Just noticed that my shortlisted poem “Feral” is now on display at Earlyworks Press. Not a lot to say about this one, apart from the fact that it arose during The Write Idea‘s STIRRED POeTS competition early on this year, in response to the prompt “Call of the Wild”. I might not have bothered doing anything more with it if it hadn’t been for the fact that some of the real poets on the site seemed to like it. I still don’t really understand poetry …
I’ve been writing poetry for close to forty years now and I would pretend to understand poetry. It’s why I write so many poems about poetry trying to come to terms with it. It used to be all about technique but if you keep peeling away there’s always another smaller, leaner poem on the inside.
As for your piece, it works perfectly well for me as a poem or simply as a piece of text. It makes sense, it’s thought provoking and I like it.
Jim, how extraordinary that you should drop in on the day that I received my copy of “Living with the Truth” from Amazon (which I ordered the other day along with Rachel Green’s “An Ungodly Child”, the only common denominator being “writers who I vaguely know via the internet”)!
Anyway, many thanks for your comment – very much appreciated. I guess my problem is that I’ve only just started to take poetry seriously over the last few months and I have no idea of what’s good and what isn’t, although I do (ahem) know what I like. I also tend to be slightly suspicious of things that appear without much effort (which this poem certainly did). Then again, many of my favourite fiction pieces have been pretty instinctive and relatively effortless, so maybe it’s just a question of confidence.