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Which reminds of @woops saying on here once that he's the wrong person to ask about French poetry, cos he just goes all gooey whenever he reads any of it.

"Almost any kind of 'strangeness' may produce an aesthetic effect, that is to say, an effect which, however slight, is qualitively the same as that of serious poetry. On examination, the sole condition is found to be thus, that the strangeness shall have an interior significance; it must be felt...

I wouldn't know where to start writing a poem about Spain or about anything really. I think if i did try and write a poem it would be in Spanish. Sometimes a little idea or a line will come into my head in Spanish that I think sounds good, but I never write them down and always forget them...

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

That's part of the genius of the book, the fact you hardly notice it, but when you do it doesn't detract from it at all. At least it didn't for me, I know some early critics complained about it in a pedantic sort of way.

Prynne on going to America in the early part of his writing career: "Gradually I became less cocksure. It made me have strong objections to the kind of thing I was doing. It didn’t make it any easier. My pencil insisted on writing this stuff that I was not very impressed by, or interested in...

Finished Moby Dick now, best novel I've ever read. What's his best book after this? If it's even half as good it'll be worth reading.

They're good stabs I think. The good thing is that no one can say that you're wrong, so stab away!

Yeah, it's the mood it creates that's the most important thing

There was time when i thought I had a grip on what he was on about in these poems from the white stones, but every time i come back to them after time off it's like going back to square one. It's all to do with those recurring words in the book of 'wish' 'hope' 'choice' 'love' and 'home' - that...

I love this one too, so beautiful - "bound in the rise and fall: learning to wish always for more" Moon Poem JH Prynne The night is already quiet and I am bound in the rise and fall: learning to wish always for more. This is the means, the extension to keep very steady so that the culmination...

Been getting more into Yeats recently so I ordered this biography cos I found a cheap copy on amazon, better be fucking good. Been reading the Tower today, one which really puzzled me before, but I think it's great now. He's one of those where you have to read around the poems a bit to unlock...

The Goddesse moved with their sute, this answere did them make: 'Depart you hence. Go hille your heads, and let your garmentes slake, And both of you your Graundames bones behind your shoulders cast.' They stoode amazed at these wordes, tyll Pyrrha at the last, Refusing too obey the hest the...

Yeah, it's like they expect you to have read everything ever, so the majority of it flies over your head. I like it that they don't talk down to you though, you have to put the work in to begin to understand what they're on about.

It's a great flood myth. In Ovid the white stones are really the bones of Deucalion and Pyrrha's mothers, which the goddess Themis instructs them to throw over their shoulder, and which repopulate the earth after the flood, as if they were seeds. I've got Golding's translation here and it's...

There's this mad essay, but it's all a bit too much for me tbh http://jacketmagazine.com/24/keery.html

The more I read of frost, the more I like him

white stones is a potent image that's in the Bible, Ovid, Prynne, never gotten round to investigating what it really means or to see if they're all connected

I should order woops' book too but I'm scared it won't arrive