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 [...]

I think these things are poems, though there’s a bit of damage and they’re of no great age. Start me at £20, anyone?

On to re-posting more poems with comments and expolanations of a sort. Here goes: GLASS The glass creation on the shelf In the early morning light refracts, transmutes The arriving light into changing colours and links That fade and reform with the slightest of gentle shifts. If you try to see through it the waving [...]

The Herald of Free Enterprise

THE HERALD OF FREE ENTERPRISE On 6 March 1987 the car ferry “Herald of Free Enterprise”, owned by Townsend Thoresen (later P&O) capsized outside the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, causing 193 deaths. A number of safety measures that would have prevented the disaster had not been taken because they were seen as low priority or [...]

Gloomy. Obscure. Negative. Vague. This sounds good…

I’m carrying on commenting on some poems I’ve already posted. They aren’t necessarily the best in my opinion, as some poems seem to me to be fairly obvious in their meaning and technique, and they could just possibly be good. The first one here, though, seems to me to be one of my best. UNDERWATER [...]

Instead of poetry, I thought I’d talk about wheelchairs, and quarries, and Halloween masks, and ponds, and knights in armour, and wheelbarrows and rainstorms…

While poetry can be a subject, as in the academic study of poetry, it’s really a mode of communication that can be about anything. In the 18th century the opinion grew in Western Europe that there were subjects and words unsuitable for poetry, which should be genteel and uplifting. Uplifting maybe – via the depths [...]

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 [...]

Selected Poems of Simon Banks

(Well, about half my poems don’t make it on to the word file. They may survive in a handwritten notebook, or they may have been scrawled on a piece of paper and then I don’t rate them. From the word file a selection gets posted here – and from that, some which most seem to [...]

Well, among the multitude of possible interpretations of these obscure poems, these will do as well as any

and gain a modicum of credibility from originating with the writer.   So here goes with some more old poems.   TOMORROW   After a month of night, a reddish moon Illuminates a new world, smoothes The slivers of metal, softens the swathes Of jagged concrete to A pebble beach. The clumps of bodies become [...]

The definitive, authoritative, comprehensive commentary on the poetic works of Simon Banks

will not be written. However, here are some thoughts on a few more poems.   ESTUARY   The church is early 12th century. Some two miles from here The Romans crossed the estuary by a ford Now long impassable The shades settle   I am confused by their weight, my questions muffled By their insistent [...]

Of course, no-one, not even the “writer”, can “know” what the poem “means”, but still…

…academics can tie themselves in some fascinating knots and, it is even rumoured, disappear up their own theories. Here’s some more commentary on poems I’ve already posted: EDEN The fruit slipped ripe into the hand The hunting hard, but always good, The trees made shade to sleep within That was the Eden we once knew [...]

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