A very fine poet, Paul, a master with words and imagery, invited me along on a blog tour. I’m chuffed to bits that he reads my blog and makes lovely comments.
Now, I also feel a bit guilty because Ali invited me on a blog tour a wee while back and I agreed and then didn’t follow through on my side of the tour. My bad. But, here I make it up to her and, hopefully, send lots of new readers to these two wonderful bloggers. Both write fabulously well, leave me standing at the starting gate, so to speak. So I’m delighted that they each extended the invite and urge you to check them out.
This is my absolute favourite of Paul’s. I had to read it over and over again and eventually made a reading of it for my own pleasure. It’s a wonderful piece of work.
Ali’s writing is so often full of humour and this one appeals to the teacher in me and the love of a fine anecdote expressed just so.
The three questions I am to consider are these.
Why do I write what I do?
How does my writing process work?
How does my work differ from other genres?
These questions certainly got me thinking about how and why I write and when it all began. So I penned this. With a pen!
Poetic infancy, I guess,
began with a doodle,
a scribble on page,
just a mark
till letters’ formations
revealed their delight,
their sensory quality,
their spark.
Like moth to the flame
of the pencil and pad,
to the ink draining
out from the pen,
I scribbled and drew,
no clue what to do
but still the flow
raptured and then
I found out in books,
those worlds in the pages,
what magic
an author creates,
I gloried in them,
hid out in my den
while kids danced and larked.
My fate
was to wonder at words,
their meanings, their source,
to be spellbound
by even their spelling,
to capture each one
how they’d become,
connotations,
their secrets concealing
in Latin, in Greek, all the words that we speak,
in the French, in my own mother tongue,
I found that one word
may erupt as I think,
while feelings
course from
my lifeblood
to ink.
In angst of my teens,
I defined all my dreams
in writing,
who I was, the why of existence.
Years charted of life,
senses refined,
thoughts penned, but
only for my own subsistence,
to reveal who I am,
what I feel, what I think
how my mind
plays tricks in the light,
I wrote for myself,
filed the pads on the shelves,
opened new,
wrote into the night.
Till one day in June,
of two thousand thirteen,
at behest of my brother,
I clicked
on WP’s pages,
typed up some old stuff,
and haven’t looked back.
What a dick!
I now feel to have been
so shy to reveal
with the family of all
who love words
my offerings today,
as I make my own way,
not in forms recognised
but in floods
of joy that I’ve found
in expressing myself,
in floating, eyes gazed
to the sky,
that nothing is worse
than a tongue if it’s cursed
to a silence
that tells its own lie.
Now you’ll be sorry you asked
for a blog tour from me
‘cos bugger!
I just don’t do brief
but that’s just my style,
I’ve tried haiku and twitter
but syllable/character counts
feel like thieves,
reducing outpourings,
that I have to confess,
just splurge like
waterfall’d blurbs,
all the A’s and the B’s
right through to the Z’s –
no process –
just a huge love of words.
And pens and paper.
A bit of a fetish actually!
Why do I write what I do? Because I have to, always have.
How does my writing process work? Like a waterfall.
How does my work differ from other genres? Not a bloody clue! And don’t, frankly, care. They’re all words.
I’d like to invite a few others to this blog tour whose work I admire.
Cole, whose eloquence in words and thoughts on life and meaning entrance me.
http://colemining.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/poets-priests-and-politicians/#comments
She’s coming to Glasgow in September so we’re going to have a good old natter about politics and music and life. Over a couple of glasses of vino, of course. Looking forward to it, Cole!
I only came across this blogger recently and he has quite a distinct style that I really must try in that his poetry is prose is poetry.
Daniel at
http://danielswearingen.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/merle/
Now there are so many more I could mention whose blogs and words I love. But I figure you’ll have more than enough marvellous reading material when you visit Paul, Ali, Cole and Daniel.
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