vague echoes of Dylan Thomas 'do not go gentle'
but in the first person. I love the seniment and the way it is expressed. XX

Comment is about Sunflowers (blog)

Original item by Cate

powerfully ominous. Indeed for whom the bell tolls there is no escape. XX

Comment is about For Whom The Wheel Turns (blog)

Original item by Cate

The translation into English is one of the
challenges that face foreign poetry. Does it
"travel"? Is the plight of humanity and its
attitudes towards life really the same wherever
you may go in this world? I'm not sure and
for every Neruda there must be many whose
work seems disconnected with our own lives.
Even across the Channel (that close!), the mindset can appear from another world on occasion. And then in Italy there is the taste
for extravagant visual and verbal effect
that is at odds with our pared-down, often
reflective style.
But UK poetry has to benefit from any effort to
embrace its fellows and if you don't try,
you'll never know.

Comment is about And it was at that age that poetry arrived in search of me (article)

Original item by Greg Freeman

how wonderful to soak up the atmosphere and then put it on paper - and the juxtaposition of the luxury and the poverty against a background of total love is extremely effective. XX

Comment is about Taj At Sunset (blog)

Original item by Cate

I'm not surprised by the dearth of verse in an age that lacks the skills or the innate humanity of a Betjeman. The overall theme?
A sort of scribbled nostalgia from childhood memories and youthful diaries, occasionally
interrupted by resentment or mind-boggling hyperbole.

Comment is about Sixty poems to mark Queen's 60 years (article)

Original item by Greg Freeman

Ah Yes Absolutely the joy of music performance after the hour(s) of practice. You have said it all so well - and of course Eric Morcambe's
marvelous line about all the right notes is my fallback position. XX

Comment is about Let`s Hear It For Music (blog)

Original item by Cate

what a fantastic mother's prayer.She loves but knows love is not always enough and suffers because of it. XX

Comment is about If I Could (blog)

Original item by Cate

This pulses forward from verse to verse until the final lines, which with their single syllables repeated slow the pace and emphasise the sadness of the daily grind to which he must submit, willing or not.It really catches the moods and felings (some hidden) of all the members of the family where the circadian rhythm is tortured. So good. XX

Comment is about The Night Worker (blog)

Original item by Cate

clever title.
Cargos is one of my favorite poems because its rhythm is almost hypnotic to me. You have faithfully echoed this and the content is brill. XX

Comment is about Not John`s Cargo (blog)

Original item by Cate

Hello Chris - the courtesy of your reply to my"profile" says as much about you as your blogs ever will. Certainly, let us by all means disagree on things political but I suggest there is surely room for "common ground" as no politician is to be totally trusted and no politicaldecision ever necessarily admirable/altruistic. My only misgiving in the general sense is the tendency to demonise "the right" and confer saintliness on the other lot...as if the latter were busy plucking their harps for us whilst the former were busy consorting with the devil. Going back a bit for a source of reference...comparing the grotesque WW2 public rantings of "Lord Haw-Haw" with the insidious activities of the Cambridge spies and their betrayal of country and people tends to add another perspective to being chummy with the devil and his works.
Keep up the good work.
All good wishes.
MC

Comment is about Chris Co (poet profile)

Original item by Chris Co

what did she put in the coffee?
Great stuff! So well set out. XX

Comment is about Tosspot! (blog)

Original item by Cate

you have a great way with words for even when you reverse a natural word order, because of the balanced rhythm of the piece, the flow and meaning are impaired not a whit.
A delightful take on the insouciance of the Gods and man's wilfulness.XX

Comment is about Pandora`s Box (blog)

Original item by Cate

Bite the bullet. Face up to our worst apprehensions. This piece is so emotive (and I've been there and it was just like this)Are you writing from personal experience?
Not sure whether 'I enjoyed it' is quite the right expession - it certainly touched a raw point in me.XX

Comment is about Biting The Bullet (blog)

Original item by Cate

The way the rhythm flows freely and joyously is like the childhood you describe - ah I remember it well. I just never wrote about it.lovely.XX

Comment is about Under The Stairs (blog)

Original item by Cate

brings back so many good memories of Lancashire for, having emigrated to Yorkshire with litte hope of return, now I hanker after my old accent
I've just discovered your work Cate and am enchanted. You have a style after my own heart and the dialect is a jewel in the crown. ( I have to resort to Albert and the Lion or the Oldham Tinkers for a quick fix these days,

Comment is about Uncle Ned (blog)

