The funny and the serious

Damien gave me some stuff by Edwin Morgan yesterday, which was very kind of him. I can see why too. He does have a someway similar voice to my own:

- Although a poem is

undoubtedly a 'game'

it is not a game

And although now it is even

part of the game to say so,

making it a "'game'"

is spooky, and we'll

not play that

- Who are you kidding, said

the next card. You just played.

[...]

Heehee. So funny. I like the way he twists you around so many time you forget which way your facing and kind of fall over, but fall over laughing. Thanks Damien.

Also, got a couple of book of Jorie Graham's out which I'm not so excited about. So fucking deep and brainy, allusions to things I suspect I'll never know about. One of those poets I think I really want to get into, but just can't. I really do love plain language, not because I think it is better or anything, but because that is what I speak, read, understand. Other language just alludes me. In small doses it great, to find a new word, but with long complicated lines/sentences loaded with allusion and big words, I do fail to get into the poem. I get the feeling she is a Keats fan too and you can kind of see that in the way she writes. It is very classical in many ways. I will perservere with it though, and try and change all this. And for fairness sake, from Never (2002, Carcanet, UK. ISBN: 1-85754-621-0):

On a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl

themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the

way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-

infolding,

entering and exiting their own unison in unison)[...]

Actually scrap all that. I'm wrong about the whole big word thing. I think it is more her tone or something that at first puts me off. But that little section is beautiful, describing the motion of the little fish without ever saying what the narrator is looking at. Requires further reading...