I’ve finished my experiments with the various conjugations of the verb “to munt”. If you ever watch the Discovery Channel program MythBusters, you’ll know where I’m coming from when I say that this has been one of those “and I do this for a living?!” helpless-giggling experiences. (Tragically, I’ve just spent twenty minutes trying to …
One year on (where have all the answers gone?)
I was awake for an hour or so yesterday morning before I remembered what day it was the anniversary of. One year since the first earthquake. One year since our lives were first tipped upside down and given a hell of a rattle. One year since the silt, since the cracked chimneys, since the world …
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Playing by Ear
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 …
A Dark Feathered Art 