> However, I've a friend who found Hill's work quite impenetrable, until I suggested she tried
reading it aloud. She said that was a helpful approach though the work
was still not to her personal taste.
I had a similar experience when talking to a friend about _Speech!
Speech!_, when she asked me why I thought it was *poetry*. I read one
of the poems in the book aloud to her. It would be pleasant to report
that she was utterly charmed and convinced by this performance, and
immediately rushed out to buy the collected works of J. H. Prynne, but
as a matter of fact all I got out of her was a grudging admittance
that it all *sounded* very nice (but was this enough?).
> Now what
are you going to do?
A hundred hundred-word poems, of course! Or maybe not. I get enough
website hits from people searching for "cocks" as it is; advertising
"Full Length Cocks" can only worsen the situation.
"Half Cocks" is rather higgledy-piggledy when it comes to style,
subject matter, focus etc. - more of a list than anything, "my final
list of things which won't be fixed", to borrow a line of Cathal
Coughlan's. There are no very firm criteria by which any of the poems
in the sequence have had to justify their inclusion, apart obviously
from the word-count and division into three groups of three lines.
It's a good form for the writing of occasional poems, which most of
them are (a number of them doubled as poetryetc snapshots), but it
rather pushes one towards the aphoristic.
I'm still rather mystified by larger compositional structures - I have
no idea for example how anyone ever manages to write a whole novel -
and would like to try to demystify them a little for myself. So a
single long(-ish) poem on some particular topic would seem to be in
order. But we'll see.
Dominic
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