Monday, August 2, 2004

On my blogroll is a link to the excellent Letchworth poetry group. Poetry ID.  Itís been going for some years & has an active core membership of some 10 ñ 15 members.  I joined it at around about the time that I started this blog ñ February 2003.  For a long time I enjoyed both the lively, supportive company & the stimulus to writing provided by the workshop sessions.    However, after a while I found the pressure of having to produce a poem to a set stimulus within 20 minutes increasingly difficult.. Never the most prolific of writers, the process began to seem more & more akin to an examination & I developed something of an on-the-spot writerís block.  Regrettably but necessarily, I ducked out for a while, only returning after a chance meeting in the street with one of the members.  He was concerned & encouraging so I began to attend meetings again.   I was now less neurotic about producing under pressure having found that the ID influence had prevailed during my leave of absence & Iíd actually produced (for me, anyway) quite a lot of material in varying stages of development.   I had to opt out again in the early summer as workload & the increasing imminence of Rosieís arrival intensified.  In order to stake my claim as an active but temporarily preoccupied member of Poetry ID (& not a neurotic renegade) I emailed the group explaining my circumstances & announcing the fact that Emma was, at the time of writing, in the first stages of labour.    Rather sadly, it drew no responses so I sent an email to the member with whom Iíd had the chance encounter, announcing Rosieís birth & hoping to be in a position to return in the late summer when the domestic constraints might have eased somewhat.  I received no reply to that email either & have had no contact with any Poetry ID members since.   Itís a febrile world where poets gather together.  Maybe I needed to have got my feet more firmly under the collective table in order to warrant some acknowledgement after a prolonged absence.  But although my poetry seems to need solitude in which to begin to make its tentative emergence, I do miss the company of others engaged in the same craft & I regret the breaking of contact with such able fellow travellers.  But being a broad-shouldered sort of guy I shall proudly retain the Poetry ID link on my blogroll & I encourage you to visit & maybe even leave a message in the visitorsí book.   ÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖ.   When I visited Dublin for the first time in 1998 I paid a visit to the National Gallery of Ireland where I saw for the first time the extraordinary stained glass work of Irish artist Harry Clarke.  Sitting in a corner of the darkened chamber in which some of his work was very effectively displayed, I wrote a poem in one sitting called ëStained Glassí.    The inspiration for the particular theme didnít derive from any specific sample of Clarkeís glass work; the window depicted in the poem is something of a synthesis of many seen across Europe.  However, the graphic intensity of his scenes & the richness of their colouring are very much an element within the piece.  Unusually, Iíve only made one small revision to it since scribbling it down first.           Stained Glass   The quality of light: this, a piece of late evening sky. How darkness can shine: last of the sun, first breath of the stars, a waxing moon. Judas walks out of the small room. They are still dining. No one knows but Jesus and his head is turned away. They canít escape, these protagonists, caught between ruby and green, the dark blue light, the black bars of lead.     pic from: www.comp.mq.edu.au/.../ cmd_mod_moon_bkside.jpg 11:14:52 PM    Mmm? []

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