Poetry Corner

This coming Thursday (7/10) is National Poetry Day here in the UK. Last year the BBC had an entire season devoted to poetry, but it seems a bit quieter this year. The theme is Home.
So I was wondering, what poems make me think of home.
My favourite poem is one of G.K Chesterton's. However it doesn't make me think of home, it's quite atmospheric and weird.
I can't really think of a poem all about home, although I know there are plenty, usually written by writers far from home (in fact this is something that came up last week at uni!). Daljit Nagra's collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! and Grace Nichols' The Fat Black Woman's Poems both contain poems about moving from one place to another and reminiscing about home.
I walked across Westminster Bridge the other day, and Wordsworth's Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, popped into my head, I suppose that's a poem about home, or at least about my home. Wordsworth wrote it while visiting London from his home in the Lake District.
A poem that refers directly to my home town, is John Betjeman's Harrow-on-the-Hill. But it doesn't make me think of home. I suppose I'll have to keep looking for poems that sound like home.

What poems make you think of home? and do you have a favourite poet/poem?

Poetry, better than you remember from school

A lot of people run poetry down. It's the ugly stepsister of fiction. Stories told in verse, seem to make some people nervous. This may be because of learning poetry at school, always being made to read aloud, trying to ignore the giggles, and you didn't even write it. I blame English teachers and the National Curriculum!! Stop picking rubbish poems, there are some great, funny for the right reasons, brilliant, beautiful poetry out there.

Our Poet Laureate is a good place to start, Carol Ann Duffy, first woman to hold the post, her collection, The World's Wife, is one of my favourite and as good a place as any to start with her work.
Other great female poets include Wendy Cope (who is hilarious, try Serious Concerns or Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis), Jenny Joseph (most famous for Warning, which starts "When I am an old woman/ I shall wear purple/With a read hat that doesn't go and doesn't suit me"), Fleur Adcock, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (rescue these ladies from being condemned by students everywhere!) and on it goes. A good series of anthologies to start you of are published by Bloodaxe Books, Modern Women Poets (ed. by Deryn Rees-Jones), Eliza's Babes (ed. Roby Bolam) and anything Virago do.

Then there's the gents. Many a student has come across William Wordsworth (not the bloody daffodils again, I hear you cry) and his contemporaries, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron. That's right, the Romantics. I have a soft spot for Coleridge's Kubla Khan, we were told not to write about it for our A Level as it's a complex piece that can't be compared with anything else. It's also incredibly vivid.
Blake's apocalyptic visions (check out the artwork he created to accompany his poems, most good editions should be illustrated), are fascinating, and anyone with a passing interest in surrealism should check them out.
Even Wordsworth isn't beyond redemption. His Lyrical Ballads (written with Coleridge) are interesting too, he was a country lad, and it shows in the Prelude, he's clearly not comfortable with the sprawling city, despite his initial impression (Composed Upon Westminster Bridge).
I like Roald Dahl's funny, slightly bizarre verse, and also the more surreal elements of a good but of nonsense verse (try Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear). I also like Andrew Marvell, Matthew Arnold (the imagery in his Dover Beach is wonderful, and tragic), some of the modern comic poets are good for a giggle (I suggest getting hold of a copy of The Nation's Favourite Comic Poems for a nice selection of funny poets of both genders). I also think Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair is beautiful, moving and tender. I'm also partial to a spot of Rilke, a light dusting of Larkin, and a dash of T.S Eliot with a smidgen of E.E Cummings to go!

There are some fantastic poets out there, and some great poems. So go, explore the oft neglected poetry section of your local bookshop and pick a new favourite or two to roll around in your head and on your tongue (it's meant to be read aloud you know!!)

And the winner is....

T.S Eliot!! Of the Nation's Favourite Poet poll.

I have a couple of his books, and to be fair, his poetry is interesting, read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and he did write Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, that Andrew Lloyd Webber made into the long -running musical Cats.

Go here to see the complete top 10: http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/vote_results.shtml
Annoyingly no women in the top 10 and there are plenty of talented female poets out there, like current Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and one of my favourites, Wendy Cope.
Who's your favourite poet??

Couple things...

1) Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 30 years old!! Read an article about it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/03/hitchhikers-guide-galaxy-douglas-adams

2) Hilary Mantel won the Booker prize for Wolf Hall, it's on my must read list along with fellow shortlister Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger.

3) An official sequel to Winnie-the-Pooh is on it's way, not sure how I feel about this, the original was one of my favourites as a child. Hopefully it'll be almost as good as A.A Milne's original.

4) Tomorrow is National Poetry Day, and the BBC will be revealing who the Nation's Favourite Poet is, according to their poll. http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason

Any book news I seem to have missed? Post a comment and let me know!!

Quick Note

Voting closes on Tuesday for the nation's favourite poet at www.bbc.co.uk/apps/ifl/poetryseason/captcha Choose from poets including Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Wendy Cope, William Wordsworth, Slyvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and many more.

A Little Verse...

The BBC's poetry season has really pulled me in. A documentary on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, presented by poet Simon Armitage (who has written a new translation of the piece) was really fascinating as Armitage traced the journey Gawain takes in a mixture of pagan and Christian sites, modern and ancient living alongside one another with modern day knights and working men's clubs on the list of places/people Armitage encounters as he seeks the green knight.
I've also watched a programme with Griff Rhys Jones on whether poetry is relevant today and what forms it now takes, this was also interesting, but not as magical, as lyrical as Armitage's show. The series about celebrities and the poetry that touches their lives, My Life in Verse, which is in the middle of its run, has been quite good, although I missed the first episode, which was a bit annoying.
I haven't managed to watch every single programme in the season but it all seems really interesting and intelligent. It's made me want to buy yet more poetry books to add to my collection. Hopefully it will encourage some people to actually pick up a poetry book and actually indulge in some verse. Some of the programming is on the iplayer www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer or the homepage www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason Enjoy!