Hi Gerald,

I like the idea of this. I also like the form or pattern it uses (letting
the alphabet have so much (even more) control over the way I read). But, at
the moment (for me) it's only "almost there."

It could be that it's too long... (that it needs something else, maybe
another formal device to be employed, another way of shaping it as well, to
help it get shorter)... Or it may just appear to be too long because of the
(sometimes) monotone of repeating the same sound/letter at the start of each
line in each stanza.

But I like the idea! The concept. The way it allows my mind to discover
things through association and selection. I know all poems do that but this
poem, for me, does it in delightfully speculative ways.

(Ooooh, I've just thought... if the poem went down the alphabet - and then
came back up...) That's what the poem's doing, doing too much for me at the
moment, distracting me as much as letting me in to enjoy it!

Glancing over the whole poem I guess what I'm asking/wondering can or can't
happen because some of the stanzas (letters of the alphabet) have only one
or two lines... And I remember reading something about how some
L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets revise and some don't (and I guess this poem appears,
at least, to raise questions about revision and what role the reader has in
interpreting/reading the poem).

And are you happy that I want Pleasure, as my first reaction to this poem
(because I see its ACROSTICK-a-bility so clearly), when the poem,
particularly in its last few lines (but also because of an Overall
Impression of sentiment), can be read as expressing such a contrary feeling?

As an important aside it also impresses me with it's complexities. That,
like all poems (list poems or not), we have to use our craft as writers (and
then as readers) to let the poem do its own work.

Bob




>  ENGLAND'S FIRST LINES
>
>a selection from the first lines of poems by Gerald England
>
>
>A blackbird lands
>A continued escalation of colliding steel
>A good beer-barrel
>A man sits in a cave knitting
>A quarter of a century gone
>A slogan a day
>A theatre in Copenhagen
>A thin layer of virgin-white snow
>A two-foot long glass column
>A white shadow shines through night cloud
>Abask the sea-wall
>After Mothers Day
>Alice was demure and O
>All the way to Bury
>Amid the heather
>Among the lupins
>And after little suzie
>And it was his grief that kept him travelling
>And the baby miscarried
>And the gulls woke me at half past
>And the sick man's vomit was spat out
>Apple bread, champagne dip, Easter egg,
>As a clashing cymbal in the discordant darkness of the night
>At the Bay at the Back of the Ocean
>
>Bare midriffs above belt-like skirts
>Bedraggled daffodils line the lanes
>Belladonna is unlucky
>Beyond the wooded embankment home
>Big Irma
>
>Child lost in big store
>Come to our raveup in York they said
>
>Damn the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation
>Deeply Katy threw her dress open
>Dementia patients ramble on the freeway of her face
>Don't smother the fire, mother
>
>Everyone's going to heaven
>
>First catch your crow
>Friendly face peeping
>
>Gillamoor looked great that day
>Going to Glimps Holm
>
>Hair dressed up in curlers
>Have you ever watched a snail
>He, bold, brassy, Geordie
>High tops streaked with snow
>History books in which you are an elephant
>
>I carry the weight of the world on my back
>I do not like telephones
>I got some tissues with my coffee yesterday
>I knew of your visit to the blacksmith
>I took my wife to a chinese restaurant to eat
>I was a teenage werewolf
>I was taking about Cleopatra
>If God is dead
>In the box there is a cat
>
>Kettle on coal fire
>Knickerless Nicola
>
>Labelled with a sticker on our lapels
>Leaving Oldham
>Lesbian bodies take advantage of patient work
>Life's mostly a game said the poor man
>Lloyd George knew my granddad
>Lost down country lanes
>
>Moo
>My son builds with his Lego
>My wife is talking
>
>Nodding drowsily against his winter habit
>
>On the far side of Hope
>One corner of the tarmaced field
>Outside the X-ray
>Overwhelmed like fish
>
>Poor Peter
>Possum roadkill
>
>Queen Victoria
>
>Real nude women mourned new ale
>Re-listening to sixties' protest songs
>Rent a bench
>Reproduction strictly prohibited
>
>Sat in the car on Royd Moor Lane
>Sharing its route with slow canals
>She is Mother England
>Sheep suckle their lambs
>Skin was slit like the opening of an envelope
>Sleet at the window
>So this is Brighton
>Somewhere I saw a South-West wind
>Sunday-morning sex
>
>The Arrival of the Queen of Sheeba
>The dog dodges puddles in the road
>The fox comes nightly to her garden
>The geese do not know which way to turn
>The hitchhiker had bought a black tie
>The ice is frozen in upon itself
>The morning when the Queen came to town
>The taps are dripping all over the city
>The wind that whistles over Oldham Edge
>The year that Patrick Sellar came to Strathnaver
>There hadn't always been a rainbow
>There were several entrances
>This is a multi-part poem in MIME format
>Through the windy pass
>Two demented vultures
>
>Up Ingleborough
>
>Victims of the bottle
>
>We had a very quiet Christmas
>We were never lovers
>When Margaret first met Malcolm
>Why are your poems so full of country images
>
>Yeah, yeah, I know what I said
>You said you wanted to live
>
>
>   GERALD ENGLAND




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