A Night in Hospital

Notes

We had lots of fun with this one, testing and tweaking the lines and images, always on the hunt for internal rhymes and other sound effects. The second half of the first stanza was a tricky exercise in balancing the moon on the tip of the dog's nose in just the right way, and elsewhere we played around with the positioning of sounds, scents and breath. The part that gave us most pause was probably the mention of sex workers, since there are so many slang words to choose from. Assiya told us that the word in Kazakh carries scornful connotations, but a word like 'whores' seemed too vicious, so we tried out 'night walkers', 'hussies' and 'hustlers' before settling on 'tarts'.

Jon Stone, Workshop Facilitator