What I like about poetry is ... you can be the complete creator of it. I mean, it's not like a novel that will be edited by a publisher. It's not like a play that might be "workshopped" by eccentrics who think they're carpenters or something. It's not like a song which might be added to by a guitarist like Mick Ronson with one of his amazing solos. You dig?
Every word and every punctuation mark can be yours!
Unless you actually need help, of course. Like T. S. Eliot with Ezra Pound. Or Yeats because he was dyslexic.
Anyway ...
Yeah, yeah. I made changes, small changes, to my big poem at the weekend.
Changes are great!
Actually, I have two volumes of Auden's poetry. Selected poems, or complete poems. The books are in the back room with the spiders and the rain. But what's interesting is ... you can see the revisions and improvements that Auden made to certain poems. Between the two books. I think one of the books is The English Auden. Yeah, it is. It shows the poems as they were when he first wrote and published them.
It's not a good idea revising poems after they've already been published though. I don't think. Never mind.
Oh, I was remembering a poet from years ago - when I was into poetry the first time, like. I thought I would Google his name to find out what he's up to now. Apparently, he's written thirty or forty volumes, or some crazy number like that. But ... he's hardly a household name. Do you know what I mean?
And then you get someone like Eliot ... his collected poems are in one volume of just over two hundred pages.
And we only need The Waste Land and The Hollow Men ... when you think about it.
Think about it!
Man, it's also ... not a good idea to mass produce poetry. We've got robots for that, haven't we?
Every new poem should be looked at like it's a major battle you're fighting. Every new poem is a chance to conquer reality and leave a mark on the world.
Fight!
Well, most poems.
You can have "supporting" poems in a volume, I suppose. But they've still got to be top quality. My On the island is such a poem. Cut Grass by Philip Larkin is such a poem. We're not talking about filler here.
All killer!
Anyway, I fought a MASSIVE battle with my BIG poem, and that's why I was exhausted. I'm okay now.
Listen, kooks ...
It's a lovely thing to live with great courage and to write great poems that will last forever.
Don't you agree?
Laters.
