The only thing that moves is the earth beneath us

The Ant is a Centaur in its Dragon World

Ezra Pound 

The Space Between All Things

I wont clog your dashboards up with any more puerile ranting, but neither have I felt the motivation to write anything of merit.

So I give you the overlooked sensibilities of a madman

The clock has turned enough
To reach a planet
Life is endless night
I hear wings beating in
the dark of my room
A giant Raven is waiting –

for me to fall asleep. 

- Spike Milligan

Anti-Grump.

Coursework almost finished.

Literally shitting myself with glee.

Well, when I say “literally” I mean “figuratively”…

oh, just go read “The Dead” by James Joyce 

Then two glorious things will happen: my underwear will remain unsullied and I’ll have made perfect sense.

BOOM.

drmpoetry-deactivated20110725 asked: I so admire your poems for their richness. And they avoid being pretentious because they're coming from an honest writer, or so it seems in my humble opinion.

Thanks for sharing.

All the Very Best,
DRM

[This is a long answer, but you inspired me to be explain some stuff about myself!]

Firstly - Wow, I’m so flattered, thank you so much :)
I really like your poem “Them” by the way: it’s just fragile enough to be profoundly touching whilst avoiding the dangers of gratuitous sadness - a balance that is surprisingly hard to strike (and I speak from experience)!

I too like to think I’m not pretentious, because when I write I don’t pick words on the basis of their obscurity or their intellectual economy, but because (and I mean this in absolute honesty) they sound pretty. Of course, a word has to sound pretty *and* bear some resemblance to what I actually want to say, but when building a poem in my head I first and foremost consider its music. It’s something I’ve chosen to study extensively here at university, and something I think is the most beautiful aspect of our language - especially when amplified though the brevity of poetry. That’s what Poem #24 is all about: the idea that our imaginations are inseparable from sounds. 

So, in essence, I don’t just want to articulate my thoughts, I want to express myself in a way that is emotive because (to shamelessly borrow from Alexander Pope) the sound is an echo of the sense. A fundamental aspect of human emotions is that they defy paraphrase for virtue of their intensity, and as such I do not find that sentences alone are ever enough. And that is why I resort to the sonic qualities, because I feel they somehow transcend the level of literal meaning in vocabulary. So, I would define my poetic license as a means of compensating for the insufficiencies of my own language.

I hope that explanation is not (ironically) too pretentious. It’s just something I really believe in. :)

Keep up your blog too, it’s full of good stuff!
Stay happy, thank you again,
Tom 

This is how I would describe my poetic ethic:

Less words than Dylan Thomas, more words than Charles Bukowski, and all the loins of Geoffrey Hill

Poem #8

[NOTE: I had to give this poem a title, otherwise it just seems like a collection of incongruous images, which is not ideal… Anyway, I’ve always wanted to write a poem about Jules Verne and now I’ve finally got round to it!]

The Last Dream of Jules Verne

We are oceans, and I am waves,
Speaking deep in Creole with stone.
Coagulate with air, movement is
Drawn in thought and born from planets:

The arms leviathan, raw glass,
And the brow plutonic, folding
The pearl heart of the Earth
In a chrysalis of brine.

Rock held me. It is quite enough
Just to hold, to cup the vessel
And make an orchard of butterflies,
Beating against those palms until

The hands drop into ocean and make
Waves fluted like a god-flower.
Perhaps this moth gazing iris
Will tempt the blue and fossil braid

To open its fists, open
And return our sand-blasted
Butterflies to the held breath
Of the air, anticipated.

- Malb 13/05/2011 16:28