Original item by Cate

Hi SS,
as a long distance lorry driver (that came out as 'long distance river' not a bad idea to start from!!!) I'm not always near the old WWW but I'm 'ere now,
I see you take your written stuff seriously, beware! there are those with millions of qualifications that are a tad pendantic about spurious grammatical ... (what!) this is poetry not a classroom for conjugation of Latin verbs!
Haiku's tin is tight for syllabic affitionados but if you wish to dip your toes ... then be my guest but beware there lurks a chap called TT who is a master of , well! several variations of (proper) poetry and if he spots your stuff he may well be the voice to ask!! The only real voice is, of course, your own. Despite my rabblings - go for it - and it will do what it says on the tin!
Ta muchly, Nick.
ps sorry it's a bit wordy - even moreso now!

Comment is about Shirley Smothers (poet profile)

Original item by Shirley Smothers

yee-haa love it - and the last line makes it for me. I always love a little twist in the tail/tale? XX

Comment is about Naughty Digits! (blog)

Original item by Cate

Made me smile this one.... although there`s not much gazumping going on in our area at the moment! And yes, our once green belt is gradually being eroded by back handers and council relatives. A breeding porogramme for the wealthy or well connected.
Cate xx

Comment is about House Hunting (blog)

Original item by Yvonne Brunton

Thanks for the reminder of that song. last heard about 40 years ago.
I learned much of my politics from listening to Ewan MacColl's steam whistle ballads as a child. Dismayed to discover later that he was an unreconstructed Stalinist until he passed away, and that this was his stage name; his real moniker being Jimmy Miller, a Salford lad. Who/what can we trust?
And then, listening to Peggy got me to listen to her rendition of The First time ever I saw your face. I cannot listen to that without dissolving.
Bloody woman! Bloody MCcoll! I knew two people who knew him well, both journalists. fascinating stuff.

Comment is about Laura Taylor (poet profile)

Original item by Laura Taylor

Oh Ray, this is lovely. Fostering is such an important job. Those last 3 lines are killer. Grit/eye.

Comment is about Looking After You (blog)

We're trying to do something different, I think. Mine is built up over the 7 parts, and follows (roughly) the form of a Requiem Mass. Yours is a stand alone piece.
I take the point of others commentators about yours, that the palette of words is rich, yet the piece as a whole seems to sidestep a lyrical construction. In my poem I was striving to draw metphor from the lake as part of a narrative, whereas you appear to be trying to translate the experience of viewing it into words. Mine was written several years ago, shortly after the events that sparked it, and was six months in the making. For me to begin re-writing it now would be too artificial a reconstruction I think. Perhaps that's not the case for you? I appreciated your comments, btw! MS

Comment is about Thirlmere in May (blog)

Cheers for your equally world-weary comments on Wilfully Blind ;D Appreciate it Chris, as I know it isn't one of my best but like I said, I just had to get something out about him. I was lying on my sickbed last week watching him drool his way through his statement and it was all I could do not to kick the telly in. Obscene.

Anyhoo, yep, we're all systems go for the next Spoke - looking forward to it. Just finished me setlist today as it goes :)

Can only agree with your really short comment on your poem (heh) - sometimes, you can actually hear the HEADLINES themselves coming out of people's mouths and you know exactly where they've got their 'info' from. I find the attitudes of the majority of my fellow working class heartbreaking and deeply disturbing. Can't agree with you on the 'genuine' right wing though mate. They stand for everything I am against. Zero tolerance.

Anyhoo - it's proper refreshing to hear you rant on about all this - balm to the soul :)

Comment is about Chris Co (poet profile)

Original item by Chris Co

Thanks, Greg, Isobel. Funny you should pick up on "to when I'm". It was added late, to make the poem more explicit. Really, I prefer just

I'm looking after you - stationed....

Yeah, it's about fostering, moving children on.

Comment is about Looking After You (blog)

Hi Ray,

Our Day Out...as capitalised... was a play wriiten in the late 1970s by Willy Russell about deprived kids growing up in deprived Liverpool. The play was recorded for television in the 1980s. This was the time I was growing up in the same city on one of its poorer housing estates.

The play starts out as a coach trip, but the plot darkens when it becomes obvious that the kids from the back streets of Liverpool, have little to no hope in terms of a future. The picture is painted that they are no-hopers; that a day trip is as good as anything is going to get for them...they'll soon be back on the estates.

In one scene at a zoo there is a bear in a bear pit.

