Last night I received a blog about Sharing Our Thoughts from
The Clinton Foundation and I thought it was a good idea to
extrapolate on this notion ... for example, many a person
in the past, and stared at me across the table and said rather
meekly ... a penny for your thoughts .... I would say in keeping
with the Postal Workers who are currently on an ad hoc
strike ... that I would wish to charge current prices for
my thoughts and as we agreed over the counter this
morning .. it would be more like £60 extra a week for my
thoughts rather than a penny. The metaphorical use
of language however is what the sentence is all about and
it has been my privelege to be published in the UK and one of
the collective anthologies had a title thus: A Sight to Share ..
which drew a lot of attention to me as a contributor to that
anthology ... and my individual poem was entitled: Turkish Lover.
It always strikes me as odd that every time one writes a poem or
two or an article there is a school of thought that believes everything
you write is a personal statement ... and it seems to take a
Board Meeting or two to clear up the misunderstandings ... for
example, I have not got a "Turkish Lover" but I suppose its
possible that I might have one in the future ... some readers
would argue that Turkish lover is about addiction to,
love, drugs, sex, alcohol - well as the writer its not about
addiction to anything at all ... in fact the background of that
poem is Turkey: Turkishness: and Turkish Culture ... but then
again I am reminded that since I wrote that poem/Turkish Lover,
Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year in
2006 and he has been translated well into English .. and the
comments are such that Pamuk writes about Turkey and
his love affair is with the City of Istanbul, its a City he loves
rather than a woman or mistress ... he is an expert in all
things to do with Istanbul as Istanbul is Pamuk''s Home City ... he loves
is streets, its ways of dealing with life and more and more its culture.
I would share in his enthusiasm for the City of Istanbul but then my
poem is more generally applied to the concept and not directly
related to Istanbul. I would fight shy of centreing myself exclusively
on the great city of Istanbul, as Pamuk is my literary hero ...well
so far so good. --- Pamuk is a great and acknowledged practioner of the art of literature and at last I am joining the ranks of the famous and the gifted in literature ...
But then Bill Clinton President of America said we should
"share our thoughts" so I suppose its not out of kilter at the moment
to include Istanbul in this concept.
Poetry has its own momentum and I share in its Greatness!
Presidential high class culture and Thanks for it to
President Bill Clinton of the Clinton Foundation of America ... excellent stuff!