Love Songs

I have been continuing to work with Mina Loy’s poetry and having finished the ‘Maps’ I have moved on to writing poems in response to the Songs to Johannes. These poems form a sequence, rather than being stand alone poems, and although I intended to avoid using an ‘I’ voice, they have taken on a first person speaker. For now I’ve decided to stay with that ‘I’  character, as these poems are not my personal experience, therefore not directly my voice. This ‘I’ has taken something of a plot from the ‘story’ I found in Loy’s Love Songs and this character is placing their experience over that. On the surface it is a single-voice lyric but is not composed of one person’s experience, rather an ‘everywoman’ experience within the range of the character. This makes ‘her’ sound somewhat one-dimensional as a character, I hope she is more than that.
The sequence is half done -- the character is still in the process of collecting her language in order to portray some impressions of her world. This having a ‘character’ is proving to be an interesting way of working. She is certainly keeping me on my toes as she’s fussy about what language she’ll allow into her poems! Strangely, she’s also insisted on a change of font - my usual arial style didn’t seem to suit her.