Douglas Barbour wrote:
>continuing here.
>
>(I'll happily take it as fictional rather than confessional, but you may
>see it very differently).
>
>Doug
>
It became fictional en route. It's also overtly concerned with this
fictionalising, the lures and ruses of self-narrative, the way that
confession and penitence shade into vanity and self-indulgence.
There's maybe a split-second's difference between my being pleased with
a line like "the world of work is where my days are spent" and its
becoming pleased-with-itself. By the time one gets to the next line, one
has already remarked the difference between "where I spend my days" and
"where my days are spent", caught the note of self-pity and accusation
("others make use of my time; and they do not use it as I should have
liked it to be used"), started to get an idea of it as a line in a poem.
The most obvious difference between this poem and the four sections of
"Domain Names" I wrote before it is that in those poems I let myself
catch up with myself before going on, so that every particle of the poem
was written in full awareness of every preceding particle as a "piece of
poem". The result is density and convolution (neither of which I have
any objection to and both of which I have been known to practice with
the considered purpose of making myself objectionable). Writing quickly,
in one's head, without the support of notepad or word processor, is a
good way of breaking with this practice and averting some of its
consequences.
I don't generally go in for this "giving your inner cop the slip"
business; I tend to prefer poetry that stays and wrangles to poetry that
goes careening bollock-naked down the page. But it's not a hard and fast
distinction. The interesting thing is to see how disciplined one can
still manage to be with brow set to half-furrow.
Dave B and Doug C put me up to it, by the way - unwittingly of course -
they just set a good example...
Dominic
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