I have, at last, finished my Belle Dame poem. Well, for a given value of ‘finished’. It’s made it to printout-draft stage, been primped and prodded, and has been through the scrutiny of my beta-readers. The interesting thing is that none of them agree on the bits that they query, and none of the queries …
Words like Peacocks
I don’t think you can be a poet and not be fascinated by the provenance of words – where they came from, how they change, their relationship to meaning and sound. Who was it who defined a writer as “someone unable to look up just one word in a dictionary”? (Incidentally, next time you feel …
Damn you, Belle Dame
I thought on Thursday (last week) that I had finally, in the words of Sir Ed, “knocked the bastard off”, and got a completed first draft of my Belle Dame poem. But no. It became quite obvious as I was preparing a printout to take to my crit group, that it was going to need …
Thank you Dunedin, and hello procrastination!
I had a ball in Dunedin. The event was technically a sellout (well, a book-out), and there was a really great vibe in the room. I suspect I waffled on a bit too much, but that's an occupational hazard. No-one seemed in danger of losing the will to live, so I count that as a …
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Romantics, Pre-Raphs, and Edgar Allan Poe(-etry)
I'm working on a new piece – a modern revisioning of the most tragic-romantic poem from that most tragic-Romantic of English poets, John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci Oh what can ail thee Knight-at-arms Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the Lake And no birds sing. Oh what can ail thee …
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A Dark Feathered Art 