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| Hearsay: |
And by that I mean been touched by a muse. And by that I mean non-sexually. Poets reveal where they’ve composed.
Benjamin Zephaniah did it stuck in a lift with a drag queen, Phillis Levin in a car on the side of a mountain, Patience Agbabi 20,000 feet above sea level in a spasm of guilt about her carbon footprint, and Kenneth Steven did it in his head during a sermon in church.
Poets don’t need a tranquil room of their own to write, the Ledbury Poetry festival has proved, by asking this year’s participants for the most unlikely physical location in which they have practised their art. On this sample they’re far more likely to be inspired by being in a car than at sitting at an orderly desk or wandering among the dancing daffodils.
For me it was standing on a dog-shit-strewn sidewalk watching a bunch of snails “race” across the concrete for the cliff of a curb.
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June 17th, 2009 at 10:55 am
I admire poets. I’ve had similar experiences, but not a poem to show for it.
June 17th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Car park at Carleton Uni…oh wait…well, it was a-musing.
June 17th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
13th floor of Robarts Library at U of T, in one of those graduate student cubbyholes.
What are we talking about?
June 17th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I worked on the assembly line at RIM for ten months, and we had these little static-resistant bags that we put defective BlackBerries in. We had millions, so many that we put thousands in the recycling at the end of every shift. Every single day I wrote a brand new haiku on one for my girlfriend.
And then she left me for a doctor. So it goes.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Lesson learned: girls interested in doctors hate haiku.
I worked on the line at Labatts in my youth, and I used to take notes on the cardboard partition grids that go in to two-four cases. I hope I never published one of those. Not because of the job or grids, but quality…
June 17th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
At least that’s what Zephaniah told his wife, anyway.
June 17th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I know the doctor, and he’s not a bad guy. I just hope he gets a prenup. She flat out told me it wasn’t because he wrote her a bigger poem. ;)
June 17th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
I’m doing it right now, all over your web site.
June 18th, 2009 at 7:30 am
Mile-high club, baby.