william watkin's blog (since 2003)

it was your idea in the first place the larger the moon the greater its admonition and if I can I will try to put the blame on you badgering after her are the kind of people who say they either have or haven't changed either way she's not listening must we admonish our youngest over the cold-cuts nanna sent over by impertinent courier after which they say to the child lay down and chew the salt lick from the belt betimes yes something awful wonderfully horrible is pertaining to the clefting-down-diamond of exhausted-and-wrung-out-late-season part-mouldy-part-etched by brush-work-undergrowth and roughage-space it was a blatant attempt to use up the extra and be happy happier happiest with none left then she was free to leave the card board prompters of this life in this town how they speak a bit of this calls to mind also a bit of that etc the concern is is it going anywhere no it's a fuckin' cityscape generally definable by it's not moving laughingly she said if yo...

well I wouldn't say that waked in rapture and once more we longer to have paris no this not-being-here isn’t it is all in the eyes I mean along with love being the haggard line of mild hills black is against the blue not because it is similar but because that’s what love and what love love gets then again or sometimes it just happens this is myopia whereas we were previously mistaken in mistaking it for self-seeing visions it is very hard to consider over there as not the future is neither past nor some meta-thing position I know that but try for your father’s sake to get along in the next three days while it lasts ‘cos it won’t always and in an instant to be gone leaving escarpments to scrape the foil off of this scratch card night perhaps it is not relevant so I will speak of lonely trains and journeys taken looking for you as if a concept crossing beaches sideways which sang or didn’t usually and ones that tapped their feet making whoopee in their own goddamn way yes life is no ...

If you insist made as if to run into complicity which might save us she holds his arm he holds her arm they hold their arms I guess so because they would not want to lose hold of them altogether people passing down a street at nighttime their shadows bound to hold their feet against the hearsay of the moon which murmurs “nothing is necessary not even contingency” except and perhaps (no one has yet addressed the category of being-as-perhaps) no more mishaps this is the real of real perchance our being guilty in the alley nor in the gully will you find my aspiration to join once more hung-over from the vision flouncing like a labrador on the motorway slipway verge and I like the rest of me could not bear the verge cut up by rabbit feet and bled by mottled run-off so let this dis-taste be my complicity a problem solved which is a pretty big challenge there can be no re-entry into reverie we are sure we wanted to get the hell out to there like insects hate the vortex which they are between...

Line Measure Measure is any notable feature in a poem that is repeatable and whose repetitions and modifications have a rhythmical effect. Traditionally this has been restricted to the counting of stressed syllables within one line, which relegates the line to being the result of this choice. However, the line itself has measure, especially in free-verse, and contemporary poetry is rich in examples of line-measured poems. The measure of the line can still be dictated by the words or syllables within it, for example poets like Ashbery, Schuyler, Silliman and Raworth composing poems based either on one or two words, or on a strict number of words per line. However, increasingly the visual appearance of the line and its rhythmical impact, what we call the graphematic side of the poem, has been foregrounded. Thus a poet might adopt the triadic foot of William Carlos Williams where the line is fragmented into three sections which move across and down the page like three steps. Rachel Blau d...

After quite some time away from this blog I am now planning to revive it, partly because the blog actually seemed to gain some interest from people and partly because it is a good forum for me to discuss my ideas on poetry and also make available some of my own recent poetry. I am also increasingly teaching a lot of experimental poetics and this will be a good place to post some of the notes and analyses this has led to that at present are only available to my undergraduate and postgraduate students. Hello again, who knows for how long.