girl was born - an exploration of a poem

I was recently asked to write some background to one of my poems and explain why I used a particular form for it. It is interesting going back to a poem and trying to remember the intention behind it. I couldn't remember when I wrote the poem - except I knew it was before I moved house in 2021. The intentions were clearer to me and the reasons I laid it out as prose poem with slashes. I will share the poem and what I wrote. The poem is from my book The Telling.

girl was born

girl was in the world / her mother was a horse / and her father was a pony / or was it the other way round / girl never knew when a day would turn sour / the world was a farmyard full of plastic animals / the houses were wooden / tiny painted rectangles for windows / nothing to look out from / girl looked out of her rectangular eyes with longing / girl reached for quiet / she reached for making sense / the words danced themselves up and down on the page / until finally she understood them / girl was born too late / or too early / she became a sister / then she became a sister again / she ran up the slippery stairs two at time / she jumped down them / girl was a ratty tennis ball / somewhere along the way she lost her bounce / girl was born a second time / girl was born of the woods / her father was a pine tree / her mother was a bramble / the house was full of midges / there was no way of returning to where she had come from / she picked up a twig shaped like a gun and aimed it

I wrote this as a stream of consciousness piece. I was thinking about how it felt like I had two different lives as a child. The first life from birth to three years old where we lived in a bedsit in my mum's friend's house in London (Ealing) - the friend had three kids, a dog and was a dress maker, the house was always busy. And then the second life when we moved to Thetford, a small town in Norfolk. There we had a two bedroom council house and I was the only child until my sister was born two years later. In Thetford the house was quiet. During the day it was just me and my mum. We lived opposite a pine wood - that wood was a big part of my childhood and often creeps into my poems, as does the pine forest that Thetford was surrounded by. I was a bright (some might say precocious) child (I was also neuro-divergent but we didn't know that then). I refused to go to nursery and also insisted on learning to read when I was 3 or 4. I learned using the Dr Seuss books. I was also a tomboy - preferring cars and guns to dolls. 

The poem is about a girl trying to make sense of the world around her. The objects (such as toys) become anchors or signs to steer by. Sometimes the separation between the girl and the object becomes blurred. I have always imagined people as different types of animal and object and vice versa. It helps me to make sense of things and is probably heavily influenced by the types of book I read as a child - fairytales, Tolkien and Enid Blyton - books where animals and trees talk and the most surprising and surreal things can happen. 

The order of the poem is not logical, it is not a linear chronologically ordered narrative. Memories are generally not linear - one memory can spark another and another. I knew it would probably be a prose poem as I was writing it. I like the density of a prose poem and the way it can keep that stream of consciousness feel. When it came to editing it, using conventional punctuation like full stops and commas felt wrong. Commas and full stops made each thought (each segment) feel too final, too separate somehow, but I still felt like I needed to break up the text with more than just a simple space. The use of the space in place of punctuation feels (to me) like it slows down the speed at which one reads the text. I like the use of slashes in poems - it feels like each slash is a momentary pause in thought - but exactly that - momentary, the eye moves on fairly quickly as the text feels more cohesive than if it had gaps and line breaks. It also means that you can break the syntax of the poem in unexpected places (a little like enjambement I suppose). I like this and when I read the poem out loud, I do read it with these tiny breaks. It might sound a little jarring at first, but I like this - it feels right for the voice of the poem.  Natalie Diaz says of her slashed poems "I hope they make the readers’ eyes uncomfortable, that they physically and musically express the disjointed, jagged experience explored in the poem."

You can buy my book The Telling from Nine Arches Press - https://www.ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/the-telling

Poetry Competitions - some hints and tips

As a freelancer and believer in the written word I have many hats - some I wear for money and some I wear for the simple love of the hat. Two of these hats involve poetry competitions - one I sift for (for money), the other I print all the poems for and send them to the judge (for love). I have been donning these hats for several years and am frustrated by how many people shoot themselves in the foot when entering poetry competitions. 

I thought it might be helpful to list some dos and don'ts. I am not an expert. Like you I enter many competitions and don't get anywhere. I have won a couple of competitions and both times I thought the poems unlikely to win. This list is by no means exhaustive.

