Hi Martin
well I wrote it yesterday so I think it qualifies as a draft.
I'm not wild about the first line, it could get absorbed into an eventual
(final) title. Perhaps. I do sometimes write "social historical" poetry but
it's not easy to incorporate the necessity of facts within the requirements
of poetry. Such facts tend to be lumpy and arrhythmical. Like handling great
globs of wet sticky clay.
best
Dave
On 26/03/2008, Martin Dolan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hi Dave
>
> Not the sort of thing idea, but if this is a draft, it's a good one.
>
> I like the way you contrast the specificity of the 1848 events with the
> vagueness/fadedness of the link to you. The interplay of images (such as
> between the fuse of the Manifesto and the firedamp) works well for me
> (had to check up on Kossuth, though).
>
> I'm not sure about the first line - even if it's necessary in light of
> the title. Also not sure about co-patrilineal: trying to compress to
> much into the line, maybe?
>
> If you've got more like these, I'd like to see them.
>
> Regards
>
>
> Martin
>
> > Circum circa
> >
> > Circa a European Year of Revolutions,
> > of Kossuth and Cavour and Louis Napoleon's Eighteenth Brumaire,
> > when Chartists massed, faintly tinted in life colours,
> > in the first known crowd photograph
> > and a grim economist fused a hissing manifesto,
> > one man found everything to lose,
> > one man preserved
> >
> > by the Heanor and District Historical Society,
> > one man who might have been
> > co-patrilineal
> >
> > to this one, scribbling here, a bone trace of age unstated,
> > Joseph of my surname, asphyxiated (circa)
> > 1848 at a firedamp lit hard seam at Loscoe pit.
> >
> >
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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