poetry

we are astoundingly blind
and really do not look at
and see properly
the world around us
which is the source of
everything

The next step on from finding poetry within fiction was to start flicking through my ‘archive’ of vintage weaving books. I felt sure there must be poetry in descriptions of this wonderfully repetetive and meditative craft. I wasn’t wrong, but what I found still surprised me, erring towards the philosophical and the abstract, rather than a simple appreciation of craft and colour.

Anyone who has read Telaic Fantasy 1 will already know about my dichotomous feelings towards Irene Waller – on the one hand so creative, on the other, with such a frightfully upper-class, scarily no-nonsense attitude (can’t you just see the attitude oozing out, even just in that cover photo above?). If there was one author I didn’t expect to find poetry in, it was Irene Waller, yet there it was, all the same.

I also wanted to share another idea I found in the above book. It’s possibly not entirely original (although you must remember it was written several decades before the likes of Keri Smith’s fantastic ‘How to be an Explorer of the World’), but I really like it:

“A marvellous way to break down any inhibitions you may have about colour is to have several large glass jars on your shelving and to drop into them fragments of anything, colourwise, which you find pleasing – beads, glass, paper, yarns, fabrics. Have a jar for blues, another for greens and so on.“

This is just supposed to be an exercise in developing a greater understanding of colour, but I think a jar crammed with miscellaneously textured colour would make a fantastic ornament, or if not ornament exactly, source of inspiration, in my workroom. I don’t think I could put yarns inside, though, as I would just have to fish them out again, when inspiration struck. Could get messy.

I really need to overcome my resistance and look out Irene Waller’s other books…

Rain by Kirsty Gunn (an extract)

When the rain came
it came at first as the
scent of rain,
the grey air stained
darker
behind the hills.

Then
when it came down to us
it was like thread and needles,
piercing the jellyish water
with a trillion tiny pricks,
the silver threads
attaching water to sky

‘Rain’ is actually a novel by Kirsty Gunn. The above poem is Kirsty Gunn’s prose with a few extra line breaks, to make it look like poetry instead. It reads like poetry, whatever the formation of the words, so I thought, why not? This prose-poem is part of a non-crafty TangledPress project I am working on, but I thought I would share it here, given the relevant imagery it uses.

P.S. I’m having some printer trouble at the moment, but should be sorted by the end of the week. I have a couple of new things ready to see the light of day, so watch this space at the beginning of next week for updates…!

Tag: poetry

I found more poetry

Rain