back to the narrator

It’s been a while since I mentioned poets and narrators on the blog, but Google has prompted me to return to this hobby horse of mine as it seems that the ad selector is just as likely as the novice reader to confuse the writer with the narrator of a poem.

I’ve been looking through some old emails and found one a friend sent me a while back with a poem in it for me to comment on. The poem contained the phrase “slipped disc”.

moving experiences I

It’s a while since I posted any poetry, so, since I’m in the process of moving things from the city to the village, this seems appropriate:

PACKING

The rip and fart of parcel tape; the tangle,
stick and cuss; the smell of dust,
mothballs and corrugated cardboard.
Drugstore detergent cartons
stuffed and trussed
and stacked in the spare room.
Both cats in heat and looking
for a mate, a nest, a fond caress…
They play at pigs in pokes, scrabble,
scratch and snag at boxes, plastic bags
and bundles, wail and waul.

When finally I move, I’ll leave
fixtures and fittings
and two grown kittens.

narrators and writers

Re-reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, I was taken by the comments about objectivity in writing in this conversation between Lord Peter Wimsey and 15-year-old Miss Hilary Thorpe.

It’s just after Easter. Hilary’s mother died at New Year and now an unidentified corpse has been found in the grave which was being prepared for her father who has just died.

“[...] You and Dad would have got on splendidly. Oh, by the way – you know where Dad and Mother are buried, don’t you? I expect that was the first place you looked at.”
“Well, It was; but I’d rather like to look at it again. You see, I’m wondering just exactly how the- the–”
“How they got the body there? Yes, I thought you’d be wondering that. I’ve been wondering, too. Uncle doesn’t think it’s nice of me to wonder anything of the sort. But it really makes things easier to do a little wondering, I mean, if you’re once interested in a thing it makes it seem less real. That’s not the right word, though.”
“Less personal?”

voices of poetry

I recently acquired a copy of Eliot’s lecture entitled The Three Voices of Poetry. It was a serendipitous acquisition, as it ties in closely to my interest in the dichotomy of writer and narrator.

Although the title refers to three voices, Eliot actually starts off by stating, “There may be four voices. There may be, perhaps, only two.” He then explains that the three voices referred to are:

from poem to picture book

Any author will tell you that the process which results in a book reaching the bookshop shelves is long and, at times, tortuous.

My own experience makes it five and a half years from the original poem being written to its appearance this month as Bubbles, a bilingual children’s picture book, now available from Topka.

from poem to picture book