Poetry Prizes

It is warm in Paris this morning, perhaps unseasonably warm. I think I saw something about an unseasonably warm weekend on the news on the treadmill at the gym yesterday. The sun is squaring its angles on the church across the street (I have just made the bed, which is my working space, legs up, books spread around me, the ideal surface, everything at hand), the pigeons fluff up their wings in the sun, the crows visit a buttress, looking for scraps from the couple who live in an apartment on the roof, whose Virginal (I wrote Virginia, the computer corrected) Creeper is flaming red. I have just checked for falling stones. Workmen are peering into a manhole, open at ground level. Maybe they are speeding up my internet connection?

I am revising my Baudelaire translation, which I'd set aside for several months, and have returned to with fresh--and hopefully more objective--eyes. Some of it strikes me as good, and some needs more work. It will always need more work, of course. Like everything else. Like the poems I might send to a competition at the TLS, or I might not. Poetry competitions are a mug's game. If this one is hoping to pay its prizes and its judges with the entry fees, there will have to be several thousand applicants for the honour of being one of three poets featured on the poetry pages of the TLS in the Christmas issue. I'm thinking maybe not.