Poetry Forum

I fear this is a one trick pony and that the pun doesn't fit the rest of the poem. The subject is also a bit obvious but thought I'd put it up here for what it's worth. What passing-bells for those who fly as cattle? Only the faux craic cheap sales patter of the stuttering commercial prophet. Only ...

i imagined a father with children in a playground in S1 and 2 - a miniature train and some swings. If so I like the contrast between childish and adult conflict - "the push and pull of wronged indignant hands". i'm afraid the second half became quite obscure to me but i did like the little...

"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts" - Friedrich Nietzsche That for which we find words is miscarried in the womb of the mind, is something already dead in our hearts. I shuffle ancient husks for thoughts, the hollow walnut shells which pass for that for ...

great stuff. the pun carries through not just the title but the whole poem which is great. i personally prefer the original version of the final verse, especially as you retain the rhyme scheme. if you're going to use a villanelle form to make a joke i think it's better to be consistent in the use o...

i see what you're getting at here, but not sure it quite works in the execution. for me the contrast between the two "versions" is just too great - too much wordiness and cliche in the first version and too much earthiness in the second. if there was a way of weaving in this contrast witho...

Thanks, Tamara, for your thoughts on "chattering". I was going for a pun on "the chattering classes" and trying to suggest (obliquely) that glasses and drinking go hand in hand with friends chattering. I'm not trying to say that glasses do themselves chatter though I appreciate t...

if the cliches are kinda the point, what point are they making?

Tamara Interesting piece. A few suggestions if I may - take or leave, I don't mean to be prescriptive. The word order in the first line sounds archaic to me - "How deep this" is to my ears a slightly musty formula. Did you mean "shave of night"? Clearly "shade" would be...

i like the dreamy quality to this one - that is the way images elide into one another, which is definitely helped by the lack of punctuation. I'd suggest you go all in and don't capitalize the initial words of sentences e.g. Where I'm headed there is no news - doing so will enhance the nice ambiguit...

We’ve drained the last of our gin, for now, shared for the last time the clinking intimacy of the chattering glasses. We’ve taken a stroll around Hangover Square and sketched the strange topography of interleaving friendships there. Travel well, like a good wine sleeping Christ-like in its bed of ha...

like others i thought the first half considerably stronger than the second. the opening image is a good one and reminded me of ezra pound's The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. The image you've chosen implies a lost beauty, or a sense of decay. The "morning ...

I really liked this, though I agree that it could be improved by either redrafting or cutting the final stanza. I thought that "bursts - just over-flows" was a bit weak - sounds like you're padding the line out to fit the meter. there are some lovely bits of wordplay here, and the line bre...

i liked the little pun on "stones" - as in when in glass houses never throw stones. perhaps a hint at bringing oneself down by attacking others in some way, e.g. through gossip?

The old coastguard station at Torr Head High on the hill with his feet to the sea they buried Bharraigh with his treasure. The walls of his grave-house crumble and bear witness in their weakness to anxious vigils over the fickle tide. The blind windows keen with the wind, the fire has died in the gr...

thanks all. i've edited as suggested, though i left in the "weight of the world on her shoulders" stanza - supposed to be a pun on "atlas shrugged", her most famous novel.

careful with that axe, eugene...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3R2PgMiTvw

interesting. my initial reading would be that this is a poem about ecology, time and decay and focuses on a tree. but that doesn't sit with the title. my interpretation for what it's worth: Your leaves wait, quiescent, it's autumn: the leaves are dormant yet in them I see the yearning for the trees’...

I enjoyed the dissonance here between modern physics and the metaphysical poets - and the whole poem is a conceit in the sense that, like Donne, you create an extended metaphor - the meaning of the poem is at least in part to do with the way you play with the metaphor itself, hence why the shift in ...

Sorry for posting several poems in a short space of time. I hope I've critiqued enough poems in the last couple of days to excuse myself. I should point out with this one that I don't have anything against Grimsby... Ginsberg in Grimsby What hideous night-trawler from the waters of wickedness dredg...

Tea with Ayn Rand On a damp Tuesday afternoon in Wolverhampton, I went for tea with Ayn Rand. I imagined her in a train guard’s uniform in the cab of the John Galt Express, puffing her way to Colorado. She’d look quite sexy, I thought to myself, with a smudge of coal on her cheek and a stray lock o...

Brendan I'm not going to comment on the political message of your poem which others have already done. Suffice it to say I disagree with you on almost every point! The point here is not what you're saying but how. As others have said I think the poem needs to give us an image of the empire in all it...

It's been a long time since I wrote anything hence my absence from the forum. To try to get myself going again I went back to writing a kind of vilanelle, taking the refrain from another text and filling in my lines around them. In this case the text comes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins and ca...

I really liked this - it's a bit crazy but some great vignettes throughout. I thought of the poem as a kind of scrapbook of fleeting impressions during a journey - the key theme to me being the conflict between man and nature, beauty and ugliness. A few suggestions: - Reading across the first two st...

I liked the idea of this, and especially enjoyed the rhythm in the first half. However I think it gets a bit slacker in the second half in terms of metre. A few suggestions: - Consider getting rid of the "who" in the first line to improve the flow: the third line may need tweaking so it ru...

Perhaps not the forum for it but here's a short essay. The New Unpleasantness Martin Amis has frequently been heralded as the symbol of a new movement for the post-modern era, "The New Unpleasantness". What does this movement stand for and what - if any - are its lessons for a world so th...