anyway it turns out the main reason why not is that i am not so much a poet.
this surprises me because when i was at high school i used to go to all the nerd extension classes where we wrote poetry instead of going to like physics or whatever.
i once wrote a love poem for some rugby player that i thought oneday i would marry. it was a roaring success. i was credited as having a sense of humour. sadly, i wasn't exactly joking.
when i think about it a bit more, i realise most of the other poems i wrote were criticised for being a bit... well... shit. basically.
in an ironic twist i was given a book at my high school's 1996 prizegiving by the poet who was most cruel about my body of work: Lauris Edmond. She ran 2 of these poetry workshops.
i always found it particularly hard to accept her criticism given her glowing review of a poem by a classmate who wrote a rhyming piece about the LA riots and how they affected her (hello! could we *get* further removed?).
in another cruel turn, i'd always thought - for some unknown reason - that i'd won the lauris edmond book for something awesome: like 1st in English, or the Katherine Mansfield Creative Writing Prize. But no... I got it for being a suck up...
1 comment:
gabs you are *so* multi-talented i bet your poems are totally marvellous.
anyhoo it isn't very hard, according to westbrook pegler. w pegler wrote in the 1930s and was hilarious. this is his view on poetry, as described in a new yorker article i saved a couple of years ago, in my clippings phase:
"[Pegler] charged into fortresses of the high-brows with cunning. One such redoubt was modern poetry: "Not many of my readers suspect that, in addition to my well-known knack of expressing petty irritation in terms of high-sounding, moralistic scorn, I possess also an ability to create poetry of great confusion and charm." He gave his readers two poems, the first titled "Night over Yugoslavia". It began,
Let cravens crawl when the bugles call
And war clouds lower near;
Let vultures fly in the tumbling sky,
What know the brave of fear?
Three stanzas followed, and then Pegler's comment on them: "Starts nowhere, goes nowhere, means nothing, but resounds in a sort of way. In short, poetry."
This is my favourite w.pegler quote:
"My hates have always occupied my mind much more actively than my friendships. Of friends I will venture to say that I have had a few, but the wish to favor a friend is not so active as the instinct to [disparage]. I think I would go much further" castigating than "remind[ing] a friend, for no particular reason, that I was thinking of him and to advise him that I was sending him a ham."
i love it. it is a terrible shame that w pegler was also a racist red-bashing right-wing bastard. but one cannot have it all.
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