An Essay and a Foreward

to the autobiographical poem

THE TRIALS OF MILES BLACKMAN

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During the early lockdown period of the Covid-19 pandemic I ran a series of Posts on my edenbray8 blog site with helpful notes from my own point of view. I did this for a number of reasons and not simply for the purpose of translating my verse. Essentially, if a poetic piece needs to be translated, it becomes like a joke where no one laughed or a cartoon that flew over but the truth is, I enjoyed that first-person writing experience and adding a little context. Poetry, to me, isn’t just about telling a story either but hey, now I’m trying to tell you what to think and what you probably already know.

As a poet, I always hope to trigger the readers imaginative response, educate the ‘third eye’ of intuition and feeling, develop understanding and wisdom, that greatest of human, mental and spiritual traits and fully engage the emotional person. Life, I believe is never one dimensional or shouldn’t be, even though trauma, pain and sadness can dull those left-field centres of our creative brains, we are always more than machines. If we can follow life’s stream even a little under the surface, maybe a half note off-key, stray, however briefly, beyond our own ‘safety’ limits or rebound our opinions and dogma off another wall it helps us to stay the course and complete the individual journey we are all on.

Sometimes our paths will cross and occasionally you will meet someone with a part of their story that is similar to your own but never quite the same and then we move on. We try to keep our journeys together but it cannot always be. It’s not necessarily unfaithfulness that causes people to drift apart. Our emotional life is always evolving. Swans and pigeons mate for life but I don’t believe they encounter that particular problem.

I don’t want to try and translate ‘The Trials of Miles Blackman‘ but then again perhaps I do. I really want my readers to get it for themselves. There may be one line, one stanza, one verse or maybe one whole section that connects with another’s life and experience or explains itself at all. If just one punch-point gets through to my readers on any level of appreciation, personally I would be happy with that. All I know is, I put a lot of work into this piece, a lot of myself and I seriously made a lot of effort to get it right. If your response to that is ‘hey, then you wasted your time’ then yes, I think I would even take that.

edenbraytoday

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