(If you're a poet and you claim you don't get these feelings, I'd suggest you've either only recently started writing poetry, or you're a liar. It's as simple as that. I think even Andrew Motion and Carol Ann Duffy look into the mirror on occasion and ask themselves "Why? Why do I plough on regardless?"
I could have made the ending more optimistic and upbeat, including something about being born to write poetry against the odds, but everyone does that. It's funnier to me to regard it as an affliction).
I could have made the ending more optimistic and upbeat, including something about being born to write poetry against the odds, but everyone does that. It's funnier to me to regard it as an affliction).
What’s the point of
this artform nobody notices,
this expensive, time-consuming,
delicate haircut of a form
that fails to impress even
plump middle-aged ladies
on the bus, their fat
wobbling under their
skin like cheese in cloth,
as they scoff in disapproval?
What’s the point of
these words with no
accompaniment, with this
fragile, brittle aural
sculpture whose
sharp jags are
caused only by SHOUTING,
with each soft word
forming a wave pattern
in the shape of a
check on a tweed jacket?
What’s the point when I
don’t have the credibility, the
soft mother’s hum of melody, the
pounding rhythm of any
sort of party, when my
fingers no longer smell of
metal fretwork and
varnished wood, and I
stink only of yesterday’s clothes?
And at what point do
I walk away?
And should it be now,
when nobody is left listening,
just waiting their turn?
