Blue Magpie25 Feb 2006

Dear Ranger,
Thanks for taking the time to read the poem, yes it is longer than many, but have you read Esther Ransom's "The Conciousness of Earth" it gives you a new dimension to the concept of a long poem. It is however in blank verse and not rhymed iambic (mostly) pentametre, so you are correct, the rhyme scheme did constrain what I could say. For example the point about a system's increasing inner complexity giving rise automatically, after a certain level of complexity, to hierarchical, self-regulatory structures is poorly made because of the need for polysyballic words, or just too many words.

However, as is so often the case in poetry, once I sat down and decided to try actually making the case for the planet as a single living entity in some real rather than theoretical consideration, with all that that brings into focus, such as humanity, well western european humanity and its diaspora, being mostly cancerous cells and the inevitability of the system attempting, in an unconcious way, to maintain its own inner health, the structure of the poem evolved on its own. I had expected to produce a more varied rhyme scheme, this was very hard to work with.