Signs : Poem: News : Web Working : Muse
Fireworks
A slide show from the annual firework display at the Abbey Gardens, Bury St Edmunds, 2007. I was there! Well, nearby...Poem
Love you how?
When you are somewhere else,
sitting in your pain,
surrounded by the world
you have made out of gossip,
and rumours, some relief
from the ashes of days,
where daily grief
suffers you to move among
the children you created,
the husband you forfeited
for the passion we made.
So these words of love
to you, are mine, no more
shall we sing together, nor
tread the road of life;
the days pass somehow.
The cat cries, a sparrow sings:
I am wary of these changes,
thereby aware of many things.
© George Wicker 2007
Signs
With the recent publication of Signs, I have been busy promoting and publicizing the book locally. What is it? Why, where have you been these last couple of months? Signs is a collection of 42 of my poems, published by arima, available now, and everywhere. Well, not everywhere exactly, but it only takes an ISBN number (in this case 978-1-84549-178-9), to order it from any bookstore. Follow the cover link above for more details and some sample poems.
August 2007
News
Didn't get on the ' Escalator'. Comment here. Productive as I can be, however, given the limitations of working-for-a-living (!) and eight million hobbies (recent obsession with chess apart). Was the Internet put here to inform and exacerbate in equal measure? Seems so.
Some of my latest poems are here.
September 2007
Web Working
A web site is always evolving. A few weeks ago I had 400+ visits; the week before 1200! Looking at my web stats, it is obvious that a lot of hits came from software 'spiders', trawling the web, cataloguing sites and pages, as I had done a lot of work that week on site submission. This involves sending my site information to search engines, and to directories such as Yahoo. Google is one of the most important search engines, as it licenses its search 'strategies' to others such as AOL. Also important in order to get a site noticed (and shoot up the page rankings on Google and others) is to put proper keywords in proper places on your site pages, for instance in page titles, page content, and meta tag slots in the basic HTML that defines the page. All this is slightly technical stuff that needs to be known in order to bring visitors to the site. The other thing is of course to have something to read when they get there.
Web site maintenance involves a lot more than just putting up pages and linking them to others. It requires a bit of tinkering, (make that a lot of tinkering), and work on hidden code and keywords. So, if sometimes I am a bit tardy in changing or updating page content, don't think badly of me. It just might be that I am working 'behind the scenes' just to make sure you get here.
June 2007
Amusing the Muse
I always need something to inspire me. Especially when I write poetry, because it seems to me that at the core of poetry lies love. Love, in the sense of loving life, nature, people, or God, the Tao, Buddha, or whatever higher power excites you.
A muse, in the poetic sense, has come to mean someone who provides the poet with the fire to continue writing. The muse is an embodiment of beauty, yes, whether within or without. Power, certainly, because thinking about the muse fills the poet with a great sense of ability, of possibility, of love. The muse is also a distraction, should be elusive, unattainable, even haughty. This last is a great characteristic, and it means we are in the grip of something that restrains us, socially at least, so that the only expression of our love can be in the art we have chosen.
I think of the poets that have been great fans of the muse, unable to work without them. Poets, of course, are just ordinary people, with heightened sensibilities perhaps, that love. It is how they convert that love, that passion, that makes them poets: W B Yeats, whose love ‘affair’ with Maud Gonne (and later her daughter) inspired his best poetry; Robert Graves, in modern times, with Laura Riding and many substitute muses after that first. Shakespeare, in the Sonnets; Wordsworth, whose muse was nature itself; Donne, chasing after the muse in desire and lust before concluding, late in love, that God was the proper inspiration (curiously his poetic power dissipated with that realization).
There are any number more: Sufi poets in twelfth century Persia; Troubadours and Trouveres, the whole inspiration of chivalry and courtly love. What is important, however, is that the proper proportion be maintained in dealing with the muse. As soon as the muse becomes human, ordinary, attainable, in our thoughts and lives, the inspiration vanishes. Perhaps the muse is an imaginary thing after all? A tool, a necessary prop to enable us to plumb the depths of our emotion? Whatever is the truth, never tell a muse he or she is just that – a muse. The responsibility will be something they cannot handle.
June 2007