Oh bother! After writing a whole set of paragraphs in the HappenStance Story Chapter 3 about the pain of errors and having to learn to live with it, there was a bebo, I mean booboo, in the first line of my verse Christmas card. How many times have I read that card? How many weeks did the prototype sit in the dining room table? I don’t think I would ever have seen it said ‘Bards of Bards’ instead of ‘Bard of Bards’ if someone hadn’t written and pointed out the ‘clunker’.
It reminds me how one day I found a mistake in a poem that had been to and fro to magazines, printed in a couple of places — and nobody, including me, had noticed something dead obvious. You read what you know is supposed to be there, especially when you were the person who wrote it.
There is an error in my poem ‘Falling in Love’ — I carried it through issue one of Unsuitable Poems, through the revised edition two years later as well.
It’s on the postcard of the poem.
The same error was in the same poem in an Aldeburgh Festival poster this autumn.
It persisted into in the recent Scottish Love Poems anthology.
It’s not a bad error, I suppose. It’s a capitalisation thing: following a colon at the end of a line, there’s a capital T at the front of ‘They’ll write on our headstone’. It should, of course, be lower case, because that’s the pattern for the rest of the poem. It causes me a little twinge every time I see it.
Oh well. It represents just how blind and intelligent person can be about her own scribblings. So I’m pointing it out for the record. Nobody is to be trusted, but most of all not yourself.
I expect it’s observations like this that win blog competitions..