Tuesday 1 May 2018

Then

Once a mainstay in my poems, it gradually became an occasional prop. These days, it's a warning sign that my narrative isn't strong enough to indicate a series of events without outside help.

As a consequence, it's one of the first words to be taken out of any draft. Its removal is an implicit challenge to the rest of the piece to avoid a similar fate. Of course, there will always be a certain poem that demands an inevitable exception to the rule...

2 comments:

  1. It's a word I've exploited in a poem, because it can mean "at that time in the past" (as in "things were different then"), or it can gesture towards the future, meaning "next". And there's the interesting phrase "Now then", whose meaning I've just looked up. Amongst other things it's "A greeting commonly used in the North-East of England". News to me.

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  2. Hi Tim. "Entonces" in Spanish can be translated as "then" if it's sequential or "so" if it's consequential. It's a frequent source of mistakes.

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