Poetry Review – The Poetician

Why did the Chair of The Poetry Society cheat?

It was in 2004 that I took a more active interest in The Poetry Society of which I had been a member for some years. It had long seemed to me that most of the new pieces that were published as ‘poetry’ in the Society’s quarterly Newsletter and in its magazine Poetry Review were not truly poetry at all.

Such “False and Unruly Stuff”

or "babble and balderdash"

Ruth Padel has been ‘Chair’ of The Poetry Society, and is an authoress of note. I present here an analysis of some of her recent writing about English poetry. *** Ms Padel published a book in 2002 called 52 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A POEM.

How Lyrically Principled is Paterson, Poetical Prestidigitator?

Part 1: The ‘Feel’ of Nonsense?

Don Paterson’s essay in Poetry Review, Volume 97:2 is entitled The Lyric Principle
Part 1: The Sound of Sense and has this introduction:- These are the first two sections of an essay the concluding instalment of which will appear in the next issue of Poetry Review, 97:3.

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;

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.