Bob,

Thanks for playing around with the title. I need to try harder with titles.

Need I have chosen a door for the poem? I worried that it might sound too
bizarre. Would a car or computer be more cool-sounding? In my original
experience it was a door (tho' that's no obstacle). I heard a workmate
undermining people -(you'll have heard it yourself in other settings)- and I
thought I would try it out on an inanimate object. It's true that I wasn't
the only person who found the lock too stiff for frequent use. Nevertheless
I was surprised by the decision to replace it. My part of it that seemed so
difficult and alien to my own nature was on the contrary so easy and natural
that it seemed I had always acted like this, and then the awful truth of it
dawned on me, that it was hardwired into my own (human) nature and that what
we think of as primitive intelligence is substantially social intelligence
etc etc

Okay okay okay no more evolutionary poems for a while now. Thanks for
bearing with me and for the useful thoughts.

Colin

PS Gary once mentioned this prob with neat rhymes breaking off into
something different. It is not intentional and if it troubles the reader
then I'll need to work on it.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Cooper" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 4:17 PM
Subject: Re: newsub/door


> Hi Colin,
> This really intrigues me! A canny first line that catches my attention,
then
> neat rhymes (ababaccdd) but then it seems - to me - to lose itself in the
> second stanza.
> In fact I wonder if it needs the second stanza...
> I get a lot from what's going on in the first! Am I right in thinking
you're
> saying "it's like us" in the second stanza? Could that be inferred,
implied,
> or said simply, in the first?
> Or added into the title?
> Hey, I'm starting to play with the title now: "When is a person like a
> door?" really appeals to me and adds loads of imaginative ideas to the
nine
> lines that follow... (but there might be need to mess with things a
> little...).
> Just an idea. Just letting the poem wander about in its own way, open its
> own doors, let it swing on its hanges a bit...
> Whaddya think?
> Bob
>
>
> >From: Colin dewar <[log in to unmask]>
> >Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: [log in to unmask]
> >Subject: newsub/door
> >Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 18:45:23 +0100
> >
> >The Door
> >
> >I didn't like the door when it appeared.
> >So I noted how hard it was to use,
> >made jokes and sneered,
> >and whenever someone else chose
> >to speak against it I strongly agreed
> >and quoted them for the rest of the day.
> >After a while gossip had enough to say.
> >I did nothing more than watch
> >as another door was put in place.
> >
> >It could have been a person
> >so familiar the unfolded tale,
> >malice and mechanism from nowhere
> >or so it seemed, the subterranean gene
> >suppressed but remembering its origin
> >in tribal strife, and how it made its way
> >as proxy for original sin.
>
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