NoPoWriMo - 2017- April 5th - Our correspondent interviews the famously private poet

Our correspondent interviews the famously private poet


Question: You have before said, which is to say
that people quote you expressing the idea
and you've elaborated on other occasions
that this idea, or conception, I should say

has seemed to have a life, a meaning beyond
its origin.  Would you comment on that?  But first...
Question: In your work, as received by the audience
there often seems to be an almost pause

a moment of collection before expression
where as a reader one is forced to look
for alternative interpretation.  How
do you imagine all that we imagine

sitting as we are so... figuratively
remote from you there with the pen...?  Which makes
me recall!  I have to ask, when ideas strike
-- sorry, this is a different question --

as an idea is dawning in your mind,
what do you gasp of it at first?  A shadow
a mere imagining with every part
to be filled in, or is it more Athena

all springing fully formed with rhymes and scansion
already there in place?  But I see we're out
of time and I wanted to ask about your book!
Never mind, I have enjoyed, it's been my privilege.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 4th - A blue star rises, and who of us can say

From this prompt about the Enigma Variations -- although as ever not directly from that...  I came the long way around.


A blue star rises, and who of us can say

out by the horizon, electric blue ink
a sky uniquely annotated dawning
its own way and who of us can say
what a day like this may mean

one pale, bluish star, low in the brightening sky
I watch you stir your tea I watch
you watch my eyes we're drawing nearer
covertly, through a fall of hair

a blue star might rise unprecedented
just there in its own way on a day
with the horizon not so far away
you tie your hair back firmly with a string

out by the horizon
I greet you properly, a public display
what passes as normal, we're unaliened
and our funny ways strange no more

a blue star rises and all unmanned,
unwomanned, freshly peopled...
we walk out hands held
into the new world, bravely

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 3rd - Did you grow up in a literary family?

The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today links to this interview, in which the first question asked is:

Did you grow up in a literary family?


Mother was entirely fictional.  So dad had
various girlfriends and some of them, pitying us,
would sometimes read out extracts from her life.

My sister and I would argue about who was
the protagonist.  She always thought it her while I,
uncertain, dithered over people met that day.

My uncle lost his appendix, and later on the plot,
eventually misplacing all the contents pages
for his mind, his life, and his wife: Aunty Peggy...

who lived, we thought, for forty years in the mad attics
with the first Mrs Rochester, and a portrait
of Doreen Grey -- now into her second childhood.

The old die old, the good die good and, they hope, well
and all my pages grow sepia at the edges
while my spine stiffens and small print blurs.

My sister failed to become the villain, married badly;
tried again, with a book-shopkeeper's son called Sid,
and now swells well with a kid and a sequel to come

and what have I done.  It seems I am the focus
character after all and I hope I haven't bored
my readership along the way.  Did I grow up

in a literary family?  Well actually
I haven't literally grown up at all.