1) Difficult and emotive content

It is painful reading poetry competition entries - not because the entries are bad (although inevitably some are) but because people are baring their souls and telling you their deepest (and darkest) secrets. There are many poems that move me with their content but will never make the shortlist because they are not doing enough as a poem, or are too oblique, or are simply prose broken into lines to look like a poem. This is sad for a reader - some of those poems have important things to say. Some feel like a cathartic exercise for the writer but are not offering much to reader. A poem about trauma (or loss) needs to offer something to the reader too. A poem is not a misery memoir - though it can touch on the same subjects. I actually find poems more powerful if they are less explicit in their content (I like this in films too) - something alluded to but not explicitly spelt out - a good example of this is the poem 'The Bicycle' by Katrina Naomi from her book What the Crocodile Taught Me. 

Another way into difficult subject matter is to use metaphor.

2) Size isn't everything

Short poems are good, they can be very powerful - but it's unlikely that a haiku will win a major poetry competition - they just don't stand a chance against those poems that have more space to make their point. Save them for short poem competitions - Magma has a short poem category in its annual competition. Of course, there is every chance that I may be proved wrong one day.

Similarly there are poems that feel way too long. Some of these go off at odd tangents (this may work in a prose poem but works less well in a conventional one). Some say the same thing over and over in a variety of ways. Some poems feel like they need the ending and beginnings lopped off - the introduction and the explanation. A good poem feels tight and not baggy. Frisk your poems thoroughly for superfluous weight - you should be doing this anyway, but it's even more important for a competition poem.

tip: One technique I use is to take longer poem and make it shorter to fit the competition guidelines. Sometimes it can't be done, but often it can - and usually the poem is better for it.

3) Write like you live in the twenty-first century

It's as simple as that. I see many poems that read as if they were penned in the 1800's - loaded with words like 'hast', 'thou' and 'whence'. The only time this is acceptable is if you are writing a pastiche - but it's dubious even then. If you are writing like that because all the poetry you read looks like that, then you need to start reading modern poetry. If you don't know where to start get in contact with me and I will send you a reading list. 

tip: Don't expect to love all modern poetry - you need to find the poets that speak to you. You wouldn't expect to go into a library and like the first novel you pick up. Poetry is the same.

Syntax is important too. Beginning poets often think that poetry is some kind of special code and this leads to poems that sometimes don't make grammatical sense - sentences without clauses, sentences that are broken up in odd ways. A poem should be written the way we speak. Try reading your poem out loud and you will soon hear if the sentence structures are odd or unnatural.

4) Rhyming

Rhyming is fine - personally I like a bit of rhyme - but it has to be good. If you are rhyming because you think all poetry has to rhyme then please go back and read number three above. Good rhyme can be amazing - it doesn't whack you round the head shouting I am a rhyming poem - in fact sometimes you might not even notice the rhyme at first. Other times the rhymes want themselves to be noticed. Similar effects can be had from half rhymes, slant rhymes and repetition. A word should never feel like it's in the poem simply for the rhyme scheme - better to ditch the rhyme scheme or put the poem away for a while and hope the right word comes to you.

5) Angst and anger

In the course of sifting/printing and teaching I see many poems that express deep felt sorrow,  grief, angst or anger. While these poems may be cathartic to write - they offer little to the reader. If a poem's message is 'I am angry - really angry' - the reader is left with the question, why? If you need to write an angry poem tell us why you are angry or at least hint at it. 

If you are despairing and feel like the world hates you - please give us some clues as to why you feel like that (and see a counsellor). These kind of poems are frustrating to me as I feel the raw emotion of them but they also leave me a little cold - they don't let me into the world of the poem/writer. I think that's the difference between therapeutic writing and poetry for general consumption - my morning pages are not for anyone else's eyes. I can moan and rage in them and I don't have to explain myself. If I want to put those emotions into a poem I have to offer the reader a way into them too - they have to care about the narrator or feel like there is some kind of universal truth that they can relate to, an 'oh yes that bothers me in that way too'. 

Grief poems can be really difficult too. Sometimes we need a bit of distance from the loss. Sometimes we need a lot of distance. It has been more than ten years since my brother died and I still find it hard to write about. Some of the most successful poems relating to loss of a loved one are about the small things rather than directly about the loss itself. Penelope Shuttle's 'Peter's Shoes' is a great example of this. We all understand what that 'year' means - yet she hasn't felt the need to spell it out. The use of 'you' and 'your' in the poem is clever to - it addresses the dead person but allows the reader to bring their own meaning to the poem (their own lost or dead) in a way that using the specific name throughout wouldn't.

