I’m delighted that this week Margaret Royall, author of the excellent The Road to Cleethorpes Pier’ has dropped in to talk about one of the poems from her new collection, Where Flora Sings.

This poem began as a figment of my imagination. I had been to the Djanogly Art Gallery in the Lakeside complex at Nottingham University with my U3a Museums and Galleries group and we had met there to view the Ivon Hitchens exhibition. This particular artwork, ‘Winter Stage’ (click here to view) drew me in and fascinated me. It was difficult to obtain a head-on view, as an art-historian or professor (clearly an expert) and his student were standing blocking the way. The former was holding forth to his wide-eyed protege, obviously explaining intricate details of the painting. Eventually they moved far enough for me to get close. I kept returning to the painting at intervals and intrigued…

Cover Art © Jay Chakravarti

Guest Editor : Scott Thomas Outlar

Dream Nation

The Red Kite – Somewhere in a battered war zone
a young boy barely ten years old spots a strange sight
of a red kite against a bright coral sky, not bothered
where it came from as long as it colours in his bleak
life after daily salvos of bullets delivering his unwanted
symphony of cream screams – Masked by deep base
explosions riding to a falsetto of repetitive high-pitched
aerial gifts of new experimental chemical bombs designed
to delete deplete and destroy everything he has ever
known – Everyone he has ever loved, left with the daily
taste of dust sprinkled with ashes of what was before –
Nearly blinded by yet another early evening menu of bright
deadly showers of heat-seeking missiles, that young
boy started running from his burning safe haven, yearning
to reach…

Edward Alport is a retired teacher and occasional writer who occasionally gets published. When he has nothing better to do he posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse. He also moderates the monthly @ThePoetryFloor Twitter writing event.

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Micropoetry and Twitter have become inextricably linked in the cultural universe, and they are about the same age, with ‘micro-poem’ beating Twitter by 2004 to 2006. ‘Micro-poem’, as a term, was coined by W G Sebald in Unrecounted, which was published posthumously in 2004. As Sebald died in 2001 we can assume that the term is slightly older.

The word micropoem (without the hyphen) is not defined in the OED (at the time of writing) but is now used generally to apply to any very short poem. But ‘very short poems’ have been around for as long as poetry has been around and succeeds, or doesn’t, for very much the…

The Notebook, a red Zenith Exercise Book, found in a Tesco bag by Louie King, a former servant of Dylan Thomas’s mother in law, contains fifteen and a half poems. The half poem being the first five sonnets of the ten comprising ‘Altarwise by owl-light’. The poems from Thomas’s first two collections, 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936) are mostly fair copies of ‘finished’ poems, written on the right hand side, or recto, pages. There are some missing pages and some occasional crossings out, less than one per cent of which were undecipherable. Written between May 1934 and August 1935, the notebook contains no unpublished work. However, it does reveal a break between the ‘process’ poetry he had begun in 1933 and the non-referential poems that came next. The Notebook allows more accurate dating of compositions, with poems, such as, ‘I dreamed my genesis’, ‘Seven’ and the sonnets of…