The scene starts off when one of the kids asks a teacher if the bear could kill you. The teacher replies saying “Well why do you think it kept in a pit?” Another kid joins the conversation by saying “ I think it is cruel don’t you?” The teacher replies to him saying that it is not if it is treated well. “No. Not if its treated well. And don’t forget it was born in captivity so it won’t know any other sort of life”


A kid replies "It must know other ways of living, sir. Y’know, free, like the way people have stopped it livin’. It only kills people cos it’s trapped an’ people are looking at it. If it was free it wouldn’t bother people at all.”

The kids like the bear are trapped. The kids can't escape a poor background in Liverpool and likely can't escape a poor future as a result.n The bear will be in the pit for all his life, like the kids In Liverpool, and will be treated the same way, and will be living the same way for the rest of their life. The bear doesn’t learn anything good other than, try and scare humans off, when they are being cruel, the kids don't learn much different.

It also includes the idea that the bear if placed in better surroundings would still be just as dangerous, still a bear. The analogy is clear; you can take the boy out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the boy. In other words there is no point in giving these kids (kids like these) a chance or a better home...they'll just be what they are anyway. (how more wrong could an idea be?)

I saw the kids that grew up before me on the estates, I saw that half of them had zero education. I was very fortunate to have very well educated parents in the home. But I saw a disproportionate number of kids from the estates were in remedial classes...like the play. I saw how the estates promoted the idea that school and homework was for losers and that it didn't matter anyway as there was no hope academically. I also saw that a lot of bad lads turned out...not surprising!

Fighting was a daily routine on the estates, but you could and would get battered if all the kids thought you were a 'suck'...which means someone pushing to do well at school. The pressure was to conform and that conformity was, play out late, play footy, jump across bin sheds. Play hideO on the roof of the old people's home, break into houses or the local school, and most importantly mess about in school.

I got to escape this background when Michael Heseltine came to Liverpool as Tory minister and they found the conditions...to not be fit to live in. The estates were knocked down and we moved... as I said into real housing. Oddly for the first couple of years I didn't know what to do without having bin sheds to jump across (I know that might sound quite mad) and green space and back gardens were confusing lol. Back on point...

You might not be able to take bears out of bear pits, but you can take children out of deprived conditions and things can as a result...improve greatly.

Our day out for me was in getting OUT and not suffering a future like those before me on that estate or like kids in that play.

P.S

I can see what your saying about the line changes, but I like the sprung rhythm that currently exists. That said, I have added two commas and a semicolon. Hopefully this makes for superior sonic units, whilst retaining meaning and rhythm. Thoughts appreciated...I always do consider tweeks.

Comment is about Our day out (blog)

Original item by Chris Co

Thanks all for your constructive comments.
There is nothing in them I would reject or dispute so during some inspired hour I will do some more work on this one.

Comment is about Thirlmere in May (blog)

This has the makings of a superb poem with its lovely, colourful descriptions. And yet, the lack of rhythmic consistency detracts from its enjoyment, for me anyhow. And yet just a little editing could bring such rhythm as the voluptuous description demands.
The word 'merge' perhaps needs an 's' as it seems to need to be in agreement with 'bark', singular. That said, it is one of only two lines containing verbs, which upsets the lovely flow. Might you consider turning the verbs into adjectives: Sable and puce, grey-marbled, for example?

Comment is about Thirlmere in May (blog)

I really like this, Tommy. It's poetic and hints at a story arc within few words.

I would agree you might think about dropping 'mainly'. Adverbs are often superfluous in poetry as good as this. How about also replacing 'became' with 'now', and swopping 'your smile' for 'a smile'?

Or does that turn it from your poem into mine? If so, apols.

This is the sort of poetry I like, essential, spare, interesting.

Comment is about A Lady's dismissal (blog)

Original item by Tommy Carroll

Hello Glyn. No connections, just a few short pieces.

Comment is about Get Shorty (blog)

a breath of fresh air Nick, thankyou

Comment is about MAN-MADE MECHANIZATIONS (blog)

Original item by NICK ARMBRISTER

All Happening in Kernow it seems. Have a great time :-)

Comment is about Head for St Ives for poetry in the square (article)

Original item by Greg Freeman

Hi Alexandros, Michael does sometimes read at The Puzzle (And has been a past guest) but I am not in regular contact with him. As I suspect you know, his work and the delivery of it are spellbinding. Win

Review is about Puzzle Poets Live at the Blind Pig on 7 May 2012 (event)

I like the concept of this poem - I agree with Glyn about the lines he mentioned and perhaps 'I am hopeful.....would be better as the penultimate line.
Because of the repetitive nature of this piece I was looking for a little something else within it. I half expected to see a kind of acrostic word formed from all the alliterative letters ( that would be great but hard work and probably need a great deal of rejigging) but it may be something you bear in mind for a different poem. XX

Comment is about Am I a Son of God? (blog)

Original item by Emma-Jane Stradling

I'd totally echo what Greg said. I have a work colleague who fosters - letting go of the children to new parents, who are not always as skilled at raising difficult children, seems to be the most painful thing; letting go of them at all must be hard when you've formed a bond.

