From The Guardian:
In reading these poems I tried to work out who the speaker might be and what tone governed their approach to the charge of finishing Kubla Khan (KK). An invented persona who fronts the poet’s work posits the idea of a speaker other than the poet as a liberating ideal in the re-envisioning process necessary for this workshop. The workshop task seems a fruitful coalition of lyric, narrative and dramatic poetry.
Unseen by Lee Stannard
A week is no river to learn what
flows two centuries guarded
by some knowing incomplete,
out of fashion for a change
like intentional clichés.
My face in the river, I see
my own face in the river to me,
yet progress talks here of a habit
making me seem somewhere else.Less than a week – no time to finish
what I began five days before I imagine
I imagine my reluctance to submit
after a dream I remember being
somewhere in an army I was
and inside a party room of odd numbers,
which next day became a chemist.A poem is time enough to leave
unfinished, fragmented as it was
or even as it could be.
So with the adding of a reading
followed by my writing beside other words,
I walk away from another river
and reflect upon a vision I cannot see.
More here.