On Correctness

by Ann Drysdale

It would be nice to hold a conversation
Without the certainty that it will end
With your taking vociferous objection
To some insult that I did not intend
But you, feeling a need, will manufacture
From any random handful of my speech
And then rub into vulnerable corners
Of parts that other poets cannot reach.
Consideration is my guiding tenet
In all my interpersonal affairs.
I circumnavigate the major pitfalls—
The yawning traps that people dig for bears—
But always fall because I never see
The little holes where goalposts used to be.

4
December, 2009

Ann Drysdale was born near Manchester, raised in London, and married in Birmingham. She ran a smallholding and brought up three children on the North York Moors, and now lives in South Wales. She was a journalist for many years, writing, among other things, the longest-running by-line column in the Yorkshire Evening Post. She has won a few prizes and published several books, including two memoirs, Three-three, two-two, five-six and Discussing Wittgenstein. Of her four volumes of poetry from Peterloo, the most recent, Between Dryden and Duffy, appeared in 2005. Her fifth collection, Quaintness and Other Offences, was was published in 2009 by Cinnamon Press http://www.cinnamonpress.com/.

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