After a weekend of non stop rain and gloomy bank holiday TV, it was great to find a poem was accepted. It was one out of three submitted. Two others were rejected for “sentimentality”. I wondered whether sentimentality has a slightly different connotation in Canada. In the UK, it’s often confused with tragedy. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 shows a boy flying a kite. That’s tragic, not sentimental. The use of Louis Armstrong’s It’s A Wonderful World at the end of the BBC coverage of Chelsea Flower Show is sentimental not tragic. Anyway, I checked the submission guidelines, always a good thing to do after submitting, and found they meant use of moral precepts. That made more sense. My poem reports the language of others, so I had a dilemma. I spent hours rewriting the two poems, and resubmitted them.
I set up a new blog at wordpress.com, http://iandsmith.wordpress.com. What am I going to post on it it? I don’t know. My second novel? Who knows?
I went to Bath on Saturday with Caroline. I know bad weather was brewing, but there wasn’t a nice atmosphere around the old city. We sat outside the theatre and watched two separate gangs checking out mountain bikes to steal. When we walked up to the Hole in the Wall restaurant, we saw a guy lying on the pavement, blood all over him, the traffic had stopped, and passers-by were saying he’s been bottled. Blood Bath indeed.
Filed under: poetry
