The Poets' Graves Workshop

I would welcome your suggestions for any poems I might read out to, or intelligently deploy into the minds of eager phone scammers wishing to help me with my computer or kindly inform me about other criminals. I was thinking maybe Not's excellent 'Different Stations' which starts quite conversationa...

Wow, that's quite a breath taking poem.
I'd never heard of King before.
Thank you for that mac!
J

Sheer genius Stuart - at first I thought 3 and 4 lacked the courage of 1 and 2 but they do grow . . . as Not points out, the violence of 4 is breathtaking, once decoded, though probably justified considering the wheens. I am reminded of the late lamented Cutler. I actually like the flatness of 'It w...

Ok, I have colour coded it. I can't quite work out whether you were getting the whole duality thing elph & mac, though if not it's interesting you like it anyway! elph - thank you for my missing L You slightly misquoted me, possibly intentionally (nibble your food vs nibble at your food) … I think I...

Hi JJ - a sprightly piece. I am entirely in love with S1 but at a loss as to how to rev up the rest to match it. I don't think the tulips and daffs are doing much - perhaps more technical details re what the squirrels are actually doing to/with them. I'd like a lot more garden apparatus please. Mayb...

Hi mac, another scrumptious offering. I found S3 a bit too plot summary/condensed text/catch-up. Unless you are set on the Dudley connection being spelt out I would drop S3, change 'court' to 'courted' and 'He is bold' to 'He's bold.' I really liked the modern inflection of 'No regrets.' intruding a...

Rock those hairs on your lip. Sweat with style. Stink a little. Open your mouth wide, and slack. Blush. Say nothing. Show your thighs. And your back. Shit with the door open. Venerate your grey stained knickers with the gone elastic. Fart. In public. With pleasure. Jiggle. And wriggle. And giggle. ...

Hi Perry, the workable premise here is that if you take anger, grief and despair and then slap a big enough greasepaint clown smile on top you may, just, escape the twin evils of 'heard it all before' and rampant didacticism. You have a great ear for tragic/comic tone and there's some neat metric an...

Thank you Tristan.
Your comments made me look a bit harder at the focus. A V2 up.
And I agree about that semi-colon.
Jules

Two greys remain; they are stubbornly different. I can't see them ever changing; grey and gray. Neither side ever gave in; and why should they? It's such a little thing, a fine line. Everything else sloughed and slid into mid-atlantic with a certain gleeful élan. But gray and grey they did and shall...

Hi Leaf, I really enjoyed the gentle meandering and inspiring words of this thread. I'm afraid I'm stuck in crit mode and just can't resist saying that I think S3 of your curlew poem has room for improvement . . . my principle motivation for saying that being that the other two stanzas are so brilli...

Thanks mac, I'd missed that. What was his first commission? Actually the only thing I liked about that poem (apart from its contextualisation) was the way the last line reads as if it's unfinished, so you'd automatically turn the pill over. On the other hand, perhaps there really is more on the othe...

Personally I like those signature 'theres'. If you changed them the poem would lose some of its distinctive character, though it would still be good. I think it was one of the James who cited Billy English in defence of one of your other poems, who also uses a lot of intentional misspellings and odd...

Hi Elph - this one definitely grows on you - I like the way the whole swirls around and gives impact to the quiet realisation of the last couplet. The Chekovian ambling atmospherics, the possible political/religious significances do the job of drawing us in but they all turn out to be borrowed music...

Glad I hit the nail Not
I suppose there are lots of reasons for being a 'night owl', but it always struck me as a sort of holiday from your life.
J

I'm going to vote for 'as is'. Really like the delicious ambiguity of this that speaks to the deep angsty 'who am I?' 'what is this?' void that can haunt that lying-in-bed 'prison' - the need to shut down thought, the way all life's problems can flock into this little waiting room (another 'station'...

Hi Tristan, this morning I am seeing this is more about love than money. The child 'knows' his parents' love is just temporarily on hold, the purple note even perhaps being a symbol of a heart. Their tired smile contains volumes of pain and hope and love for their son. I'm still struggling a bit wit...

A good story well told. I like the halucinatory quality, the sort of glowing simplified reality of memory captured in the sentences of the first two stanzas (the form fits it perfectly) - and the way S2 could almost be a dream within a dream. S3 - the shift of focus from N to mother seems to distrac...

Actually was starting to come round to 'phallic' - it shouldn't be a perjorative word but somehow always is ; using it there did seem to grasp the nettle, plus a nice chime with 'cryptic'. 'treasure' though is healing, gives a way back for her lover. If I'm being picky the last line is still not as ...

'unashamed fruit' is a nice phrase
Maybe substitute 'rude' for 'phallic'?
J

Hi mac, I've been enjoying cycling around this conundrum - the sonics scrumptious! I read it as a rather cheeky interrogation of maleness and femaleness. Adding the extra stanza was definitely a relief - the pressure of searching for sententious symbolism lifted - Eve can just conceivably be an ordi...

Thank you JJ, mac and Tristan . . . a welcome response from all three of you, pretty much capturing my own conflicted view - I am tending to post my fringiest of poems at the moment i.e. I have a hunch it's working but a suspicion it's nonsense . . . and in a way the ginormous posterboy of nonsense ...

I'm a hyperacusiac with amusiac tendencies somewhat relieved by trichotillomania I'm a hyperacusiac with amusiac tendencies more and more retrieved by the thrill of instantania This is not what they tell you on the boards of psycho-teranumia This is not exactly believed by the psyche grads blowing c...

I get the feeling that Monet's water lilies had some special significance for this friend - the one redemptive concession in this poem of quiet despair. Very effective. The first three lines of S2 seem like a possible metaphor for a whole life and if that's the intention I'm not sure if it rings qui...

Ha! It's a lonely job but someone has to do it
Glad it raised a snigger or two.
Now I'm wondering how many people I can offend by doing a borough county coastal one-liner.
Jules the Circular