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Philip Burton reads ‘The Aberdovey Bell in Springtime’ (Issue 92)
Poetry Showcase: Matthew Freeman (March 2023)
So Far
Once you’re fully inside the Constant Symbol and everywhere you look the synchronicities are increasing and accelerating you think oh no this must be death but maybe not so until you discover the source but now mathematics and physics look like the mere work of a factotum who can’t see anything. Well, you had no choice but to come along this way and look at several methods for thinking yourself out of it like the subjectivity of a purely personal multiverse— like social media from Erebus— and then you ask Chief where’s the internet and he surprises you and says North or South Carolina or something which is just a metaphor for something much deeper and scarier and immaterial which involves Truth and Logic Deconstructed and so you say One Thing and you think your childhood church is going to put a hit on you— maybe one day…
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Special Launch Feature – Val Penny
Please join me in congratulating crime fiction novelist, Val Penny, on the launch of First Cut published by Spell Bound Books. Without further ado, it’s over to Val to tell you all about it.
My Writing and The First Cut
Val Penny
Thank you so much for inviting me onto your blog today.
I have been writing and telling stories all my life. When I was a child, I used to make up stories for my little sister after our Mum put the light out and told us to go to sleep. Later, I wrote documents, contracts, and courses as part of my job, but my time was well accounted for and so I did not create any fiction.
However, I took early retirement when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and there were times when I suffered severe side effects from my treatment. I could not go out…
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Poetry Showcase: Jay Maria Simpson
art by Edvard Munch
Silence
We walked into your apartment today
and found you lying in a bed of snow
We touched you with the care of a mother
We washed away the stains of youth
You have that smile
oh, that contented smile
that is bursting with love
and lonely nights
Your hair is long and softly golden
your curls swirl around the broken mirror
that tried to cut your wrists
and that careless lock of hair
We watch you silently
your static face
fanned by the swirling light
and a breeze that chills the room
Nightmare We fell about each other laughing as our bodies rolled and touched and smelt of familiar perfume of simple pleasure and life jugs full of wine and cigarettes burning in ashtrays and on Persian carpets jugs of foaming beer and joy of Africa and circus tents elephants dancing for coins in our…
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ORBITS – A Hybrid Poem by M.P. Pratheesh
ORBITS
object poem, M P Pratheesh, 2021
materials used: body of a millipede, shell, butterfly wings, canvass
A millipede. A coiling serpent. The lines over the snail’s shell. The brown ring around my
nipple. The circle made of flower petals in my front yard. The orbit of celestial bodies. Our
endless journeys centred around a faraway star. Every object and being carries its orbital marks.
Like the marks of a silent dance.
(Translated from malayalam by CS Venkiteswaran )
M.P. Pratheesh is a poet and artist lives and works in Kerala,India. He has published ten collections of poetry in Malayalam language. His poems and object poems have been appeared at various places including Singing in the dark (Penguin), Greening the earth (forthcoming from Penguin,2023) RlC journal, Tiny seed, Indianapolis Review, kavyabharati, Nationalpoetrymonth.ca(Angelhouse press), The bombay Review, Keralakavitha, Guftugu, Acropolis, Osmosis, True copy, Indian Literature and elsewhere. His recent books of…
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Idiomatic poetry
Paul Brookes’ chosen form last week was idiomatic poetry The result was fun, but I’m not certain it’s poetry.
A figgy pudding, pardi
They sit on the fence, mi-figue mi-raisin,
while the world goes west,
à l’ouest, where we send the mad ones,
away with the fairies and the illuminés,
because they see light at the end of the tunnel,
la sortie de l’auberge, where pigs fly,
and hens have teeth. There will be happiness
at the end of the day, that time entre chien et loup,
that place over the moon, where everything
is half-fig, half-grape, and all circles are squared.
Questions and nonsense
When the answer is,
how long is a piece of string,
what was the question?
And if ce n’est pas le Pérou,
nor la mer à boire,
what is it?
I would like to get out of this wood,
where all I can see are…
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TheWombwellRainbow #PoeticFormsChallenge. It is weekly. Week Twenty Six form is #MathsPoetry. I will post the challenge to create a first draft of a poetic form by the following late Sunday. Please email your first draft to me, including an updated short, third person bio and a short prose piece about the challenges you faced and how you overcame them. Except when I’m working at the supermarket I am always ready to help those that get stuck. I will blog my progress throughout the week. Hopefully it may help the stumped. Also below please find links to helpful websites.
One of the main exponents of maths poetry is eminent poet Marian Christie. On her blog she has posted in depth examinations of various kinds of this form.
Here are her links:
https://marianchristiepoetry.net/tag/fibonacci/
Her pamphlet ‘Fractal Poems’ is available to purchase from Penteract Press.