6) Subject matter

Pretty much anything goes in terms of subject matter these days but there are some things to be wary of (and, yes, I have definitely seen all of these):

a middle class white person writing of the black experience 

poems about murdering young women that read like a script for CSI

explicit sex for the sake of it

racist/homophobic/sexist poems

ekphrastic poems that describe the art work/painting that they are based on, but don't do much more than that

poems based on historic events that just describe the event and don't offer us anything new (be careful with this type of poem of overloading it with facts from all your research too)

anecdotes about something that happened and simply that - sometimes these are just prose chopped up to look like a poem

7) Form

Anything goes in term of form really - although as I said earlier a Haiku is unlikely to win a major competition. Poems in strict form can and do win as do poems in free verse. The trick is to do it well and for the form to fit the subject matter. Also check whether your poem is actually a poem and not just a piece of prose chopped up - could it be a prose poem, a bit of life writing or a short story?

8) The Title

You would be amazed looking through a mailbag for a competition or a journal at how many poems have the same title. I must have read a hundred poems in the last year called 'Lockdown' for instance. One line titles like'Lockdown', 'Snow' or 'Rain' are best avoided. I would also avoid titles that are a pun - especially if it's a serious poem. You also don't want a title that gives away the whole poem or a title that is a line of the poem (this takes the power away from the line in the poem). Titles are notoriously difficult. If you are having problems ask your workshopping group or a writer friend. Sometimes when I have been really stuck a friend or a tutor has immediately suggested a title that brings the poem alive.

9) The ending

I talked earlier about poems that feel like they should end sooner. Beware of over-blown or summing-up endings. Trust your reader - you really shouldn't need to spell it all out for us. I have noticed that some great poems go a bit weird towards the end - sometimes a really good poem will suddenly go all poetic, start using archaic words, or hit us round the head with a bit of moral guidance. Similarly some writers feel the end to end on a pun, a joke, or a punchline. Trust the poem to do the work. Endings are hard but there is shortcut to the perfect ending. Workshop your poem if you are having trouble, pay for a critique, or put the poem away for a while so you can come back to it with fresh eyes.

Mother's Day Poem - Knitting

Knitting

My mother is knitting a womb,
soft click of needles in the semi-darkness,
pictures from the turned down TV
reflected in the half-moons of her glasses,

she watches a mime of cowboys
slinging guns in a dusty street,
a stampede of shooting and horses;
all that death.

My mother is knitting a womb,
out of wool the colour of wine or blood,
her glass of wine on the low coffee table,
a man falls down dead in the dust.

My mother smiles,
she hears me in the doorway,
come in dear she says don’t just stand there,
I sit down next to her in the semi-darkness,

sinking into the cushions of the old red sofa,
she pours me a glass of wine,
a man falls off a roof,
a horse rolls in the dust.

Julia Webb

Voice of the Ridge By C.D. Wright

I was devastated to hear of the death yesterday of my favourite poet C.D. Wright. What a loss to world poetry. My favourite poem of hers is not online so I will post it here as a tribute.

Voice of the Ridge

By C.D. Wright

Something about a hazy afternoon−a long drive

          about cedars spearing the sky

Something about a body at a crossing

          about a dog missing a paw

          about buying a freshly dressed hen

Something about the locus of the dead

Something about a strange town on a weekend

          about large white panties on a line

About a table in a family-owned café

          an old morsel on the tines

Something about the owner dragging one foot

Something about wine from a jelly glass

Something about a hazy afternoon−a long drive

          about no purse no stockings

Something about unfolding the map

          about a cemetery that isn’t kept up

          about grasshoppers−their knack for surprise

Something about finding a full set of clothes in the weed

Something about a hazy afternoon−a long drive

          about hills of goldenrod

Something about filling-station attendants

          the one blue hole in the clouds

Something about birds of prey−the locus of the dead

Something about the long drive home−a slow sundowning

           about the din of insects

Something about straight gold hair on a pillow

Something about writing by the kingly light

           in the quick minutes left before lips

           suction a nipple from wrinkled linen

Photo Project Revisited

Back in February I posted about a new sequence of poems I was writing that concerned photographs from my childhood, both real and imagined. I had a flurry of writing these poems and then, as often happens, I got distracted by other topics and stopped writing them for a few months. While I was having an editing session a few weeks ago I revisited some of them and this led to me being inspired to write a few more.

