| 4.12.10 | Cambridge is a superb place for poetry right now. There's the magnificent Prynne; I'm reading "Biting The Air"; it's incredible how he's broken context to get rid of most of the literal meaning to leave the raw combining of words to create the poetic effect; he's got poetry not merely to use some techniques of music, but to work like music. That's stunning, to me. There's Drew Milne, who's poems are a sequence of spotlights on ideas, he highlights so much in so few words, he leaves it to the listener to assemble the connections. There are so many more good voices in the colleges and in the town from that tradition: Rob Mengham, Richard Burns, Tom Raworth, Peter Riley. |
| 4.11.9 | The shambolic English court system strikes again! It turns out I was 'taken to court' in July 2003, and I've only just found out about it. Talk about intense and incredible incompetence. No one phoned, no one emailed, nothing. They didn't bother to use their preferred symbol of waste, the archaic and collapsing postal service. What a bunch of tossers. This rot has being going on for a century and all those idiot savants working in it just let it be. And that's the best possible interpretation of their behaviour. uncivil law might be about to get another extension. |
| 4.11.2 |
Bit of an odd few days. It started with being stood up. I'd booked the best restaurant in Lincolnshire (Harry's Place). Turned up. She didn't. I've received no excuse, no explanation, no apology. Not nice. Over the last few days I've been putting together one of my thoroughly non-serious bits of music, and it's gone rather well. It had a difficult start. The rhythm took time to gel. Then, tonight, I went along to the CAMBRIDGE Series of modernist poetry readings. This has been fantastic. Unfortunately, my stomach decided to rumble. Loud. Think Hippopotamus loud. It was immensely embarrassing. I felt so uncomfortable I left during the first reading. My apologies to the poet. |
| 4.9.8 | I like the language in my poetry, but the subjects, especially in the short poems, seem to have become unidimensional. They say little, well. This has been bought to my attention by (my translation of) "We Drunken Here". But to force additional themes into a poem is to create crap. I suspect I need to make my life---or at least my sources of inspiration---a little richer. This needs thought. |
| 4.9.6 | My damn stupid cat has taken to sleeping on the car engine. I drove off this morning, and fortunately heard the terrified miaows, so stopped; she'd made it to the battery and was cowering there. She's stupid because she's still going into the engine despite the experience; I'll just have to check them before I drive for now. |
| 4.7.11 | Odd: lots of people are listening to Rock (Of The Early Eight) Is (400 downloads from many different addresses in the last 10 days). Even more odd: according to the logs, lots of people are trying to run perl scripts called email, contact, and so on. Er, what's wrong with the instructions on the contact page? Others follow it. I don't want to put perl (or here) scripts up; I'd have to hardcode an email address; I distrust clever spammers. Or maybe it's spammers trying to use the non-existent scripts! |
| 4.7.7 |
I dreamt a
Water poem
last night:
André got Jeremy Prynne to give a spontaneous tutorial.
The exercise:
'catch an experience that caused you
to feel pride for an event in history'. I wrote
Cold War
(remember, a theme is to get a poem written).
Some of the poem flowed away as I awoke;
I've fixed a couple of problems.
I've never met Prynne, he's a myth to me. I dreamt he was my age, with thinning ginger hair. This is wrong. |
| 4.6.21 |
Right, I've got the stock answer: Creativity's a cat, it never bloody cooperates unless it's hungry, then it yowls in the middle of the night and wakes you up. |
| 4.6.19 |
Found this: Since it's called Mumbai, not Bombay, shouldn't "Bollywood" be "Mollywood", and Molly would what? And some naughty computer talk: fork (you) |
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