Thanks, Tim.
I haven't given too much semi-conscious thought to it yet. This morning I
am listening to the fridge gurgle and drinking masses of tea I don't really
want, only to wonder at my need to urinate twice as a predictable result -
my version of an old gull with its foot in fishing line or net... But I am
aware of it - the problem... the question...

Like any self-respecting old seagull, I like to think I am right, and
always have been; so your message is very welcome; but the people who have
written, friends all, in a Quaker sense, raising the questions, most
recently Sheila, I think, have taught me a lot in the past, not just by
seeing potential improvement but just by their benign challenge,
encouraging me to consider, though I may well not agree finally.

As in this case, my making purposes have rarely been that conscious and are
made verbal retrospectively, following benign challenge. I imagine that's
true for many of us. I wouldn't have it otherwise, short of a
further-beneficially-evolved brain. Thinking IN poetry, rather than
thinking PRIOR to poetry.

I suspect that I shall keep the poem as it is; but I need time to be sure.
This, too, is not a process which can be declared decided and ended by a
"Are we agreed then?". It will, I hope, come to me as the poem came to me,
in much the way that bodily processes announce themselves (the standard
input output ones for instance especially in today's extended teabreak)  -
the tomato I just ate was not desired by reasoning but by seemingly
increasing its attractiveness to me as it lay on the kitchen surface. Not
inspiration (ha!): it's all quite bodily and internally generated

The interrogation mark, and I have wondered about its presence, is not
terribly standard in its intention. I've been working with it as an
indicative tool in 2 and 3 voice poems, workshopping texts with Tina Bass
often. There I notate my text, marking an interrogative cadence by using an
inverted interrogation mark to start. I have found that useful; but of
course I had initially to say to Tina what I meant by it; and it isn't
necessarily questioning; and it isn't upspeaking.

I felt I shouldn't do that here. I don't want the oddity (for the
readers).... It needed something there, as the painter says in O'Hara...

My tea is cold. Time to fill the kettle. Thanks for this. I shall unthink
on this. I may be gone some time

L










On 14 May 2015 at 10:28, Tim Allen <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi Lawrence, I don't agree with the questions some have asked about the
> 'maybe' and 'sometimes' - for me those are pretty essential to the mood of
> the poem as I think you wrote it - they link the concreteness of the images
> with the fluid and conditional mind of the one thinking/seeing the images -
> which is what a lot of your current stuff seems to do. I love it as it is.
> that's my pennyworth.
>
> Cheers
>
> Tim
>
> On 13 May 2015, at 07:19, Lawrence Upton wrote:
>
> > you'll see sometimes an old or infirm gull,
> >
> > a bit grubby, long since less than ebullient,
> >
> > limping in a length of fishing line maybe --
> >
> >
> > that's how their seasons end, rapidly slowing
> >
> > towards the speed of stone; still in motion;
> >
> >
> > the swaying moon glides on, turning, vacuous;
> >
> >
> > it's a hobbled chunk of an avalanche
> >
> > banging towards the big emptiness, opening
> >
> > it for rock to fly in tethering circles
> >
> >
> > of curves; parabolas; and springs of straightness
> >
> > through meshwork of nested slingshots; tangled?
>