Chris Armstrong's Blog: CuratedLines, page 10
November 20, 2022
Interlude
An interlude is a short piece of writing or acting introduced between parts or acts – initially of miracle or morality plays – or added as a part of surrounding entertainment. When Trystan is published – sometime next year – readers will discover that there are eight interludes that surround and interrupt the main ‘story’ chapters. I will say more about this when the book is published. Meanwhile – between more important posts – here is a poem.
Ashes in a WildernessTo you, reader...
November 18, 2022
What Comes Next?
In The Dark Trilogy, I created a literary alter ego – Trystan Lewis – named Trystan as I had a vague idea when I began writing – all those years ago – to link him in some way with the Tristan in The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. I never found a way to make that work but kept the name! Lewis, the surname, after the old nickname I had been given when I first went to sea, Louis (as in Louis Armstrong or Satchmo). A few months ago I was reading an article about James Joyce which reminded...
November 15, 2022
November 14, 2022
Zen Reflexions
Reality and Writing
Laurence Durrell once wrote, “Reality is too old-fashioned nowadays for the writer’s use. We must count upon art to revive it and bring it up to date” (Monsieur. The Avignon Quintet, 1974). Much of my writing – this is true of The Dark Trilogy and the poem at the heart of the novel, as well as of many of my other poems and, as you may discover when they are eventually published next year, also of many of my short stories – is based on (or around) my life.
Which may lead you to won...
November 9, 2022
An Unpublished Poem
There are about a dozen poems quoted in The Dark Trilogy that are not published in Mostly Welsh. Here is one of them!
The Interface
Books make visible the writer’s soul
Which bleeds its angst by pen:
Spread thin across life’s whited bowl
A thin red stain of madeleine
Books may offer us an author’s eye
That ensnares the reader within its brail
Or should writers light the reader’s sky
And tear apart the shadowy veil?
Books will hold the writer’s thought
And bridge ...
November 7, 2022
The Scholar Critic
The device that I have used in The Dark Trilogy is one also used by Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire – that of using an imaginary second person – a scholar – to discuss and explain a poem, thereby narrating the story.
Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote wrote that his friend’s poem was a “sudden flourish of magic” and it will become evident that my scholar feels similarly about the poem of his friend. He too would of course suggest that his commentary should be read both first and during a rea...
November 5, 2022
Some would argue that no genre is more fictitious than a biography
So said Carlos Ruiz Zafon – it is the lead quotation at the beginning of Book I. In an interview recently published in Poetry Wales, the poet Tim Relf says: “I don’t believe any of us are reliable narrators of events, even to ourselves. My latest collection Same Difference returns to that idea in various forms: how our life is what the novelist Julian Barnes refers to as ‘the story we have told ourselves’.”
I have tried, in The Dark Trilogy, to blend the story that I have told myse...
November 4, 2022
The Dark Trilogy: Agon
So, a beginning. The agon, that conflict of my personae, that conflict of my characters. Today the wind has been blowing from the west and the rain, which has kept me from the little garden surrounding my cottage for the past week, continues on and off: then it was sunny… As I drove slowly along the country roads towards home, through the leafy shades, between the high hedges and patches of sunlight, past hamlets and villages, my mind ran back to the many times I had passed this way befor...
Enough said!
Can’t really fault their advice so I thought I would pass it on!
The post Enough said! appeared first on _______________ Curated Lines Publishing _________________________ .
CuratedLines
- Chris Armstrong's profile
- 2 followers
