Friday, 17 February 2017

Finishing School for Versifiers, part 4: Acerbic censure (from the Saloon Bar) of that low brow poetic persona.

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Well. I don’t know. More than four decades on and a voice from the Saloon Bar censures in one breath a generation of British poets for ingra...
Sunday, 12 February 2017

Three haikus in homage to John Clare.

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Skylarks but no sky. The river hems the dawn mist, a canvas unworked. Children roam in masks. In the shop window a sign, which r...
Friday, 30 December 2016

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 3) In the bleak midwinter.

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Listening once more – as is traditional with us – to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast  on Christmas Eve  from King’s Colleg...
Saturday, 17 December 2016

The Ballad of the Needlemen

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A Street Song of the Chartists, from June 1887, the month of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Alton Locke , Tailor & Poet (185...
Monday, 5 December 2016

Elegant variation . . . a too ornamented pronominal substitute?

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Ugh. Oh dear. The repetition of ‘Beverage’ . . . a wretched word that, in my view, has currency only in Her Majesty’s Department of Customs ...
Sunday, 13 November 2016

Repel Boarders! Two Unintermittently Stupid Sophomores Outstay Their Welcome . . . Ackerly and Ackley Conform to Type for Giacommetiesque J D Salinger and Jean Webster

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A sophomoric heroine and a sophomoric hero are just settling down to immersion in an edifying book, when the seclusion of their dorms is bre...