Articles – Page 2 – The Poetician

Wading Through Blancmange

An attempt to comprehend the Editorial in the Summer 2008 edition of Poetry Review

The three paragraphs of this peculiar Editorial are taken sentence by sentence, in order, as it were, to keep our footing in somewhat slippery stuff.

Impossible to say whether there are more poets at work in Britain today than ever before.

The Journey of a Dunce?

OR: How a mere pith-helmeted end-rhymster is almost lost in a jungled swamp of syl-la-bab-ble

In the chapter Reading Poetry Today in her book 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, published in 2002 by Chatto and Windus, Ruth Padel talks about modern poetry published in Britain that is written in English. She promises to show how, technically, the sound supports the sense (p6) in a partnership;

‘Prosetry’? ‘Pretendery’?…or ‘Poemaletry’?

A first attempt to answer the question ‘What is Poetry?’ was published in ‘Quest’, the journal of The Queen’s English Society under the title ‘On English Poetry and Poems’. This paper is to be found on The True English (Poetry) Party page of the website.

Famous Seamus: Shaman or Sham?

These sentences were published as a piece titled ‘An Old Refrain’ in 2009 in an edition of a quarterly literary magazine:- Robin-run-the-hedge we called the vetch ~ a fading straggle of Lincoln green English stitchwork unravelling with a hey-nonny-no by the Wood Road-side-o.

On Firting Feltonics and Flash-Fryed Feet

a Diatribe upon the Tyrrany of the ‘Iambic Pentameter’ and its Importunate Rabble of Ambiguous ‘Feet’

James Fenton’s book, An Introduction to English Poetry, first published by Viking in 2002, is a fairly modest 130 pages or so. It is an entertaining but in many ways inept little book. It is concerned more with the question as to ‘what makes poetry’ than with the question as to ‘what makes good poetry’;

A Rather Silly Story

and Somewhat Poetical Tale

This is A Memoire which in part records The Adventures of the Illustrious Firm of Pseudo-Solicitors Messrs. Blather, Buttock and Funge; which discovers not only An Amazing Pair of Aubergine-coloured Gardening Boots, but also The Legendary Green Man of Hazel Grove;