Blasphemy is vital. Extended and redrafted '4am', now called, with perhaps a smidgeoon of irony, 'Parable'.  It's about desire as a compulsive force which drives towards the future.  How we look to the future for something fresh, something

Writing 'Gospel' continues to have its repercussions. I'm not risking enough in my poetry.  Emotionally or linguistically.  And the reason for this is because I've got this exaggerated regard for an imagined reader or audience, and this ke

A certain anxiety about how to start the next poem, especially since 'Gospel' does, I feel, break new ground in that it's a highly personal piece, and also in that it squashes some quite subjective and mysterious imagery into a tight, minimal meter.&

That last stanza-and-a-bit says it, I think.  It says the aim of Life and Art is to transmute accident into intention.  There's no meaning.  We live in a meaningless universe.  But we can make - or attempt to make - meaning, tenuo

This is not a pleasure any more.  I'm fighting with it.  Unlike a sonnet there's no definite endpoint.  It moves incrementally, and indefinitely.  It could go on forever.  It's like a pool whose surface is slowly getting bigg

'Mother' creeps on.  Two things have struck me:  one, that it's hugely personal and would embarrass my mum if she knew it was in the public realm.  (This, my blogging, might be becoming what Robert Bly in 'Iron John' would call 'steali

I'm making an effort to write poems about my deepest feelings and beliefs, in an attempt to avoid the whimsicality I'm prone to.  So I'm writing about the stuff that came out this year - about my mum's shame and guilt, her (as I believe) attempt

One week to our 'civil partnership'!  Ten days to being in France again - and writing poetry.  Greg wants us to write a poem which expresses our most fundamental beliefs, which is good since many of my poems tend to be too whimsical.