Saturday 18 July 2009

Camping Trip - And Writing Poetry

I've stopped giving my poems titles because I can't think of any and I just want it finished after I churn them out. So I'm just dating them. The last poem I wrote comes from pieces of notes I wrote while on (coming back from) a camping trip to Cornwall. We usually go there in the Summer, and I've had a couple of inspiring moments to write. Well not moments, just memories. I find it hard to write in the moment, if you know what I mean.

One being me and my best friend drunkenly running around the campsite and waking up some German tourists and nearly getting kicked out the site, while our other friend slep in his tent. This time we (me and my best friend) drank whiskey thru the morning after a night out, and play the "lying down game" (from facebook) and just talked.

Things have started falling into place recently. Things were falling aprt once again, but it's come together and hopefully by the Autumn things'll be good. I'll be in uni doing an MA Writing, and my Death Valley bike ride for charity is being moved to November, which I prefer.

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Some notes on writing

Spend a long time in choosing one word.
Read as you write.
What you write is a skeleton at first.
It will never be perfect until you make it perfect.
Sounds are everything / almost everything - inc. sentence sound/word sound...
If you don't like the poem then the reader won't like your poem.
If you don't understand your poem...
Allusion. ie. allude to other things in literature/art/science/history/life/anything
Try to say something.
Try to speak.

Poem 18/7

You've got me by the roots of my eyes;
An air of hooks catch legs
Pulled up straight brain like putty,
Grey as guns, Babylonian skies,

Alive smells of wet wood and grass
Lasts as long as you or I,
And I am dead, and you are free
And we are mystics we blow out to sea

Without hope or rest;
Roads burn to a marriage of webs,
Our rainy tracks, rare and random,
Rain like smoke and dust and snow;

Under a bridge the rain explodes,
And lampposts stitch the sky;
I'm held together with glue and tape,
You pull apart my strands, piece by piece by piece.

Saturday 4 July 2009

Untitled Poem 4/7

He got a call. It was 12:24am.
He said Hello – He said Hello again –
She asked if he would come round –
He was 35 miles away –
He came anyway. It was dark.
There were deep roads of black tar,
Buildings with glass limbs – no men no women –
Packs of old dogs dragging their lifeless
Forms along the highway.

He walked the distance of 35 miles
That night to be with her. Just like she'd asked.
He passed a dandruff of junk,
Cannibal eyes from each new terrace –
He knocked on her door. There she was.

She had blonde hair.
She held wine in one hand
And a knife in the other. It was 12:24am.
Again she went thru the motions.
She slowly unbuttoned her dress.
She was blind – she covered her
Eyes with a tangerine-coloured bandage,
She had no clothes on –

Inside. The dust inside
Were galaxies in mysterious
Motion, deja vu like liquid –
She took off the bandage.
Her eyes were grey like his father's eyes,
She asked him about her eyes:
“I see everything I see
In you I see nothing at all.”

She was naked as the sun.
There was no sun.
It was 12:24am and she was
Going to leave for Falmouth in the winter.



**Wrote this last night. It's mostly imagination. I imagine walking from Liverpool up to Preston, where I went to university, 35 miles away. The girl is no one inparticular, although the blonde hair was taken from someone I knew. I expanded the second stanza today, I realise I have some imagery from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I recently read. I read some Frank O'Hara last night too.

I think I like this one. I don't usually write this way.