Often, the cry of the cynic is betrays a jealousy of hope. I know this from personal experience.

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When someone gives up on a joint project, it takes on the features of glass – cold and transparent. And behind it you see the back of the one who left.

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There is something beautiful in taking something meant as an insult, and wearing it as a badge of honour. It throws light back up the arse of the insulter.

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A translation is an excuse to write something new under another authority.

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“Whatever such a mind sees is the flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon.” This is state we could strive for, so long as we remember that, not only beautiful, still, and peaceful, the flower has the nesting insect, eating it from the inside out. And the moon is bright, and hangs outside of our world, but lunar craters are cold, dead and sterile.

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In poetry it is sometimes easy to look for crunchy language, rather than a true picture, or letting one build its surface over the other. But then, capturing things is not the kind of thing language does, like a graph, or a sum, or a photograph, despite these all having their subjective aspects, or hardly capturing anything at all. Language evokes, but must evoke on the terms of the reader. But do I do any of this? Do I even think it when I’m writing?

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The writing feels right, it isn’t like what has already been said. Some of the language that comes is new, in new ways, some of it is couched in dull or dead forms, which have to be revised. But what does this feeling of ‘needing revision’ consist of? Of resentment, of defining the successful in terms of what I am not? Not old, not hackneyed, not used up? Writing a poem is equal parts what I like, or think is successful, and what I don’t like about what I have written, what is unsuccessful. It can’t just be one or the other. And it can be more. Sometimes I feel nothing about a sentence. Does that matter?

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Resentment as a concept, a superiority of approach, defining yourself against Them, ‘what they do is bad and I don’t like it’, this concept has a lot to do with how taste develops. And this is okay, so long as we realise it, and can get past it from a negativity to a creative, positive, self-related progression.