Welcome to The Big I Am & other musings

As Sam Cooke once sang (I paraphrase)

'Don't know much about poetry'

It's true, I don't! This isn't simply hiding behind a phony facade of self-deprecation or wallowing in my own ignorance, it's just that I've never had the time or the patience to read poetry, never mind study it. At a stretch I could recite the odd passage from 'The Ancient Mariner' or 'Reading Gaol' but that's about it. I've attempted The Wasteland, skipped through The Prelude and some of it I get, some of it I don't. But then, what's 'to get?' If any art needs 'explaining' then it has no value.

And yet I like to write poetry or rather, my own intepretation of what I believe poetry to be, which isn't some exclusive, elitist artform that revels in it's own cerebral superiority but a condensed form of literature that concentrates on feeling, sincerity, emotion. I suppose my recurring themes are landscape, memory and mortality; the usual shite! I try not to shape or re-shape the pieces once they've appeared on the page (or screen) as I feel that interferes with the spontaneous process of unloading often subconscious thoughts and feelings. Therefore most of what follows is half-formed and gestating; but that's the way I like it. Cheap manifesto to follow....


THE BIG I AM

Quotationgoeshere (Plutarch’s Life Of Pericles, Paradise Lost or Prelude? Ask Pete)

Vanitystance Pt 1

He held himself in great esteem this architect
Of words
And sound
Comparsions to Eliot (Billy not Tommy)
Dancing toe to toe with
Minors (sic) and assorted
Suns (sick) of the soil
Building Gothic arches above
Their heads for shelter
For warmth
The heat of intellect
Burning through their thick, insolent
Skins

Vanitystance Pt3

Clever eh?
Cleaver eh?
Slice through this shite one more time
Chop away at all the pretence
Sever those metaphorical sinews
Holding poetic muscle together
Flesh on bone
Skeletal self-delusion
Find contentment in your mediocrity
Maaaan!
Look at you; the de-constructivist!
Knocking down walls, already
Ruins (ruined?) (self-attack being the best form of self-defence)

End bit (Pt2 ah-ha!)

Latinbitgoeshere

Or…perhaps….

Yeoldegaelic (dedicated to Irish Tom)

Impressed are we?
That says more about you than
It does about me
Mememe
The Big ‘I AM’