I often seem to work like this. Occasionally I will write a sequence pretty much all in one go over a few days or weeks, but other times I will find I write a sequence that I leave alone for a while but keep coming back to. My prose poem sequence about the religious family was written like this - I have written quite a few poems in the same voice (that of a youngish girl) over the space of several years. Sometimes I think I am finished with it and a few weeks later will find another poem in her voice clamouring to get out.

My photographic series seems to be working in much the same way. I become bored with it or lose momentum and leave it for a while, and suddenly weeks later something will spark a memory that leads to another poem.

This is the latest one in the sequence - this is an imagined photo of a real incident.

Visit

This is the estranged aunt
who arrives out of the blue
with Easter eggs in a fancy vase
and a cuddly rabbit,
this is her at the kitchen table
in her fur coat drinking tea,
this is how you loved the rabbit
by pulling out his whiskers,
this is the aunt leaving in a taxi
before your dad gets home.

Later and other repetitions

So someone said the other day that they had heard that you should never use the word later in a poem. I am not sure that I agree with this, but it did make me more aware of how and when I  use it in my own poems. I gave a reading at Ely River Rhymes Festival yesterday and one of the things I noticed was that two of the poems I read used the word later to signify something that will or could happen later on. This seems like too many  times - I don't want that kind of repetition of ideas in one reading.

I sometimes notice this kind of repetition in books. I know we all have particular words and phrases that we are attracted to, and that these ideas sometimes appear in more than one poem. For example I have a poem called "The Bird Inside" in which the "I" is "full to the brim with tweets and whistles" - and I have used a similar sentiment in another poem, which is about a new mother in hospital, where "her mouth emits a series of beeps and whistles..." Two very similar ideas, so similar in fact, that although the poems have quite different subject matter I don't feel comfortable reading them in the same reading. This is the kind of thing that I think I would really notice if I was reading a collection, and I wonder, although I like both poems, whether one of them should be ejected from the collection that I am putting together.

But back to the idea of whether "later" is an over-used conceit in poetry. I suppose it is used a fair amount (I will probably notice it a lot more now that my awareness has been drawn to it) and I will be thinking hard over the next few of days about whether there are other ways of signalling something that might or will happen later on in a poem.

The trouble with writing...

I have slacked off with my blog recently - not because I am lazy, but because I have been busy and I have been putting my writing energy into writing and editing poems as well as trying to send stuff out to journals etc.  My Easter resolution was to be much more pro-active about submitting work and so far this seems to be paying off as I have already had two poems accepted.

Yesterday I printed a bunch of poems out to see if I had enough to put together a pamphlet sized collection. I find it really hard to know what to leave out and what to include - there is very little that I like of what I wrote at the art school and even of my MA work there are are only a few that I am really happy with.  I wonder if I am too critical - the trouble with creative work is that generally as you evolve you go off your earlier work. I felt the same about my art work too and in fact I recently had a purge where I threw a lot of my old work away. I don't necessarily want to do that with my poems though, I suspect some of my earlier ones can be made better and maybe I will spend a bit of time trawling through them finding the ones that are worth saving.

Escaping the Thought Rut

I seem to be a bit immobilized at the moment by weather and health but I am trying to make the most of it by reading and working my way through a book called How to Write a Poem by John Redmond. It might seem like quite a basic title but actually I am finding it really useful. The chapter titles are what you would expect from this type of book - basic stuff like "Viewpoint", "Image", "The Question of Voices" etc, but they are well written and each chapter has a writing task at the end related to the chapter that you have just read.

I love this kind of book - I think that however practised a writer you are it doesn't hurt to go back over the basics once in a while.  Sometimes you might learn something new or be reminded of something that you have forgotten. I find the writing exercises really helpful too - anything that takes you out of your own thinking rut (and we all have one) has got to be good and occasionally they have inspired a really good poem that I may not have otherwise written.

Where has the "I" gone?

I had a great work-shopping session with a friend on Tuesday morning and  she raised quite an interesting question about my recent poetry - which was where has the "I" gone? And looking back at the body of work that I have produced on the MA it does seem that the "I" has been somewhat absent from my work. I find this extremely interesting, especially so because the work that I produced on my creative writing degree at the art school had a very strong sense of self and was intensely personal and firmly rooted in time and place. So where has this self gone? Is it that I haven't felt comfortable enough to be as candid as that on the MA? Is it that I have worked through those issues and moved on in my writing? Or is it that I have been responding to the comments of one of my tutors that some of my poems were less accessible because they were so personal?

