Openings . . . & . . . Closings

Recently I have attended two writing workshops and one activity was to look at opening sentences and closing sentences.  We were talking about novels and stories but today I just picked up a collection of poems and started looking at the opening and closing sentences of those. Some of you may know of the phenomena about being able to read words as long as the first and last letter are correct regardless of what comes inbetween - try it if you don't believe me - and I wondered if this idea can be extended to poetry.  I am not saying of course that one can get the whole poem from the first and the last but I wondered if the poems could still speak to me in some way. . .

 I was quite surprised by some of results. - (Oh and I cheated a bit because punctuation in poetry is something else. . . if it is there at all that is!)

Here are just a few.

'Meeting Point' by Louis Macneice

Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):
Time was away and somewhere else.

. . . . . . 6 verses inbetween . . . . . .

Time  was away and she was here
And life no longer what it was,
The bell was silent in the air
And all the room one glow because
Time was away and she was here.

'Bleep' by Jackie Kay

I am the unreal voice speaking.
. . .

. . .
See my nose, it used to be a tomato.

' What the Chairman told Tom' by Basil Bunting

Poetry? It's a hobby. 
. . . 


. . .
Go and find work.

'This Compost' by Walt Whitman

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
. . . .

. . . .

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

Norman's question in the workshop was - does the opening sentence make you want to read more?
My question is - does the opening sentence connect with the closing one, do they speak with one voice?

Of course this is all just musings. . . . it is me tring to avoid working!!

Oh yes and here is an example of the word thing!!

Arocdnicg to rsceearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm. Tihs is buseace the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Amazing isn't it!!

Reflection on an exhibition

On Tuesday 5th July with some fellow ministers I visited the Rene Magritte exhibition at the Liverpool Tate.  This is the resulting reflection I wrote on my return.

Reflection on an exhibition 

Today I wandered through another’s thoughts…

looked with a stranger’s eyes

into a landscape of dreams . . .

 a world where shrouded lovers kiss, locked in a blind embrace. . .

where day is in the night and night within the day

– together –

playing with the light,

the time,

the space . . .

where birds fly in the clouds and clouds float in the birds –

perception all awry . . .

What is reality?

Suspend disbelief. . .

Realise the impossible . . .

Here thought is made visible.

In the paint anything can exist and

it really is raining men and

a woman offers up a pubic kiss.

Looking up the umbrella contains the clouds

inside, outside, in . . .

The artist thinks it into existence 
and the art is poetry in the making

portraying the imagined,

unimagined glimpses of reality,

hidden in surreal landscapes of the mind . . ,  

creative thought. . .

Mystery lies under the visible reality of the world. . .

Real life is always something else,

something that does not exist.

What is unreal now. . .

 is . . .

“For the first time my eyes saw thought.”

“. . . I make use of painting to render thoughts visible.” 
The artist said.

“The image is just a picture

and had I written 
“this is a pipe”

I would have been lying.”

I looked through someone else’s eyes today

and all I really know is . . .

This is not a pipe.
 .......................................................................................................................................................



some images that inspired this poem: