poetics
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Ruth Padel’s Radio 4 programme “Poetry Workshop” is back for another series. I missed the first one in its entirety, and only noticed this evening when I wandered to the iplayer for “The Verb” that it was back for a second round. So I listened and enjoyed. I listened even more closely when I heard
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Tonight, one of my children asked me what poetry is. I answered poorly, talking vaguely about lines. (Well, how do you explain it to a five-year-old?!) But it got me thinking again about that imponderable. Does the difference between prose and poetry, perhaps, boil down to this: in poetry, the focus is on the relationships
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For a long time, the Reasoning Rhyme section of this site has simply directed readers back to my old blog, but I’ve now consolidated all those previous posts into a proper section of this site. I’ve not added anything new, but I do have good intentions — and we all know where they lead —
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While song may share 99% of poetry’s DNA, it isn’t poetry, any more than, say, a chimpanzee is a bonobo. This, from Adam Newey reviewing Hard Ground, poems by Tom Waits, photographs by Michael O’Brien, in yesterday’s Guardian Review, strikes me as a shrewd snippet on the difference between song and poetry. (Newey has a
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As many poets gear up for NaPoWriMo, in which they attempt to spend every day in April writing a poem*, I’ve signed up for InterNaPwoWriMo, in which poets from throughout the world post a pwoermd** a day during April. Much more manageable; simultaneously far zanier and far saner. A pwoermd is, as the name suggests,
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Rob Mackenzie has blogged about using personas and characters in his poetry. One of the points he discusses is the degree to which a reader is likely to equate the I of a poem written in the first person with the writer. Anyone who writes in a persona — anyone who writes, I suspect —
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There’s an extensive, thoughtful and very positive review of the sampler over at Jim Murdoch’s ever stimulating blog The Truth about Lies. Jim comments on each of the poems in turn, as well as on general aspects of the pamphlet as an object and collection. This is the paragraph that most interests me: As a
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Rob A Mackenzie got himself in slightly hot water with some comment writers on his blog last week for daring to suggest that he might not consider Magi Gibson’s work poetry. Unfortunately, instead of following the question of what makes a poem a poem, which could have thrown up some interesting ideas and insights, the
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One question that arises for the new terminology is whether it can cover rhyme practice in languages other than English adequately. It ought to be able to, as it’s based on phonetic/phonemic correspondence rather than any single tradition of what does or doesn’t constitute a rhyme. In this post, I start to test it out
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Interesting to hear Tom Paulin talking so much about the sound texture of poems on yesterday’s edition of The Verb. Worth listening to while you still can (seven days). It’s a trailer for his new book, The Secret Life of Poems, which Faber describes as a primer which offers [47 poems] – or on occasion
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I closed my first post on Tiel Aisha Ansari’s criticism of my new rhyme terminology by saying that the mention of structure brought me to her most fundamental objection. She is bothered that my nomenclature risks broadening the definition of “rhyme” to the point where it loses all usefulness. This comment grows out of her
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It’s good to see Tiel Aisha Ansari’s critique of my Reasoning Rhyme posts on her Knocking From Inside blog. This is the first time anybody has taken me to task on any elements of my rhyme terminology and analysis, and it’s envigorating. Ansari says there is a lot she likes about my terminology. However, she’s
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On last week’s edition of The Verb, Paul Farley opined that “we” are “in denial about rhyme” because, when “we” rhyme, “we” use relative rhyme*. If you’ve read my Reasoning Rhyme posts, it won’t surprise you to learn that this is, in my opinion, utter tosh. Far from being a denial of rhyme, relative rhyme
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1 In contrast to prose — which, being continuous, pretends to a form of wholeness — poetry, because it is divided into lines, is equipped in its structure to reflect and deal with the brokenness of the world. This it holds in tension with a more intense and therefore more whole scrutiny of language. 2
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I’ve been thinking about the way that I and other writers use the pronoun you in poems and realising how strong an antipathy I have to its being used to stand in for the first person. I’m not talking about the colloquial use of you as a replacement for the often bothersomely formal impersonal pronoun
Amy Jo Philip 