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Birmingham Poets Online
Yes, I know it looks like I've dropped off the earth, and I don't appear to be doing any technical writing or research (don't appear...aha, just you wait), but I have been spending a lot of my spare time writing poetry. Before you laugh, can I just remind you that it is a noble art form, intellectually challenging, and one which I find very engaging (I lose hours troubling over a rhyme or the right words to keep my iambic pentameter intact). OK, maybe not for everyone, but I am really into it at the moment (reading poetry as well as writing it).
Anyway, to my point: I've now got my own space on Birmingham Poets Online. I don't think it takes much to get on there, to be honest, but it's nice to be part of an (albeit small) literary community. Those of you who've been missing my poetry on here (not you, obviously, sis) can catch up with my latest works there.
Comments
Poetry
I particularly like 'Spoil' on first read through. And the last two verses of 'While'. I expect, like songs, the pretty overcoat will give way to a deeper understanding and altered affection as I re-read them. Thanks for the fantastic shifts of perspective, overlaying seemingly incongruent meaning - I always find them hard to come up with but love reading them.
Tell me, what poetry have you been reading? These things on the left here?
Hello Natalie. Thanks, glad
Hello Natalie. Thanks, glad you like Spoil. People seem to respond well to that one. Funny, I wrote it very quickly on the bus, in about 10 minutes flat. Other stuff which took hours of work (e.g. Queen of the Immortals) is more often met with confusion. Tricky thing, poetry. Do you write poetry, by the way? Strikes me you might.
Yes, I've been reading the stuff on the left. I also read Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind, which I liked a lot. And various things by Brian Patten, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, some ancient Chinese poetry, etc.. I actually went and bought a load of stuff in secondhand bookshops and off Amazon marketplace a few weeks ago and have been plowing through it. The 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem book is really interesting: close readings of 52 poems, which is helping me think about how I structure things, word choices, rhyme schemes, traditional poetic structures etc..
Poetry
I used to write poetry occasionally but since I don't read/ appreciate much that's already been written I feel like I have no place trying out my own stuff :) I might have a crack at it after reading through some of what you have listed there. I do, though, remember really enjoying 'The Waste Land' by T. S. Eliot during A levels, one of the few works I can quote. Hmmm, I feel the first rumblings of the infernal muse.
I enjoyed "The Waste Land"
I enjoyed "The Waste Land" at school, though I thought it was quite elitist: requiring the reader to understand all the allusions to classical literature, myth and other more obscure stuff (like Sanskrit religious texts). Then I realised that if I don't know that stuff, it's OK: I have a right to an interpretation, regardless of whether I know all that stuff. The Reader is King; the Author is Dead, along with their intentions. Then I descended into a sea of relativism, from which I have never managed to struggle free.