Edits

Not really been editing poetry in fact. Instead video. Applying effects.

Pimping images to form a row of insets.

Getting just the right music.

All with phone video. So very nice.

I suppose this came about because I was asked to produce a slide to present my work for an event I am going to. And it sent me through a visual door.

Not sure where it is leading but I will keep you posted.

Sorting algorithms and editing

Yes it has all been quiet. An editing kind of quiet.

Lots going on but not much to see. As a result I have enjoyed looking at the visualisation of sorts by Timo Bingmann.

Audibilisation too!

Sorting algorithms have a weird fascination for me and encourage me to think of a kind of mechanisation of editing.

So imagine some different passes:

• checking for duplicate words - are they good/bad/emphatic/a mistake
• internal rhyme - wow! just enjoy it...maybe turn it up a bit here and there
• rhythm - check?
• rhyme - scheme? does it have one? should it?
• stanza? signs of dehiscence? what happens if I break the normal big fat strand of verse into boxes of say 3 lines, 6 lines. 4 lines...oh feedback into rhyme scheme and recheck...
• vocabulary - what it is saying about the poem?
• and so on...

So that is what I am up to right now,

You can find the sorting algorithms here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg&feature=youtu.be

Edit

Perhaps things are a bit quiet over the holiday season? Or quieter?

Time to get out some old paper and check out what you wrote but never finished. Or rewrite what you finished but never quite got out to any magazines.

Picture of song lyrics courtesy of The Blacklist from Galashiels, Scottish Borders and more here http://www.impactarts.co.uk/news/news/the-blacklist-presents-no-ties/

The reticence of Elizabeth Bishop

The American poet Elizabeth Bishop was notoriously possessive of her work refusing to give up poems even when solicited by editors. Katherine White wrote to her in 1955 "As usual this letter is a plea to let us see some of the Elizabeth Bishop manuscripts that I feel certain are all on your desk, all finished if only you could bring yourself to part with them."

Bishop is a rule unto herself. And you can find the unpublished work in the Carcanet book Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-box (out of print) and judge whether she was right or wrong.

Yet the store of riches when a poem is all complete and ready to go is to all of us almost a drug: that feeling of the work in progress or something good about to come. But sometimes a visit to an editor for poems even if rejected with no comment loosens up something unexpected. And the poem gets richer and better as a result.

A poem is never finished only abandoned Paul Valéry