It is Sunday afternoon and it feels like Sunday afternoon. A bit grey outside, kind of cosy outside, not a lot of activity out on the street.

 

I have started my November poem a day and am NOT getting on with the play. Yet. Somehow it felt too big to get a hold of in a spare half hour on a weekend morning. Maybe something will come later ...

 

Half term is drawing to a close; it’s been fine really. Kids are getting older, demands of a certain sort are reducing. My mother in law always quotes her mother ‘Little children, little problems. Big children, big problems’. Not that big problems are being experienced right now, but I know just what she means. They don’t need you to play endless games of ‘I’ll be Littlefoot and you be Littlefoot’s mother, or ‘You be Lilo and I’ll be Stitch’, but they need you to chivvy them to do their homework and give them lifts to parties.

 

The new Magma Poetry website will up from tomorrow, and I’ve been helping with it, still dusting off arrangements for the next launch and dealing with our Roadshow. I also went to hear a discussion about Zbigniew Herbert, the late Polish poet, at The Purcell Room. Now there was an intellect. The panel and the audience weren’t half bad, either. Poets are strange and wonderful and often so steeped in the language of the work that they speak it quite fluently. Here is a little quotation from a brilliant American poet  on an internet forum I belong to. I read it, understood it, then thought ‘hang on; this is extraordinary’:

 

‘I had been tweaking a villanelle with 10-syllable lines, and I was forgetting that kwansabas are written in counted verse, not syllabic verse. It do think it was nice to see how the voice changes under compression though’

 

Note to self: I must careful when in the company of non-poets, not to speak in the tongue of poets ...