I study Poetry Writing at Newcastle University under Cynthia Fuller, W.N.Herbert and Sean O'Brien. My influences include O'Brien, Plath, Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Fleur Adcock, Jo Shapcott, T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.S.Graham.
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One of my all time favourite poems is 'Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons' by Graham:
You are not really only an interpreter.
What you will do is always something else
And they will hear you simultaneously with
The Art you have been given to read. Please
Sit down, and I haven’t asked you to take your coat off.
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"There it is: the beginning and the end in one breath. How would the novelist manage that? In a paragraph? In a page? Mixing it perhaps, like paint, with a little water, thinning it, spreading it out... Now I am being smug, I am finding advantages." (Sylvia Plath, A Comparison)
"The avante garde imagines, and the mainstream regrets, that it exists." (Sean O'Brien, Proceedings in Palmersville)
"I want to write poems which are places, in which paraphraseable meaning has been drawn back into the place itself, so that the reading of the poem resembles inhabiting or at any rate contemplating the place. The original landscapes of my life: these are not something to use but to enter, though I don't know why. They are sufficient." (O'Brien).
"The means of poetry are, perhaps, related to Pound's sense of the increment of association; usage coheres value. Tradition is an aspect of what anyone is now thinking - not what someone once thought. We make with what we have, and in this way anything is worth looking at. A tradition becomes inept when it blocks the necessary conclusion; it says we have felt nothing, it implies others have felt more." (Robert Creeley, To Define)
"I have been asked to commit myself about poetry. I have committed myself already so much IN poetry that this seems almost superfluous." (Louis MacNeice, A Statement)
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One of my all time favourite poems is 'Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons' by Graham:
You are not really only an interpreter.
What you will do is always something else
And they will hear you simultaneously with
The Art you have been given to read. Please
Sit down, and I haven’t asked you to take your coat off.
-----
"There it is: the beginning and the end in one breath. How would the novelist manage that? In a paragraph? In a page? Mixing it perhaps, like paint, with a little water, thinning it, spreading it out... Now I am being smug, I am finding advantages." (Sylvia Plath, A Comparison)
"The avante garde imagines, and the mainstream regrets, that it exists." (Sean O'Brien, Proceedings in Palmersville)
"I want to write poems which are places, in which paraphraseable meaning has been drawn back into the place itself, so that the reading of the poem resembles inhabiting or at any rate contemplating the place. The original landscapes of my life: these are not something to use but to enter, though I don't know why. They are sufficient." (O'Brien).
"The means of poetry are, perhaps, related to Pound's sense of the increment of association; usage coheres value. Tradition is an aspect of what anyone is now thinking - not what someone once thought. We make with what we have, and in this way anything is worth looking at. A tradition becomes inept when it blocks the necessary conclusion; it says we have felt nothing, it implies others have felt more." (Robert Creeley, To Define)
"I have been asked to commit myself about poetry. I have committed myself already so much IN poetry that this seems almost superfluous." (Louis MacNeice, A Statement)
- Last seen on Nov 11 7:13 AM 2008. Member since September 17, 2006.
- I am a 20 year old guy (England)
- When I'm not writing, I'm an English Student.
- Visit my homepage at spaceofliam.blogspot.com
- I have 40 comments, 7 archived poems
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Im really pleased it managed to conjure that in you.
I'm always amazed how poetry that is intensely personal is always the best at generating emotion in others.
Liam x
Speaking of fleeting... that is part of the reason for the lack of punctuation/enjambement etc. To create that sense of time passing that is the central theme of the poem.
As for the line break between 'dining' and 'room'. The thinking behind that is to create the three chimes of the clock (notice the title) with the rhyming 'I' sound at the end of the three final lines of the poem:
Chime
Dining
Signified
You have got me thinking about a possible edit:
You whispered
'Looks are NOT everything'
Grandmotherly advice that made me
roll my eyes and wonder:
How old do you think I am?
It was black ... (&c)
...
On writing it and reading it I'm not sure that I gain anything in sense but that the poem possibly becomes more static? What do you think?... I also lose the end-of-line rhyme (although it still exists as an internal rhyme) between 'eyes and' and 'I am'...
Thanks again -- if you have the time would love to hear your thoughts back on this.
Liam x