Wednesday 25 June 2008

Homage to the Lame Wolf


I have been reading Vasko Popa's "Homage to the Lame Wolf" (translated by Charles Simic) and have it inspiring. Popa's poems are a brilliant example of the distillation of language. Each poem is pared right down until only the essentials are left. There are no extras here, nothing that could be added or taken away. The poems set me off on a train of thought that has inspired me to start writing. Popa references family quite a bit in his poems (Father, grandfather, grandmother, great grandfather etc) and this made me start thinking about my own family, their dysfunctions and quirks and I guess my heritage. For my work in the coming year I had been contemplating the idea of writing a kind of fictional autobigraphy as a series of poems, but reading this book has made me wonder about whether I should limit the poems to one voice, one narrator or widen my scope.

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