Thursday, November 21, 2019

Sean Bonney, Tom Raworth

This morning I woke up to discover via Aaron Boothby that Sean Bonney had died. I knew his work only from the blog I've linked to, but have spent the morning reading screenshots others have put up on twitter, of texts from different works and things that are available to rad online.

Hopping from one poem to another, one poet to another, I was reminded of a post I'd made here some years ago. I thought the words were, Write six words, take away five and searched for that phrase, naturally turning up nothing. 

I googled it, with a vague feeling that it was Ian Hamilton Finlay. Nothing. 

Finally, I began to scroll through all the posts here tagged poetry. Of course I found it again, and of course I'd remembered it all wrong. It's Write six lines, drop five

And it's Tom Raworth, not Finlay. So much for memory.

Another lesson: save images on to your own computer, because web pages mutate and you get Dutch, literally, instead of the text/image you linked to years ago.

It's chasing that post down that also led me to find out that Raworth had died in 2017 and I never knew. So this morning, news of the death of two poets. 

Write six lines, drop five. What are you left with?