Harrier

I think that what emerges in many of the poems is a personal version of metarealism. I say this with hindsight, as it is not the result of a fully conscious intention. What I am aware of at the time of writing certain types of text is that they envisage an illusory cosmos or microcosmos - which, in poetic and spiritual terms, is no less valid to me than the commonly-accepted and unchallenged illusions to which any given society may accord the title of "reality".

While this poem is not an example of the above, but more in the manner of a subject from nature, observed and reflected on, the forms of metarealism as practised elsewhere in my work can be coherent and at the same time inconclusive, so maybe this corresponds to your image of the web - an artefact continually being spun, capable of generating multiple possibilities.

I think that any viable poem possesses some of the properties of a web - it catches at the reader's consciousness in different ways, according to individual perception and interpretation refracted through the reader's own experience and angle of vision. I personally find the image of the web a very productive one, even though it may seem to have been overworked in recent times, and in various contexts.

So thank you for this comment. You have pin-pointed something quite elusive, but paradoxically essential to the poetic process as I understand it.

Naturally one doesn't always succeed, and there is a big difference between being an illusionist and being a poet. I hope I'm somewhere on the road from the former to the latter. The poems (if I may call them that) and the reader's reception of the texts, are the only means of knowing if that is so.

Jena Woodhouse   18.05.2006 04:22   Заявить о нарушении