6 responses to “45 Minutes”

1. 

   Alex

   12/08/2008

   Abdel once sent me a set of his sonnets by e-mail by way of a sneak preview pre-publication. I really loved the wonderful, stark and contra-intuitive line-breaks and complemented him on them.

   It was only later, when they appeared in print, that I learned that the brilliant layout was due to my e-mail program’s automatic linebreak function 🙂

   ————-
   Like the poem a lot, except for the last line, which is not poetry but opinion. Ich habe genug…

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2. 

   Dave King

   13/08/2008

   Shame they couldn’t fit you in. I sympathise, having suffered in the same way, having editors rearrange the lineation for me! Great poem, though. I enjoyed it. Deserves a better fate, though perhaps it yet has a better fate awaiting it. Let’s hope so.

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3. 

   Andrew Philip

   13/08/2008

   Thank you both, gentlemen. As you can see from the update, they've fixed it. That's the beauty of online publication.

   There's something kind of Oulipo about your story with Abdel’s sonnet, Alex.

   If that last line isn’t poetry then, rather than opinion, it’s experience. And it’s the experience that’s central to the poem. Perhaps I need to rethink it.

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4. 

   Andrew Philip

   14/08/2008

   Meant to say, Dave, that the poem is included in the manuscript of my forthcoming Salt collection.

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5. 

   Alex

   15/08/2008

   Aha – the formatting makes all the difference! For one thing, it reveals the “dialogue”, which pretty much eggs my face re. the “opinion” snark (well-meant as always ;-).

   Nonetheless, it begs the questions “for what?” and “for whom?”. 45 minutes can be time enough to invoke a lifetime of love…

   ———
   P.S. Had to google Oulipo. Silly sods. Although one might argue that the formal constraints of a petrachian sonnet are equally arbitrary (this btw relates to what was so great about the spurious linebreaks in the Abdelkader e-mail: the tight form of the sonnets was offset beautifully by the quixotic linebreaks. They had been shattered, but it was their fragility that revealed their beauty.)

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6. 

   Andrew Philip

   15/08/2008

   See, I know what I’m doing (most of the time)! But I also know you’ve a good ear, Alex, and wouldn’t take any of your criticisms as anything other than well meant.

   I did try to embed a link to the Wikipedia entry on Oulipo. For some reason, my links in comments aren’t appearing even though the code doesn’t get rejected. I’ve tried again; maybe I was getting the code wrong.

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