Apparently anything can be poetry, so it seems safe to say this is

So it’s important and you ought to look at it seriously. OK, I’m being ironic: putting something boring, uninspired, mannered or prancingly self-indulgent in short lines in a nice shape and calling it poetry and art doesn’t make it any more worthy of attention than anything else anyone writes or says.   Still, you might [...]

What is Poetry?

I’ve seen it recently said on LinkedIn that it’s wrong to limit poetry through any kind of definition, wrong to say that anything isn’t poetry.   I understand the thinking behind this – and maybe at times I’ve been too willing to make absolute statements about poetry. But if anything can be poetry, why can’t [...]

If we deconstruct these poems, we can put all the letters in a different order!

OK, I know “deconstruct” doesn’t quite mean that, but it has a chilling, dehumanising sound. I don’t want to dehumanise my poems, though maybe throughhumanise them. Here’s some more with comment. DIGGING DOWN I have found an old guilt: By scrabbling in the dirt with callused hands Brushing away the low lying deposits Stories of [...]

This probably isn’t what I meant, if I meant anything, but you never know

So I’ll go on disinterring old posted poems and suggesting some context and meaning. Soon I’ll go back to new postings.   By the way, I have a blog (http://sibathehat.blogspot.com) for everything non-literary, and the leading countries people are visiting the blog from are: Joint 1: U.K. and U.S.A. Vying for third place: France, Germany [...]

Erm… I think I really meant…

So I’m carrying on commenting on some of my own poems already posted. These were written at a time when I was coming out of a period of great stress occasioned by a family illness. Writing such poems was part of the emergence from that period and they carry a certain bleakness as well as [...]

Long lines or short?

Poetry’s origins are in song and chant that made their impact by sound. It remains, for me, an art of the spoken word: that it’s seen in print on the book page or the computer screen or by Kindle is a convenience but not an end. We need to hear it, in our heads at [...]

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