RE: The Dove

Hell I don’t know man. What’s this got to do with “A Dove”? You must be joking.

It’s always difficult, I find, when people ask for comment, particularly on writing style and approach, to know if one feels qualified to reply with any confidence or self-assurance, but one can perhaps just comment from one’s own perspective – not to say there is a truth or a ‘right way’, but just to say what one feels one has discovered in one’s own ‘have a go’ jouney. Sorry, that was the preamble and I can’t now remember what I was of a mind to say. ... Oh yes ... rhyming does not these days say heartfelt commitment, but rather tum-tee-tum, however carefully it may be delivered – I think it’s just a cultural thing and really the result of the ‘fact’ that Eliot and Pound weren’t that strong on rhyming but good on image and fracturing. Fracturing can seem cool but may be starting to look ... a bit posey, as if ... . Metre is all a bit likewise, and it’s all a bit too easy to lose track of metre after a very metrical first line, as I know, or, indeed, to persuade oneself by the way one reads one’s own line that one has not lost track of the metre when, in fact, one has - it’s obvious when one reads it again in a flat way that one might read a newspaper article in. Inversion, say of putting an adjective phrase before its noun, can also look culturally uncool etc. So, what to do? Relax about a poem being a poem, de-stress, and feel the rhythm of one’s heart (even on a political issue, or indeed perhaps mostly there) and write to that - one can’t help feeling the heart’s changes and modulations being intensified and focused in the sounds and images one chooses. Maybe, ultimately, it’s the quality of the heart that determines the ‘success’ of a poem, rather than the quality of the art?