May Snakeskin
 

I have a couple of pieces in this month's Snakeskin. I would like to thank people here for their feedback on my translation, both recently (via PM) and when I posted an early version on the Translation Board fifteen years ago.

Joe Crocker has a piece in there too.

Duncan

Spherean Robin Helweg-Larsen (editor of the Potcake Chapbooks) also has a poem in this month's Snakeskin

Yes, I saw these. Well done both. Some bravura rhyming in your oxygen poem, Duncan.

And I've seen yours before, here, Joe. Is it much changed from what it was? Or not at all?

David

Hi David

My “Apocalypse Now” poem has changed a fair bit since I put it up for criticism here a few weeks ago. The consensus then was that poem was playing too much with surface references to the film and not saying very much new or original. Which was a little dispiriting but undeniably accurate.

However, I did very much enjoy playing with the references, images and quotes and trying to weave them into a villanelle that encapsulated my experience of the film. So I decided to make a virtue out of superficiality and crammed in even more of them.

But I did take on board several comments that people made. The Snakeskin version now stands back a bit more and looks at how we, the audience, have reacted to the movie as a spectacle.

When Snakeskin said they were having a special issue called "Breathe", it seemed to fit the rubric.

Is it any better? (You don't have to answer that!)

Duncan, I've drifted toward a very strange reading of Catchin Yer Eye that deepens it. Ineffable affection and worry perhaps. Right reading or wrong reading, it's still very good and quite interesting.

Cheers, David and Allen!

That sounds about right, Allen.

Duncan

Hey Joe (where you going with that pun in your hand? Sorry, I must be thinking about your carp poem).

I'm glad to hear the poem has changed a fair bit. (Great British turn of phrase, that, isn't it? I think of it as British anyway.) I wasn't that enthused by it when it appeared here, in an earlier incarnation, but I think you've improved it a fair bit. You've let light and air into it, to its benefit. (Not sure about the nod to Old Possum though.)

Cheers

David

Thank you David. I’ll take “improved a fair bit”. The Elliot references to ragged claws and hollow men were both in the film, though perhaps rather clunkily crowbarred into my version

So are you a Hendrix fan or do you like the cracking bass-line hippy Love version?

Ah look at me. I had completely forgotten - in fact I still don't remember - the Eliot references in the film. Interesting.

I'm not especially a Hendrix fan- "Hey Joe" is unavoidable, either way - but I am a big Forever Changes fan. I didn't know Love had done this. I think they made a great job of it. Thanks for the introduction to it.