Chris Armstrong's Blog: CuratedLines, page 2

A New Nursery Rhyme

Chris

Following on from the short February 4th ‘Miracles’ poem with it’s ‘time’ theme, another poem that recognises the variability of time!

Tick, tock, distant star
How I wonder when you are
Just a timepiece in the sky
Your every ‘now’ another lie!

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Good AI / Bad AI

Chris

As a writer – possibly even a poet – I have concerns about the Large Language Models (LLM) of Artificial Intelligence. As Robert Griffiths wrote recently in PNR 281:

“But even if these programs could train on ‘good’ poetry, it is not clear how, in their production of what is statistically most likely in a word-string, they could produce anything original. It is not obvious that any analysis of the best poetry written before 1915 would have come up with the third line of Prufrock [“Like a pa...

Miracles

Chris

Around me, the unseen miracle
Of the past: the birds in the tree—the hills—the clouds—the people passing by,
I am at the centre of my time
                And they are all in the past
What stranger miracles are there?

After Walt Whitman:

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

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Illusion

Chris

A Haiku

Golden sunsets streak
Cloudy skies over the sea
A lost horizon

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Winter 2024, December

Chris

Mid month
as a good a time as any other
to write of howling winds that smother

Every hint
of comfort and the daily norms
to replace them all with Darragh’s storms

Which break
the trees which crash and fall upon
wires, and thus: the village power has gone

And then
in every room in every country cottage
is darkness from the lack of wattage

No heating
warms, no ovens cook, no hobs to boil
and freezers let their contents spoil

Crouched around
wood burning stoves we try to read
by candlelight, wondering how to ...

Available Titles

Chris

The following titles remain available:

The Dark Trilogy
When I Am Not Writing Poetry (short stories)
Mostly Welsh (early poems)
Book of the Spirit (poems)
Lost Time (poems)

There is an ongoing problem with taking payments through the site shop – please either use Amazon or message me via ‘Contact’ (top menu).

Thanks, Chris

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The (Vanishing) Tenements Bus Stop

Chris

I have just discovered that the short story published in Storgy which was available on their web site is no longer accessible. It is available in When I Am Not Writing Poetry, but as it used to be available electronically – and it is very short – I thought that I would reproduce it here.

The Tenements Bus Stop

She told me she loved me. She whispered it. She breathed in my ear. She brushed my lips and breathed into my mouth. We hugged and she pressed against me. I could feel her body...

In Version Space

Chris

In the abyss
between language and meaning
the crease of intent
is shelved with
volumes bound in leather
each embossed
in gold

And when you
have selected,
dust, no… polish each
with the softest
white vapour;
care for the interstices
that lie between its words;
consider the colours
and shades of nuance;
search out the drifts
and shivers of significance—

do not embrace,
do not grasps greedily
but use them tenderly
feeling for the perfect edge
which, with great love of locution,
I honed. Only

then will y...

You have to wonder…

Chris

… about an algorithm that recommends your own book – the book that you have written – for you to buy!

How often are we told how clever are these algorithms? How they improve your online experience? Keep your children away from the stuff you wouldn’t want them to see?

I have an author page on Amazon and all of my books are linked to it. Wouldn’t you have thought that the algorithm would recognise the same name – Chris Armstrong – on both the product being recommended and the re...

Wishing…

Chris

Wishing everyone a peaceful Christmas and 2024.

I want to share this poem, recently posted on WriteOutLoud, by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai was published in his 1971 collection Not for the Sake of Remembering, a few years after the 1967 Six-Day War, fought between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In 1994, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shared the Nobel peace prize with Yasser Arafat, President of the Palestinian National Authority, and Israel’s foreign minister Shimon Peres. ...