Poets and writers evolve, hopefully. I wrote this poem about forty years ago when I was young and stupid. The person who used to read my poems at the time pointed out that a word existed for someone or something that had moved forward through a process of evolution and that was: evolved (not evoluted as I had written). Humans evolved from monkeys. I still feel my red-facedness.
I wrote Damned Electricity after moving to the French Alps into an apartment above a school. A small electricity pylon stood in the garden and carried power to the main village from a small dam. It was during my even-worse-poet-than-I-am-now period. I have great affection for the poem though. I hate to think of it laying at the bottom of the drawer not seeing the light of day. So here it is.
Damned Electricity and the Evoluted Spring 1982 When our garden was someone’s field evoluted monkeys came to build a tower of webbed steel - a prop for a high-voltage highway. I have followed this highway which passes over stable roofs, and found at its beginning a little iron dam with limited capacity. A little iron dam between the bellies of two fat mountains where pines grow together like forests of tall green people where you, great soulless thing have been adopted and I have not – a little iron dam all wet with purpose.
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