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meaning meaning David Hart
1. In our everyday lives moment by moment such shifts of 'meaning'. 2. During a conversation the person I am talking with: their eyes turn away. 3. Hearing on the radio a piece of music I like, I sing it then in the shower. 4. In a corridor I like the sound of someone's voice but cannot catch the words. 5. Walking along the street my eyes are caught by an advertisement for soap. 6. I like what you are saying but then you refer positively to someone I don't like. 7. Someone phones me and cries while on the television people are laughing. 8. I try to recall what it was a stranger said to me at the bus stop and sighed. 9. Someone walks into the room who reminds me of someone I knew years ago. 10. Someone is making a speech with which I agree but I don't like their voice.
11. Do we want a poem to affirm what we know and affirm already? 12. Do we want a poem to affirm what we feel - what stirs us - already? 13. Is a poem most worthwhile when in a significant way it confuses us? 14. The reading aloud of a poem in a language I didn't understand moved me to tears. 15. A poem on the page - its shape, its font - made me want to read it. 16. Give a subject to a journalist, a politician, a teacher and a poet. 17. On my way to a funeral I couldn't bear the idea of a poem. 18. I didn't understand the poem but I knew I had to keep it with me. 19. The poem wasn't that good but it was written for me and I treasured it.
20. If we keep saying the lake shimmers it will no longer shimmer. It never did anyway, didn't have this label stuck on it. 21. If every day I tell you you are lovely, 'lovely' gets worn thin, as it does if we all say to each other constantly, 'You are lovely'. 22. How different if I describe you with affection in my voice as a goat or a twig or a catherine wheel or a spicey pudding or as a sunrise or a bottle of the finest wine or a dandelion. 23. The smell of bacon reminds me of a transport caff which reminds me of the chair Van Gogh painted which reminds me of the many-coloured coat you wore in the carnival, and there was another carnival, by the sea. 24. I break a line here or here or here or here and the meaning changes? 25. One person's 'description' in poetry of a scene can be dull, another person's description of the same scene can be gripping. How is this? 26. I feel something stirring and I want to send you a poem: should it be a sonnet or a haiku or a song-text or a villanelle or a talk-poem or a fragment? By which of these means will my meaning be best carried? 27. Last year this poem meant so much to me, now it seems flat, nothing. 28. She says it's a great poem, so does he, but I don't see it. 29. I like the idea of poems in the hospital, on the walls, but why can't they put up sensible poems? I mean bizarre poems? I mean shit-hot?
30. If only I could find a way of saying this simply. 31. God told me to write this poem. Maybe. 32. If I write it the best way I can now, maybe one day I will understand what I've written. 33. I was crying when I wrote that poem, so how can you be so clinical about it? 34. The person tip-toeing into my poem has no right to be there.
November 2005
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