The poems that I wrote about cleaning out my mum's house are personal but in a different way than the poems that I used to write, and the same with my journey poems. The new poems are more about what is happening around the "I" than about the "I" itself. This is very interesting and I think that there is a definite danger that if I am not careful  the poems might become too detached and therefore less accessible to the reader.  The "I" could simply become a thing that the landscape and circumstances surround and act upon rather than taking a central role.

My question is does the loss of the"I" make the poems dislocated and ultimately less powerful, less believable or is the "I" implicit in the narrative voice?

My friend also raised the question about whether some of the poems were doing enough. For example I had written a poem about milking and she questioned whether or not I should give voice to the wider issues that the whole idea of milking evokes.  Heaney, for instance, almost always has a deeper issue in his poems about rural and domestic life. My worry though, is that I don't want to state these deeper issues to openly - aren't the issues of farming, motherhood etc implied in any poem about milking?  I found myself wondering later exactly what the imperative of the poem I had written was - was it the problematical relationship between mother and child/human and animal, was it the ethics of farming, or was it a little of all of these?  One of the things I wanted to do was to dispel a little of the myth of the beauty and glory of rural pastimes. There is a great romanticism (especially in literature) attached to the milking of cows but I found it to be somewhat unpleasant and I wanted to convey this in the poem.

A Poem is a Commotion

On Wednesday night the American poet Peter Gizzi gave a reading at UEA. I had not heard of him before I got the email inviting us to the reading but promptly looked him up on the inter-web and read a couple of poems that were really good. He was really inspiring and afterwards talked a little about writing - one of the things that he said was that "a poem is a commotion" which was really similar to something our tutor said last term - she said  that "a poem is a disturbance". When she first said it I was quite resistant to the idea but over the recent weeks I have endeavoured to observe where it is that my poems actually come from, where they begin.  In doing this I have begun to realise that she is right, often there is a physical disturbance or agitation that comes before a poem. The disturbance will come and then there will be an urgent need to write - like a mini birth I guess. Sometimes it can feel a bit like the feeling that you get when you are about to be sick (but without the actual nausea). Or it can feel like when you are building up to a big cough or a sneeze.  It is a very odd sensation and it often arises after I have read something inspiring or if I have been to a reading. But at other times it comes if I am on a journey (walk, train, car etc.) or in a new place. Sometimes it happens when I am simply walking along the street and over the years I have learnt to stop, get out my notebook and pen and write it down - because otherwise the idea is usually gone by the time I reach my destination. It's like when an idea comes just as you are dropping off to sleep - you might think that you will remember it in the morning but usually you don't. Sleep somehow seems to flush those ideas out however great and fully formed they seem at the time.

Big Journey, Small Journey

I am wondering if it is enough to write a collection of poems that are about journeys or does there have to be more to it, some deeper meaning behind it? Should the poems be making some kind of bigger point -should the collection be some kind of metaphorical or spiritual journey, or perhaps echo the journey through life?

One of our poetry tutors told us that a poem should not be a story or an atmosphere - so the question I need to ask myself is are my journey poems merely an atmosphere? They are certainly trying to capture both the atmosphere and essence of a particular place. I suppose, though, that for a poem to be purely an atmosphere it would have to be nothing more than a physical description of a place. On first reading my poems are just that, but I am also trying to convey something more, to give the reader something beyond place that they can relate to (so that you could read them without ever having been to the places within them and still get something from them). This is where the ideas of how man affects the environment and the idea of a life journey (life/death) come in. Through physical description the poems convey a sense of how man changes the landscape - using ideas such as: fields, crops, litter, signs, etc. The use of devices such as the crosses on trees waiting to be felled also indicates this physical changing of the landscape but also alludes to the idea of life and death.

Editing, Squirrelling and the Narrative Voice

Yesterday was all about editing. After having had such a positive (and helpful) tutorial, I knew that I had to knuckle down and get on with the real work of writing - licking those initial ideas into a more coherent shape. I am a terrible procrastinator but I knew that the time had come to get off of Facebook and into Word.

