I very much agree with this approach. It's for the change in, say, line
length or register, bound in with a change in say pace, that a
self-conscious reference to the work in the work is interesting for me. I
mean, reminding your audience that this is a made-up thing is OK, though it
can be spoil-sporty and a bit obvious, but the sounds, the "changes in
air-pressure", that shift through a poem that has those kinds of roughnesses
and delicate amateurishnesses - I'm talking about aspiring to an intricate
modulation that has to have so-called cruder (or just very different,
unworked) elements and - again I think cris is on the money here, if I read
him correctly (yes I know, "money") - needs time and trial to elapse across
the piece, to articulate nuance as getting-to-nuance.

It's why, to declare my oldfashionedness I guess, since I can't think of any
more modern poets that work in this way that I like (help, save me from
tanktops), I like Apollinaire and Lawrence's longer freer work than their
traditional work. Increasingly I'm leaving, selectively, more stuff in my
poems: not because I think genius springs from my pen in the first draft (I
take that as a given, naturally), but I do like the sound, now and again, of
the great unpolished. (There's also a sense of my wishing to get out of that
staticity, that secular hymn minimalism, Haikus R Us say, that is fine I
guess in its own way, but at the moment I find stultifying, you know,
perfect-poemism).

Richard

-----Original Message-----
From: cris cheek [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 12:07 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: cut the crap


Hi

writing as a leaky sieve that Aiden was referring to and that has become the
butt here between Fletcher and Tony I have at times deliberately ployed
around the inclusion/exclusion of crap in respect of both my own and other
reader/writer sensibilities.

There have been times when it's interesting, to me, to leave in what should
obviously be taken out. As a result i've been accused as exhibiting a
tendency to glut. It's almost something worth putting as a blurb on a back
cover. The point is the element of deliberation.

In one or two pieces i've even highlighted certain lines as being 'weak'.
The result has been comments to the effect that they became the stronger
lines.

But then i read and write pieces as 'pieces'. Whether they are 'poems' or
not isn't my primary concern. I want the pieces to try to do something in
terms of scope and granularity. I want to play an ambience or score a
journey with all of the ups and downs along the way. Somewhat as Miles Davis
took ages, at times, to get to the melodic statement having offered partials
and cracked notes and rasps in the process. What should he have done, edited
out all of the preamble?

Is it possible to appreciate blue sky without there having been clouds?

I'm old fashioned

love and love
cris


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