Poems from Rialto, etc.
Suppose in the draft of a poem you have
"I laugh at the teacher, fling myself around the room. I playfight, the scratchy fibres of my grey school jumper shoved by another girl's palms. The walls are unforgiving against my shoulders, elbows. I pose before the mirror at home wearing bruises and a wig. As in True Colors"
How might you improve it? Suppose you ensure that "As in" begins all the sentences, not just the last. This is the strategy adopted in the 30-sentence first poem, long-listed in the National Poetry Competition. Such poems make me realise how far I am from understanding modern poetry. Oh well.
And yet I feel I'm on the same wavelength as the writer of "Blue Scissors and "Ague", both of which I like. I'm not convinced by "Potholes" or "Fenland elegy" though I feel I understand them. "Some villages" is ok.
"The Cloud Store" idea is used in various ways - there are phrases such as "The Cold Store presses its own stop button", "The Cold Store shapeshifts into a Neolithic girl", "maggots are crawling through the Cold Store's portrait in the attic", etc. Sometimes it only appears in the title e.g. - "Portrait of the Cold Store as a Grandfather Clock" is about a clock and the room it's in. "Portrait of the Cold Store's Thoughts as Random Word Content" seems to do what the title says - not worth the effort. Portrait of the Cold Store as Eel Talk" is perhaps the most gratuitous use of the cold store idea.
So what is the Cold Store? Something big with a mysterious inside which can only be imagined at, which absorbs allusions.
One poem uses "/" instead of a line-break. "Dead Users" is aligned on both sides, though some lines have far fewer characters than others. Several of the poems use a two-column format, the columns sometimes interleaving. There's a villanelle and a Golden Shovel. "Herding the Northern Lights" has loose abab stanzas. Each line in the first stanza becomes the final line of a subsequent stanza.
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