Other Useful Links
The melodic and the logical – an interview with Anthony Etherin
#TheWombwellRainbow #Poeticformschallenge last week was a #IdiomaticPoetry. Enjoy examples by Tim Fellows, Lesley Curwen and Jane Dougherty and read how they felt when writing one.
Proposal to a logical woman
Have a heart he said. She wondered whose.
Was he offering his own, bound in scarlet ribbon or demanding hers.
Take your time he said, which sounded generous
but time was never his to give, she thought
and turned him down.
How did It Go?
It was really interesting to look at a common idiom and unpick it, try to undress it with a little logic. It made me really think about the hidden meanings of idioms.
I found it quite difficult to make this sound ‘poetic’. Perhaps it would be easier to write a prose poem on the subject of relentless logicality.
Lesley Curwen
Sticky Wicket
He was on a sticky wicket
the field was closing in
he’d dug in as much as he could do
with a straight bat he might win.
He didn’t want to hole out
down a fielder’s throat
you play each delivery as it comes
if you want to be the GOAT
Make sure you cover up the gate
to keep the googly out
watch the yorker in the blockhole
deny the “Howzat” shout.
He wasn’t playing cricket
politics was his game
he’d found that cricket metaphors
helped deflect the blame…
How did It Go?
I was inspired by another poem recently that used some football cliches / idioms. This is a cricket one, which may confuse some overseas readers! Several of these are in everyday use in England with a less literal meaning. “On a sticky wicket” means to be in a difficult situation, “playing with a straight bat” means to play safe, and/or correctly. These idioms are often used by posh politicians as a way of indicating their good breeding in playing our “summer game” at their elite school.
Tim Fellows
A figgy pudding, pardi
They sit on the fence, mi-figue mi-raisin,
while the world goes west,
à l’ouest, where we send the mad ones,
away with the fairies and the illuminés,
because they see light at the end of the tunnel,
la sortie de l’auberge, where pigs fly,
and hens have teeth. There will be happiness
at the end of the day, that time entre chien et loup,
that place over the moon, where everything
is half-fig, half-grape, and all circles are squared.
Questions and nonsense
When the answer is,
how long is a piece of string,
what was the question?
And if ce n’est pas le Pérou,
nor la mer à boire,
what is it?
I would like to get out of this wood,
where all I can see are trees,
but the blind are leading the blind,
and though there might be short cuts
along the way, it will always be
a long long way to Tipperary.
How did it go?
Language and linguistics are endless subjects of fascination, taking us back to the origins of humanity. Every word has a history that has roots in different parts of the globe, the different elements are the pigments of any piece of writing. Idiom is a huge subset of language and much of it is national, regional or dialectic and unfamiliar to speakers of the same language in a different part of the world, unintelligible to non-native speakers. I had fun writing these poems (if they are poems). The vernacular is personal, often drawn from different sources. Mine is as mixed up as anyone’s.
Jane Dougherty
Bios and Links
Lesley Curwen
is a broadcaster, poet and sailor living within sight of Plymouth Sound. Her poems have been published by Nine Pens, Arachne Press, Broken Sleep and GreenInk, and later this yea
Jane Dougherty
lives and works in southwest France. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, the Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, ink sweat and tears, Gleam, Nightingale & Sparrow, Green Ink and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She blogs at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/ Her poetry chapbooks, thicker than water and birds and other feathers were published in October and November 2020.
Tm Fellows
is a writer from Chesterfield in Derbyshire whose ideas are heavily influenced by his background in the local coalfields, where industry and nature lived side by side. His first pamphlet “Heritage” was published in 2019. His poetic influences range from Blake to Owen, Causley to Cooper-Clarke and more recently the idea of imagistic poetry and the work of Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez.
Poetry Showcase: Kushal Poddar (March 2023)
photo from pixabay
The Complex Quantum of the Magnetic Fields
Some salesmen smokes in the market. The chickens are still alive. The shops
release the stretching cats from their shrouds.
Rigor mortis has set in some mice, some writhing.
Megaphones slur. Words travel in paddle-carts.
Work has been cancelled by the union demanding
more works. Our favourite mad man turns, yawns, farts.
The flight of the pigeons thunderclaps
the complex quantum of the magnetic fields into the sky.
An Address Bleeds On The Door Once more I've come to the door, scored a photo, asked the mystery behind- "What is it that keeps pulling me in?" The numbers on the woodwork, hand-painted, bleed a lot, and I wait as if its wound would heal, the address would instill a jiffy etched in the air like a capricious feather. Knock on the skull; if I have ever here as a resident…
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The Wombwell Rainbow 