:A: Thanks a lot once again..its nice to know that this struck a chord…

Fading memories do cling. Well captured Anil.

So Anil, mayhaps you could enlighten me? As far as I understood it’s a display image…est-ce que j’ai compris le bon sense du mot?

yvaine: thank you…

I remember all the loves that weren’t meant to be.

…you put it much better than I ever could…simple but true…

finnegan: have to admit that half your comment whooshed right over my head without even a wisp of comprehension lighting up in my muddled brain!

oh signing up is very very easy…but before I tell you how let me digress a little…I’ve been trying to implement a local caching of gravatars on my site so that you (or other visitors wanting a gravatar) don’t have to use your default one all the time but I can’t get the blasted thing to work…

…so until then…please sign up by ticking the checkbox below this comment box…and just follow the instructions…in short include a valid email id..enter a password and submit a comment…you will receive an email giving you instructions on how and where to upload your gravatar image…and lo! everytime you comment here with that email id your gravatar will be displayed next to your name! I hope I didn’t waste my breath by repeating what you already know! on the other hand if I was not clear enough please don’t hesitate to ask again…

if you held a gun to my head and asked me to take sides…I’d throw in my lot with the post-modernists…it is exciting to throw the rules and conventions to the wind and create beauty out of anarchy!

if a gun were to be pointed at your head, it should be a laser shooting nano-charges to your
temporal lobe. if it misses and hits your limbic system, i’d guess all bets would be off.

and my personal wish is that you please sign me up for a free gravatar gun today!

mmm…do we have a nice discussion on our hands now? *rubs his hands in gleeful anticipation*…I agree partially with the two you…I do not like straitjacketing poetry with strict rules of rhyme, meter etc….I consider that academic nonsense or being a lit snob…let the poet decide…and poetry like everything else in this world has evolved…one cannot use rhyme or meter all the time just like one cannnot ask today’s painters to paint like Raphael or da Vinci or make contemporary composers compose Beethoven or Mozart like music…imagine Schoenberg and the Eroica together…two extremes right? change can be beautiful even if it leads to loss of structre or classical beauty…

having said that rhyme and other crafts of the trade do lend an additional beauty to a poem…so to cut the chase and get to the point…a judicious mix of classical and modernist (or even post-modernist) ideas would make poetry all the more enriching…

however, if you held a gun to my head and asked me to take sides…I’d throw in my lot with the post-modernists…it is exciting to throw the rules and conventions to the wind and create beauty out of anarchy!

Finnegan – I’m not sure I entirely agree…poems that follow rules of meter and rhyme aren’t neccessarily to be looked down at, oft it is that a poet may polish his first draft to give that perfect rounding off to the lines.
And aren’t all poems lyrical in a way?

your muse is alive and her heart is thumping steadily with this one.

poetry is like painting with words, as the cliché goes. as long as the muse is amusing, there isn’t anything to fear. meter and rhyme rules are for chumps who like their fingers clean at the end of the day.

poetry should be hard and dirty soul labouring where your nails end up black and your hair stands up as if you were hit by a bolt of lightning from the gods of verse.

or something to that effect.

a lot of poems give off subtle hints of songs. this one has that quality.

gulnaz: thank you…yes this is a lament of sorts…

Aran: as always thank you…although I personally prefer the first four lines…

Jai: ah, you opened my eyes to something I had not seen…thank you!

transience: *smiles*..thank you…perhaps I succeeded then!

Rohit: thanks man…

Mermaid: I know…sometimes not saying but feeling is more important…

Geetanjali: hey thanks for pointing that out…I think you are right…it illustrates, I guess, how unsatisfied I’m with this poem still…I’ve been agonizing over whether it should be ‘cling’ or ‘clinging’ or ‘faded’ instead of ‘fading’…unfortunately, I’ve to confess that I only have a rudimentary grasp of the English grammar…so your feedback is much appreciated…

to answer your second part…I fall firmly in the latter category…I almost never plan meter, rhyme et al…perhaps because I’m a self-taught person when it comes to writing poetry…and I don’t think any of my poems conform to formal rules of meter…rhyme etc…I’ve the healthy distaste of a proletarian for such bourgeois ideas! *winks* it is either I’m inspired to write or not…it is the feeling that counts the most! without feeling a poem is dead I feel…and in my case when I’m inspired to write, if I start thinking about rhythm etc too much my muse begins to choke and die!

Am wondering how you (or any other poet for that matter) write. Do you plan the meter, rhythm etc or is it simply an overflow of emotions?

As I look
To the east
And watch
Your flight to freedom

My favorite stanzaz. Bittersweet would be too trite to describe this. So I won’t say anything.