It cost me but it didn't hurt and it was worth it just to be at Wincanton, that under-rated glory of English countryside where horses of not always the most proven talent do the best they can.
That's all that can be asked of any of us.
It should be asked of a few more of us.
--
I stayed with the poems of William Matthews for longer than I thought I would, knowing that there were worthwhile fragments in them even if the poems as a whole were struggling to convince me.
It's not easy to convince me about 'prose poetry', either, but there is such a thing and it's not for me to say it's an oxymoron.
In La Tache, 1962, in praise of a bottle of wine, Matthews writes that,
It is the emblem of what we never really taste or know, the silence all poems are unfaithful to.
It's that last bit, the silence all poems are unfaithful to, that looks profound, that makes one come as close to shuddering as any few words in a poem have done for quite some time. It might need some 'unpacking' in a way that I'm not prepared to do for fear of sounding like a poetry reviewer.
The best art aspires to the condition of silence/ because that is better than being found guilty of having said something/ and music is far better at that than poetry is.
You can see why I find it so difficult to write poems any more.
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