Getting Closer

I feel like I am getting closer to an idea of how I want to order my collection now and I have a working title as well. One of the most difficult choices is what things to put in and what things to leave out. I tend to find that I don't ever really like much of my work that is over a year old - but used that as a criteria for will go in the collection it will be very thin.  I have a body of work that I produced on my MA at UEA but I am not really keen on much of it now - and anything written before that is almost definitely out.

The only thing that I know for certain at this juncture is that my sequence of prose poems is definitely going in, and some of my poems about transformation.  The prose poems have a fairly unique voice and at one point I had thought that I might wait until I had enough of them for a mini collection or a pamphlet - the trouble is that I have flurries of writing them and then I don't write any for ages. Each time I write one I think that now I am surely done with them, but then a month or so later another one pops out.

Transformation

I have noticed that one of the recurring themes in my writing is the idea of transformation - one thing turning into another thing or something emerging from inside something else. These transformations are not always comfortable. I am also a little obsessed with the idea of things being not what they seem - in my current writing this obsession has manifested itself in the form of poems where a human has animal qualities or is revealed to actually be an animal.  I am intrigued by the idea from quantum physics that we all contain particles of stardust from the big bang and the creation of the universe and also by Bohm's  theory of the Implicate Order which connects everything with everything else. "In principle, any individual element could reveal "detailed information about every other element in the universe." The central underlying theme of Bohm's theory is the "unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders." (http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_sol/plenum/plenum_3.html)

My poems are much more simplistic than this of course, but nevertheless it is a fascinating idea that we all have elements of other things inside us.  I also seem to keep coming back to the idea of alienation which fits with the transformation theme very well. The change and alienation within the poems is not as large scale as in "The Metamorphosis" - usually it is more subtle - someone might have the characteristics of a bird or be revealed to be a fox.