekend listening of choice - got to face it, we are OLD now). The lyric really stuck in my head and set a story idea going:

Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So I can feel the rain

It's a kind of poetry I think (certainly better than any verse wot I ever wrote).

The answer to the riddle by the way is - a beam of wood. My other favourite from the same collection is one that I like cos its funny (and rude!) rather than poetic:

Swings by his thigh a thing most magical!
Below the belt, beneath the folds
of his clothes it hangs, a hole in its front end,
stiff-set and stout, but swivels about.

Levelling the head of this hanging instrument,
its wielder hoists his hem above the knee:
it is his will to fill a well-known hole
that it fits fully when at full length.

He has often filled it before. Now he fills it again.

Now then. Calm down - its a key of course. What were you thinking?

I love a bit of Dark Age humour. Imagine them all snuggled round the fire chuckling and sniggering and someone at the back shouting out, 'Willy!'

And finally...

Many were met, men of discretion
wisdom and wit, when in there walked...

Two ears it had, and one eye solo,
two feet and twelve hundred heads,
back, belly, a brace of hands
a pair of sides and shoulders and arms
and one neck. Name, please.

Answer, tomorrow.

Women who write

Hurrah for the return of snail mail.

Two very welcome deliveries this morning (and no bills!).

The first was the new copy of Mslexia which always cheers me, although I have to eek out my reading of it carefully over the next three months.

Second was a bundle of copies of a writing anthology called Landscape from a Dream - which has a piece by me in it! Ta-dah!- publication at last. The anthology was produced by the Newcastle Lit and Phil Library for National Poetry Day on the 4th October, and the organiser Sheree Mack asked me for a piece way back at the beginning of summer. It's so lovely to see my words in black and white in an anthology of, in my 'umble opinion, 'damn fine writing'. The booklets were distributed in Newcastle on National Poetry Day - let me know if you got hold of a copy and what you think. Meanwhile I will be distributing my copies among family and friends, and of course keeping one for myself.

Mslexia is subtitled 'for women who write' and when I began subscribing a couple of years ago I considered myself 'a woman who wants to write'. I've still got a long way to go and a lot of writing to do but over the past year I have moved on, so that I am now 'a woman who writes', it is part of my life and I love it.