Reading:
On finding poetry in my ninth decade I delighted in my virginity. No studied craft between Me and what it was I hoped to say. I feasted in that Unschooled paradise where I could take my beauty straight And hoped to write it from my heart, indifferent to poetic sheen. But if you want to make good verse they said, poems that might last You have to follow certain rules: of metre and of rhyme, Alliteration and the colloquy of vowels. Of verse forms passed On down the ages, stanzas which have stood the test of time. Getting on for ninety though I’ve no years left for long Apprenticeship in others’ work until I’m free to set out on my own. And ‘It’s too late to repair the damage of a lifetime’ before My first attempt to conjoin thought and feeling into one. It’s not just lack of skill. My problem’s not technique Nor even commonplaces as the only things I’ve found to speak. The truth is that skill alone will never make that perfect lyric line Which melts the heart. For as Picasso said, ‘I find, I do not seek.’ So is my verse mere argument decked out with prosody, The QED secreted in that final line? Prose chopped up with cunning end stops, Aphorism laid out in sentences that chime? Worse, is it just feel-good dressed in drag for those who, reading Can be made to think that all is truly for the best? Sermon where there should be song, no room for verbal jest? But do how poets conjure sound and syntax into periods that sing? Intuition is the one thing that makes magic with no ‘reason why’ And ‘winging it’ is no bad metaphor for those who hope to fly. You only lose your hymen once so I’ll press-on, poetic fingers crossed, In hope that I may find pure poetry before I die and all is lost.
Peter Lloyd Jones 