arts & ego blog
strands

I decided, a few days ago, to put copies of the poems from my old, and now deceased, Amstrad 1512, into my version control database, for completeness. I hadn’t transcribed a lot of them to my first demon site, which I built ten years ago? The ones I omitted are the ones I felt were bad. I didn’t understand a lot of those poems then, and I didn’t understand them when I wrote them in the 1980s, so I discarded them.

Thank God that something, a self–humility, an awareness of the imperfection of judgement, prevented me from throwing them away. Now I’ve aged, my poetry has matured, and, in some cases, such as Spreading Strands, I like what I see. It’s got obvious flaws, but there’s something interesting going on there. I still think some others are crap, mind you, but most of them are here.

Never, never, throw away those dreadful poems. It may be they’re actually pretty good, but you don’t understand them yourself. The part of you that creates, and the part of you that judges, are not the same, can never be together. For your own health, the judge must indulge the creator.