Poetry Forum

Crayon wrote:Crickey, you're posh.

You bet.

The other night I invented the sausage roll sandwich:
2 doorstep slices of white bread
hot sausage rolls to fill
deli style coleslaw
tomato ketchup
strong mustard

Take out the bread and coleslaw and come back to me.

Salivating over steak tartare tonight with a raw egg, something bready and crispy and a red blend.

It's too hard!

Thanks JJ for your usual thoughtfulness.

The title is a disaster and I have changed it to hopefully also elucidate the poem a bit. It's about faithlessness in its various forms and how it undermines happiness.

I may change the last three full stops in line two to commas.

The ghosts on the walks. Who come in somehow. A window. A joist. A door. Pour terrible tidings in your ear; stab you with forks. The walks: the ways between: houses, oaths, limbs. When you summon something, something comes, foul or clean, uncommonly corrupt, or civil, or just or unjust. What you do ...

Educational or just socio-political I think. Line 4 is a real clunker with "I hear you ask". Also not keen on the likeness to flowers. Makes them seem like angels when they're just ordinary.

Hi Crayon. Crawley Softpen of course was a found name, not an invention. Found - I don't think it's real. But it's someone else's pseudonym. Capital O? I think it's OK when a sentence has an interior question. Matter of style. Article for parthenogenetic? Technically but fine to exclude it if thinki...

Ian - I think you're right about "21st century city". Although I want to emphasise that this phenomenon is really c21, not c20. But maybe find a better way. I agree about the limb simile, but I think people will get it without complicating it with inside out. Re: the sentence. But it's the...

Serious revising there. "Improved Revision (I Hope)" is just about bang-on I think. I would just change lines 10 and 12, so that (a) they rhymed properly and (b) to eliminate the idea that history suggests things have turned out for the best, which most would find odd. You must keep it as ...

Drink responsibly.

That's an interesting list, WT. Very healthy, as you say, and a good mix of flavours. I'd want a vegetable or two in there, maybe in place of the bananas or the chicken. Appropriate that lamb and feta rub shoulders: few better pairings in life. Cashews (sounds just like a sneeze) are a fine nut but ...

As a health hazard
it's hard to improve upon
eating yellow snow.

Can't argue with the sentiment.

Bit confused who the "her" in line 5 is. Your partner or someone in the film.

"Fist"/"finish" doesn't rhyme like the others.

Hi Trystan! What a friendly introduction! Welcome to PG.

What is your first language?

Better! But isn't the plural "potatoes"? Only other quibble, I've not heard of "spring stew", stew being generally such an autumn/winter thing. But if spring stew is indeed a thing and that's what you call it, then fine.

Second line is (reads) so much longer than all the rest. Seems like some stray initial capitals? I like "we say nothing / back and forth". What's wrong with "when folded linen / was in her hand"? "Fresh, hot food" doesn't really make me think of fresh, hot food. Overall...

Good poem. Maybe "it was like air congealed / into etc". The two "always" in v2 sound flat to me. I'd prefer "we used to go out..." and "it would catch". You can delete "that glass ornament, sat on its shelf" which has been said before. Last six line...

Too straightforward for my taste, but the ending is great.

"With the start of a quarry" reads a bit awkwardly? Maybe "when quarrying began" or something.

I really like your titanium spork Ian. It's definitely baggy on the page but it rolls well enough when spoken aloud. I'l listen to the audio file tonight. The word "spork" grosses me out by the way. I wish you'd used something else. But I understand why you went with it.

Man, woman, or maybe a unisex job? Sam, Alex, Kelly? Hilary Something? Ought to be plausible, not Pynchonesque: no Crawley Softpen or Maybelline Feels. Archly poetic: Emerson Longfellow, Senryu Haibun? or cryptic - an anagram: Jason Shinreko? Rail stations in Britain: Tod Morden, Glen Garnock? Is it...

Terrific sonnet! Love "the uncertain hours" and "the useless German Georges". "Mulch" is a great word in this context too. And line eight is simply a great line in the sonnet tradition. Line nine misses a beat, as I'm sure you know, but it jarred with me on first readin...

On balance, I prefer the first version. I especially prefer the layout in v1. Most of the changes (and you really made a lot) I don't think are improvements, although they're also not bad as poetry. I would keep v1 if I were you, and just try to lighten/reduce line 4. It's strange that no-one notice...

Thanks everyone! Have rejigged the middle part. Keeping the beginning and the end. Tristan - Delphic in the sense of hard to read, equivocal, vatic. I hadn't meant it as a metaphor for the hole in city life, but I suppose it could be that. I don't think there's a bigger hole in city life than in rur...

I don't see why the gatepost has to be allegorical. Sometimes a gatepost is just a gatepost!

I like the poem but am having trouble visualizing the arrangement of the hands. Two resting on the post, and two more on those two. It just seems... odd.

Revision Not in the middle of a dark wood or at the Poles or by a lake of sulphurous mud, but in the 21st century city: layers of asphalt and aggregate, sewer lines, tangles of arm-thick cable cleanly, capriciously cut, like a cross-sectioned limb. Sometimes they devour a soul or two but often swal...