Saturday, January 03, 2009

A very rough draft of two poems written side-by-side.


New Year

Taxis haunt the highways,

(posr removed)

6 comments:

Hugh McMillan said...

You got a box of images for Christmas!

First impression;
New Year doesn't work for me at present though there are some beautiful images eg

taxis haunt...
streets smoke..
hills have drowned in a pint of mist (I don't like the way you invert this line, though I know why you've done it)
a shorebird like a rusty hinge...

Trouble is neither the bubble of imagery or the bit at the end amount to a coherent whole, or add up to give this reader a sense of what you're contrasting, or what you're saying about yourself.

Dream is much more self contained and its meaning is much more defined. Nice imagery again, windows burn in prisms...
coals in my hands sing...
You could drop the odd word- blurry, gentle, and the line reaching to snag.....

I wonder if the pieces might be combined- Where you build up a set of images representing reality and then representing the dream? Don't know.
Anyway you use language in a sensual and layered and dreamy way.

swiss said...

i like the feed into amazing grace in the first one.

but (and there's always a but!) like shug says, you've got a box of images! sometimes less is more.

do you kinow much about the imagists? i'll put something up in the usual place

Marion McCready said...

lol, I feel like I'm bursting with images at the moment and finding little coherence to bring them together, hoping if I threw some of them out there I might start to see them more clearly!
thanks hugh for your thoughts, prunings and suggestions.

hi swiss, funnily enough I was just re-reading part of Pound's imagist manifesto earlier tonight.

swiss said...

that'll be synchronicity for you!

me, i was watching rubbish tv!

Jim Murdoch said...

No wise words of wisdom today I'm afraid but here are my gut feelings: I prefer the first poem although it reads like a list; the second is okay but the last five lines spoiled it for me - I'd scrap 'em - but then I find poems about dreams usually annoy me. Yours was just sappy - at least the last five lines were, Sorry I can't be more constructive but gut reactions are good too I suppose.

Marion McCready said...

thanks jim, I appreciate your gut reaction, I've got my work cut out to make something out of these!