Poetry Forum

Try http://bodyliterature.com/2014/01/17/fr ... sh-poetry/

On the general point about voice, I've heard various opinions - Eavan Boland et al considers it more essential than ever that poets should discover "a real voice, a true voice". First find yourself, then you'll find your poetry. Others think that using the term "voice" rather tha...

I'm a bit confused about timings - when did they find the letter? When did she try to close the map? What moment does she remember - the chance discovery of the letter? Maybe the main narrative could use the present tense. The way I see it, after a hint of freedom she opened a letter then tried to f...

Is there something I'm missing about "swift" water?

Try the Wikipedia page. Maybe a UK version with Prynne and Pam Ayres as judges?

RAI (roughly Italy's equivalent of the BBC) have a show called Masterpiece (like "The Voice" but for writers). My Italian's not good enough to know how good an idea this is. You can judge for yourself at the RAI site

Three quick points 1) the "agitation of … wave of … click of … reek of … grasp of" repetition nagged after a while. 2) Though it says "How could I forget myself so completely", the poem doesn't really convey the sentiment of self-forgetting by showing it. I guess that's ok. 3) Ar...

I liked it, though I had trouble parsing "In all these half ignored sense objects what is present can have meaning". I think it's alluding to objects apprehended by the senses (i.e. "sense objects") but "objects" could nearly be read as a verb - e.g. it could be read as...

I think many 20th century avant garde movements could be viewed as normalized eccentricities/symptoms. Then those avant garde ideas become part of the mainstream. In Madness and Modernism Sass looks at connections between artistic movements and mental conditions. Here are some extracts "[in pos...

I couldn't get in the Goss...I'm sure it was the theme.

I wouldn't recommended it to people interested in poetry per se, for the reasons I mention in my write-up. But there are other reasons why people might like the book, and why the book might be good.

States of Independence is happening on Saturday 15 March at Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Leicester, and it's all free. Dozens of small presses will be there, and there are dozens of talks starting from 11am. "This year there is a strong emphasis on fiction … we have asked each and...

More impressive still, the recently announced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wilbur_Award

I think it needs a twist. At the moment it's just a more restrained version of "if I were a rich man". Verses like "Would keep my carbon footprint small By building wind farms, planting trees - I'd do such good for one and all." aren't earning their keep.

I agree about "head & shoulders", and if "wounded knee" was chosen mainly because it rhymed with "fancy me", perhaps the rhymes should go. My guess is that "touching distant" should be "touching distance".

I am having a hard time deciphering your poem, whatever you the author was trying to impart to me the reader as not come through with any clarity. I think the persona's saying 5 times that s/he has trouble relating to people. It's a topic that's popular with budding poets especially, but also with ...

My Something old, something new article about spelling and poetry has just appeared in Hinterland

Some UK mainstream poets have dabbled -

• In "These Days" by Leontia Flynn there's a poem with fragments of a computer program - "Perl Poem"
• Heidi Williamson's "Electric Shadow" collection includes IfThenElse

I guess we're supposed to be amused by the persona's lack of self-awareness? Even so, it sounds very laboured to me. I can't suggest improvements.

I've been plotting my 2014 prose campaign. Some of you (especially the UK ones) may find this useful January Comma Press - http://www.commapress.co.uk/?section=FAQs will be announcing a call for submissions to their next 'new writer' anthology in early 2014 Wigleaf - stories under a 1000 words, the ...

This poem was written as a response to events here in the midlands. But why was it written? Who for? What will the "you" think if they read it? In what way does the content make "us" think in a new way? Or is the strength of the poem in the mode of expression rather than the dep...

Congrats. It's a mag I've tried to get into a few times, without success.

tried something a bit different A bit different from what? A problem I have with my stuff is that I can produce words that "capture" the effect I'm trying to communicate to my satisfaction, but only by using concepts, phrases and/or words that many people have used before. The reason thos...

And for discussion sake, do you think contemporary poetry should be actually limited to a certain level of vocabulary? ... when I myself read (a poem) and see a word that I don't know, I get excited at the thought of learning that new word - another tiny addition to the tools of expression, no? Thi...

I've tried this kind of thing, both in poetry and prose. Can't say I've been very successful. One always hopes that the constraint will force out a phrase that might otherwise never have appeared - maybe "Yale’s prestige as king of the zoo" is such a phrase. I think pre-empting crit like t...

There are some punctuation problems, and I wonder if there's spelling trouble too. Maybe "clam" should be "calm" and "dye" should be "die", though I'm not sure, because I don't really get the poem.