Although initially I often feel a bit precious about the stanza orders of my poems - they do often benefit from a little reordering. This has definitely been the case with my journey poems because they are highly descriptive poems about moving through particular landscapes it was sometimes hard to find the driving image of each poem and I needed this to enable me to make sense of the poems and order them in a logical way. Instead I found that I needed to look at what the poem was implying but not saying directly. It is not that the poems necessarily have any kind of underlying message but more that there is something going on beneath the surface that is alluded to - for instance in the forest poem the narrator passes through an area of the forest where trees are about to be felled - this can be seen as a metaphor for death - this, I realised during the editing process, is the central image of the poem even though it occurs quite near the end.

Other issues that I needed to confront were those of viewpoint and voice. I had written a poem called Squirrelling using the narrative voice of a squirrel, however, after talking to my tutor I realised that there was some confusion for the reader over who was actually speaking in the poem. In some places it seemed like the person speaking was a human and in other places a squirrel and this needed to be resolved. In other poems I needed to think about tense - sometimes changing the narrative voice of a poem from the third person to the first person can give it new life and energy and it can enable the reader to engage with the work more fully.

Here is the (hopefully) finished version of Squirrelling.

Squirrelling

Wrinkle of fur on small paws

as you rustle the shiny nuts

into the hole that we have prepared.

Fluff of tail as I ascend the tree.

You dig with picky paws

amidst the dried-up leaves and tree roots,

while I run up frosted trunks

ice-picks on my feet.

For now I am content to watch,

later we will dig a frenzy

at every tree foot

trying hard to find our stash.

Back to the Source

The advice of my poetry lecturer this term has been to go back to the place where a poem comes from and see what else you find.

Wise words but not as easy as one might think. I think that largely I have avoided doing this in my writing practice. I tend to write something and then go back and edit it several times, shaping it what I hope is a finely honed poem.

But is rare that I actually add much more to the original words. This is partly through fear of spoiling it and partly through a kind of preciousness about what I have written and I realise now that this is both short-sighted and a little arrogant. I am not doing my work any favours and if I want to take that leap sideways which George Szirtes spoke of last term I need to be able to go back and re access the source of my ideas.

I tried this earlier this week in a poem I was writing about a house fire. I am not happy with the poem itself because I feel it is too much of a narrative and I shy away from writing that kind of poem generally, mainly because the long narrative poem is not a form that I excel at. But hey I am on a poetry MA and it is a good time to be trying my hand at taking risks and writing different styles and on different subjects - trying not to just write in the usual ways about the usual subjects. Anyway to get back to the point I wrote quite a bit of the poem in a a kind of free writing exercise kind of way and then instead of coming back to it later and simply typing it up and trying to lick it into shape I actually went back into the subject and wrote a whole lot more. I was surprised at how much more was there - it is just a shame that I don't like the poem.

here is a short extract:

I hear the throaty rumble of fire engines along the track,

the shouts of men in braces and helmets as they haul the heavy body

of the hose across the field to the river below the wood.

And now the house begins to creak and groan

like a ship straining at its moorings in a violent storm,

its sad mouth collapses in on itself

while its prematurely clouded eyes cry tears of river water.

Question

Is there a new underground emerging in British poetry? a post-post-modernism that aims to make poetry more accessible to ALL readers by writing about things that they can relate to but in a surprising way. Poetry doesn't have to be pretty or written in inaccessible language. unfortunately it seems that the general population seems to still have the idea that poetry is difficult and elitist and this myth is somehow perpetuated by the press and the literary establishment.

Dylan Thomas said that when he first came to love poetry as a child that it was the sound of the words that he came to love first and the meaning was only secondary. For me it was the opposite - I loved the places that the nursery rhymes and poems took me to. I wanted to be that pedlar man driving his gypsy caravan through the countryside or dancing round a fire at night in the woods with the raggle taggle gypsies. I didn't neccessarily need my poems to have a narrative but I did need them to have something that drew me in and allowed me to dream myself out of my ordinary life and into some mysterious other world inside the poem.

Recycling Day

This is part of a poem that I collaged onto boxes that had been put out for recycling. To use the whole poem seemed too much, it would have made the image too busy. I tried the image in black and white but actually I think that I like the slightly cropped colour version better. I was trying to write in response to the situation so that the poem related more to the context in which it was placed whilst (hopefully) standing up as a poem in its own right. I still feeel that the text is somehow seperate to the background and I am wondering if I should try writing on objects and leaving them ouside for a few days to weather them.