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by Hugh Cook |
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So they're leaving now, for good - |
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It's subtly dated. The "girl" in "brazen girl" is unthinking, natural - this was written before the invention of political correctness. The cigarettes, which might now seem a little aberrant, designate the totally ordinary.
I don't know how I came to write this poem way back then. It's about experience which is not really my experience, a world observed (or imagined) rather than a world lived. It's not the sort of thing I'd write now, but it looks okay to me, and so I've put it online, and I'm sure it will find readers. The reason for my confidence is that, all through the year, people have been finding the site with searches like "fish poems" or "poem on pregnancy" ... whatever you've written a poem about, someone wants to read it. (That said, it has to be understood that building a successful website is a lot of work. If you have a little itty bitty website somewhere containing three and a half poems, then don't be surprised if you only get three and a half visitors a year.) That's the most surprising thing that I've found out about the Internet: that people are using it to look for poetry. It's surprising because, in the publishing world, poetry is the one thing that really doesn't sell, that doesn't have a market. There aren't the readers for it, you see. But there are. Maybe not in the bookshop, but certainly out there ... somewhere. So, at odd intervals during the year, I've been digging old poems out of my archives and putting them online. And they've been finding readers. And, encouraged by this, I've been writing new poems ... some pretty simple ... others requiring quite a bit of elaborate effort, like my dragon poem. And this new poetry writing has been one of the surprising developments in my life in the year 2003, because for the longest time ... for the years, I think, between 1986 and 2000 ... I didn't publish any poetry, I don't think, excepting some small pieces that were published as part of my CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS novels. So, in review, the year 2003 was, for me, the year in which I felt myself becoming an Internet poet ... in a world spectacularly cruel to poetry, the Internet has enabled the poems to reach an audience ... pretty painlessly, really. (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) |
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