WBY in the Faery Dust

This morning, a BBC Radio 4 post acknowledging the passing of William Butler Yeats 78 years ago today, came across my twitter feed.

It reminded me of my reaction to his death.  No.  I do not actually remember it, but back in the early oughts,  I read W.B.Yeats: A Life by biographer, Stephen Coote.  Upon closing, after the final pages, I sat in my chilly Duck Mountain cabin, crying liberally. tears and sobs alike.  Of course, I knew this story would have death the end, but The Life absolutely grabbed me with its imperfection.

As a poet, Yeats' life made sense to me, and Coote's biography, which minimized the literary and emphasized day-to-day activity, grounded me as a poet.  His life, somehow, put mine into context.

So here is my poem to Yeats. I wondered, as I glanced back the sixteen years, if maybe it had been a poem to Coote, but no, it was indeed for William's life. (Click on the poem to get full size.)

As an aside, Stephen Coote, though a prolific biographer is an enigma.  He has no wiki profile. There are no photos of him, through any newspapers in the ethernet.  This small search elevated my respect for him.  I would love to hear him speak.  I will chose another of his biographies.

Goddess Queen Siracusa

My poems snap me out of it.  A piece of scrap paper, flipped over in a tidying whim, and here it is.  One of my favourites.  Time to post one.  So many.  So many.

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Anticipation

It is not unusual for me to discover something I have written, weeks, months, or even years after the words originally spilled from my right arm or my fingertips.  If it was hand written, it might be in a notebook, or on a piece of bond paper, or even a serviette.  If I wrote it on the keyboard, I usually find it the day I do some file management and back up work.  And that was today.  I wrote this on my birthday.  It was a long anticipated birthday and slid past with very little hoopla.  I like it.  Today, I gave it the title.

I have a thousand poems.  Some day I will make a book.

  ~~nancy

(click on the image to more easily read the poem)

Metapoetry Series #7 - The Imperfect Mind

Just click on the image of the poems to read them.

Thinking generates lists. We keep them in our heads. Or, we write them on random chits of paper, on bargain store whiteboards with quaint floral decals, in notebooks or month-at-a-glance agendas. Lists. Our mind is insecure without them. Sometimes, because I'm lazy, a list becomes a poem. It is to the poem what a pun is to the joke, or worse.

And thinking is so damned tenuous. It's on the tip of my tongue. What was that we were talking about? (shhhh. I can't introduce you because I forget his name.) Poems, like snow, evaporate or sublimate, into nothingness. What was clear and there in a flash is gone.

So that is why, to me, they are all precious.

Metapoetry #6 - Accounting

Just click on the image to read the poem.

I gave this poem its database entry count as part of its title. I seemed to be aware not only of each poem but of the body of poetry that has exited me. In 1998 I sent all of my hand-written and typed chits of paper, housing poems from the previous couple of decades into an msAccess database, and there they now sit. Everything is cozy and together there: the stupid poems and the poignant ones; the compulsive lists of thoughts and the prose that flows. My stories are there too.

So, I will dedicate this week's episiode to Sara Jeffery. I am not certain who it was listening to my woe-be-gone tales through the mirror when I wrote my 800th, but Sara will know what I mean, as will any of the queens of the shears.

Why do I keep track? Is time beneath it all?

Metapoetry #5 - The Shape of It

Just click on the image to read the poems.


The graphic novel is a now kind of medium, maturing from the comic and bringing visuals into adult literature. A graphic poem can also experiment with visual elements. Font art, like the cut-and-paste kidnapping note from magazine clippings, can make an interesting contribution to what a poem is saying. Poems and images often go hand in hand, but usually in post production, not so often during the inceptive creative process.

I find the physical shape of the poem, on the page, to be an interesting poetic element. And the shapes of the letters themselves can contribute a visual element to a poem.

In this collection, there were two, specific pieces, that took a physical shape on the page during the writing process. Possibly, it was the shape of the page that invited a long and winding graphic output, but the shape also gives a repetitive redundancy ;) that was part of the mindset. The third poem presented here, Away Away, is a galloping poem, more so than a graphic one, but I've always thought of it as a diminishing triangle on the page.