Poetry has concerned itself too much with words. Language and oral communication are now highly mediated by the technologies we have created. Yet the potency of allegory; narrative; repetition; methods for patterning sound and meter; are still capable of transcendence. Poets should apply their understanding of these powerful, mnemonic techniques not just to the written and spoken word but to all the media at our fingertips. In that way poetry will permeate our lives, and a prosody of relativism underpin all our expression.

I can see the word ‘huh?’ (in Don P’s handwriting) written in the margin beside the phrase ‘a prosody of relativism’ and it’s true I can’t quite yet explain what I mean by this. There’s that grim expression of Orson Welles’, that ‘we are born alone and we die alone’ but perhaps if we think of it as being alone in our own consciousness it seems less bleak. Noone else can ever be inside my head and heads and hearts, science tells us, are inextricably bound together. One beats out the rhythm, the other draws its unique semantic conclusions. Time and the perception of experience. This is Einstein’s relativity. The rhythm of individuals, the rhythm of cultures, these are something… something I’ll come back to.