In amongst the Christmas cards was a letter from Ragged Raven Press to say I had come 2nd in their competition for poems over 40 lines, with my poem Glass Bottomed Boat. This was a nice surprise, since I had forgotten I'd entered. They also want to publish the Bodil poems, which made me pleased because it is a sequence I was pleased with, but knew would be hard to place due to its length.
There was an initial Elves and the Shoemaker feeling,when did I enter this? Did some Elves come and make me in the night? (Was this fairytale about acute schizophrenia or what? He went to bed, when he got up the shoes where done- he had been working all night, but when he did this he was a smaller man called Elf, and had no memory of it the next day.) Finally I remembered, then I got to thinking about the new work, and wondering if people will like it more because there is no trace of Middlesbrough in it anymore. Is class really that important still in poetry? Or is there another reason? I'm not sure.
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- angela
- Poetry is like having an imaginary friend, who still forgets your birthday.
4 comments:
ooh- exciting and magical!!
Is class relevant to anything anymore?? You need a copy of teach yourself marx- except I haven't finished it yet, just got the manuscript back with a few amendments to sort out!
I am one of those working class people with a chip on my shoulder I think, so my opinion is somewhat tinted. But in terms of poetry I think maybe there is still something there, but you can never be 100% certain. I'm just aware that the new class neutral material seems to be doing better with magazines etc than the last work I did, which was full of local dialect and working class reference- and I'm wondering if it is because there is a class issue, or people are uncomfortable reading about it. (Of course I'll never know, it may just be that there is somethingelse in the new poems people like. ) America seems to be easier for people to get into than the Boro!
I researched class a lot for my last chapter and I really don't know the answer. I think it is becoming less relevant but it is hard to tell. Dialect is often seen as a problem but that doesn't seem to put rappers off, everyone just picks up their way of speech- yo bitch!!
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