September

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Poetry is one of the oldest, most widespread and yet most secret means of renewal known to human culture. It is the most essential way of prizing single words and the immemorial heritage that is language. With poetry, science and magic are mixed; we put runes under a microscope. A poem is a fish that has swallowed a ring of many meanings, leaping from the belly of a lake to flash for an instant in the sun.

In recent years, I have found myself drawn to the Japanese tanka form, and have developed my own version of it, in English, through practice rather than theory. I say ‘my own version’ not as a boast, but as a disclaimer; as a disclaimer and not as an apology. I would say I ‘attempted’ to develop my own version, except that, in being something worked out in the doing, it has been entirely natural to me. The new form combines a discovery of small mental and emotional specimens, like shells on the mind’s shoreline, with a stylistic means of presenting such natural and serendipitous finds as aphorism, memento, meditation and so on.

In 2015, I decided that for the month of September, I would write, upon waking, at least one such poem a day. In this way I have attempted to keep a diary of time, place, mind and their relations to each other.

Quentin S. Crisp, Bexleyheath, February, 2016