Notes to
Three of My Chasms

 

THREE OF MY CHASMS, aka "The Calder Cloughs" aka Three Simultaneous Poems was written through 1991 and 1992. The three poems are 'Simultaneous' in this sense: They all took shape together in shapes made of a natural human process and common plot, that might be simply described thus: The poet, spiritually broken in the course of the collapse of his marriage, expresses his despondency, but, in due course, he begins to buck up, and even to flirt with the lasses a bit.
        Though 'simultaneous' in time-composition and in reference to living story, they have formed themselves into an order, 1, 2, 3; the order in which in fact they were felt, from first to last, to be finished and have done, with thus: Sothfastness, The Green Woodpecker, My Chasms.

 

 

and, A Fourth

 

A FOURTH was always going to be a problem. I thought the Three needed another One to finish, and I like the idea of exuberant bad poetry, so I wrote something I called “The Bridge that Sings” and it proved too highly silly in print to live with for long. I’d have to scorn and tell it off. I tried again in 2005 and came up with the provisional attempt that can be heard on the Archive of the Now. This has no form in text any more. Again in 2006, again I thought “There needs A Fourth.” But now I acknowledge, later by more than a decade, though I’ve left of a lot of its silly load and burden, I am still no nearer to a clearer finish than is buffed with levity and laughs.

            What’s that, tone deaf?