Marie Gauthier

My laptop is in the shop yet again.  Possibly this was the last gasp of the beleaguered motherboard — I feel its pain, deeply — so I am not only without a draft this week — which is fine, because when I include the dragonfly challenge poem (a challenge I won, by the bye!), I’ve met my allotted 4 poems and am due a week off for revisions anyway — but I’m not really able to write a proper post as such.  It’s too difficult when I’m running hither and yon, checking email on the library’s computer when I can, borrowing my neighbor’s laptop at other times. 

However, in those halcyon days before my laptop failed me, just three days ago, I found this article on Magma Poetry’s website, from an old issue, as I trawled the interwebs, and it’s great fun.  Brilliant.  They have a regular column, “Poetry in Practice”, and this is one installment from a few years ago.  You should go and read the entire bit, but here are a few clips, not by any means the least of it:

*Ending.  A.  Poem.  Like.  This.  Is.  Often.  Crap. 

*Never agree to stay behind and look at the folders or manuscripts of individual poets after teaching a workshop.  This leads straight to boiling in pig’s blood in hell. 

*Don’t, as I was, be put off by the lofty way reviewers and academics write about poetry – think of it as the pidgin language of a far-away land you never need visit. 

*Reviewing should be firm, kind and not more than one sentence cruel.  If you can help it. 

*Don’t go to a dinner or drinks party where you don’t know the other invitees and say you’re a poet.  Auden settled on ‘Medieval Historian’, I normally say ‘Logician’.