Your poem made me feel that ache. I think you express it all beautifully. If I was to be picky - I would just replace 'to when I'm' with 'till when I'm'

Isobel x

Comment is about Looking After You (blog)

Does anybody know when Michael greavy will next be reading at an Event ?

Review is about Puzzle Poets Live at the Blind Pig on 7 May 2012 (event)

Hi, Shirley I am pleased I was able to help you and happy that you were able to rescue your poem
XX

Comment is about Shirley Smothers (poet profile)

Original item by Shirley Smothers

Hi Glyn. Well I should update my profile as I've now managed to read my work out twice now! I must admit that I lost my nerve and pulled out on Tuesday but it just didn't feel right. Apart from that I'm glad I read my poems out and I think they went down well. I sat back down so fast im not sure! Hope it goes well for you.

I'll have a look at your poetry. Is it your poem The King of Thorns that you'd like me to read?

Comment is about Glyn Pope (poet profile)

Original item by Glyn Pope

a telescope has an invisible statement wrote on the side 'Use Me!'

this reminds me of my old telescope when i was a teen. many memories brought on by this.

Comment is about Telescopes and Things (blog)

Original item by Isobel

Glyn that's so nice to hear. It's really great to know that someone else gets what I'm saying. Given me the incentive to keep writing.

Comment is about BERBERIS (blog)

Original item by Emma-Jane Stradling

theres a lot in this, like a what you call it, a microcosm/macrocosm (large/small) thing about life. planets and people even. very different read:)

Comment is about No. 4 (blog)

Original item by Isobel

Yes thank you for your comments Glyn.

Now I look at it box of chocolates line is terrible!

I'll have an edit & see what I can do. I'm glad you liked the idea.

Comment is about Am I a Son of God? (blog)

Original item by Emma-Jane Stradling

hi Shirley thanx for replying, yes i like your poems. glad you resolved your issue, things like that are important:)

Comment is about NICK ARMBRISTER (poet profile)

Original item by NICK ARMBRISTER

Very clever Mrs.B!
and very funny.

Thank you.
Patricia and Stef.xx

Comment is about House Hunting (blog)

Original item by Yvonne Brunton

Stokes Croft or Gloucester Road familiar? recognise name/profile pic

Comment is about SPACEGHOST (poet profile)

Original item by SPACEGHOST

I've got to read out loud for the first time in September. I'm rehearing what I've going to say already. I'm terrified.

Comment is about Emma-Jane Stradling (poet profile)

Original item by Emma-Jane Stradling

I've read three of your poems. And I'm, well words fail me. I love this. It just completely speaks to me. I love it.

Comment is about BERBERIS (blog)

Original item by Emma-Jane Stradling

I like this because i like a poem that makes me think.
I feel you could find a better way of saying this 'It might make you woozy,'
Id be interested, Emma-Jane in what you think abut my poem Crown of Thorns.

Comment is about God is looking for action (blog)

Original item by Emma-Jane Stradling

For quite a serious well written poem in the most part this line is dreadful

'I am chosen like choosing a caramel from a box of chocolates.'

Find something better to say. Also not as strongly, I find this line a bit clumsy

'I am unfastened, I understand, unlike ugly friends who choose not to.'

Though overall it's a great idea for a poem, but it cud be improved. Give it some thought. My criticisms are kindly meant.

Comment is about Am I a Son of God? (blog)

Original item by Emma-Jane Stradling

I can't see the connections. I have no argument with them as little individual snaps.

Comment is about Get Shorty (blog)

First reading I thought this guys swallowed a thesaurus. But, because you overdo the language it works.

Comment is about Thirlmere in May (blog)

I think you've got something here Tommy. It certainly captures a certain indefinable something.

Personally I would drop the would mainly, it loses a tad in qualification but gains a lot sonically and in turn of phrase appeals a little more.

Good write

Chris

Comment is about A Lady's dismissal (blog)

Original item by Tommy Carroll