I won’t go on the North Circular again
There are so many cars, it’s mayhem
My husband drove well
But this road is hell
You might as well turn  a sheep  to a hen.

When he was  more young he drove fast
If I wanted to pee, he was pissed
Then he got older
And his prostate was bolder
So he was sorry  he’d hurt me, at last!

I did not bear him any grudge
For his face was a sight much beloved
His voice caused much fear
When the doctor was here
She looked like she’d swallowed a smudge.

I know this may never make sense
But my feelings are always intense
I pray for  some news
But God is amused
So he wants my old man to stay hence.

He looked like a Peer of the Realm
So a barman said,overwhelmed
His grandad was a blacksmith
So he  covered up  his  nuts with
A piece of  old iron at the helm

There was a young lady from Kent
In whom wisdom was somewhat absent
She went to a zoo
She knew what to do
On the tiger’s cage she leant, now she ‘s went

My husband  lived near ICI
The air was so bad  they’d no  sky
They said, kill or cure
Or repent and be pure
So he just goes,”why, will I die?”

My husband was a very strange man
He  once fried an egg  on a pin
I said,I bought that in York
Why not use a fork?
He said,I pinked and so therefore I am.

He was on this diuretic for  a while
He had to pee into a vase or a pail
He had no desire
To eat or perspire
Nor did he break into a wail

I didn’t know he was going to die
He leaned over and smiled with his eye.
He winked at me laughing,
I  had a premonition
Before I could speak, he had sighed

I still think he’ll come back to me
So I put out a cup for his tea.
I see from the edge of my eye
He is there till I turn to espy
Well,at least up above, they don’t pee!

There was a young lady from Ealing
Who wept upside down on the ceiling
When she was asked why
She  said , well I cry
But gravity keeps interfering.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=32944&utm_source=Poetry+Foundation&utm_campaign=abbd14820e-PMAG_SEP_05_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ff7136981c-abbd14820e-185545637

• Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

  BY JOHN ASHBERY

Source: Poetry (August 1974)

Browse all issues back to 1912

page?

August 1974

Come live with me and be my helpmeet now
I’ll share my bed  if you can see I’m true
If you let me love you
I’ll darn your old gloves 4 you..
If you come and meet me brow to brow.

Poetry is images in words
And sentences that coil around the heart
Poetry, like love, is  called absurd
Yet  does not pierce our being like a dart.

Our first  language was song and not  bare speech
A melody  can move us and entrance
The  politicians would be other beasts
If singing was  their way to eminence.

In Westminster, the clock would chant, Amen
As silently the day’s work  was undone
In the morning,it would sing, Begin
Penelope would weave her soul again.

The image may strike deep into our soul;
Make live the voice that sings us into whole

https://qz.com/523746/a-photographer-edits-out-our-smartphones-to-show-our-strange-and-lonely-new-world/

Eric Pickersgill has created a set of photos to show our lonely world.I find it really interesting that he thought of this

when words are not enough
to give our feelings form
music is the language
which many find gives calm

when words are too clumsy
touch may be enough
a glance of compassion
may pull us from the Slough

when words don’t come easy
when music fails to charm
then come to me and tell me
and I’ll enclose you in my arms

gestures,touch and glances
are a language in themselves
words are not enough for me
I need your touch as well.

http://talentdevelop.com/articles/TCPTPT.html

10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

Most would agree with Rabinow’s words: “Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them.” A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.

Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.

Deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.

Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss.

Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake.

Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/what-makes-poetry-poetic/377508/

http://www.newstalk.com/What-makes-a-poet

“Today there are no guidelines for what is poetic and what is not, what constitutes a poem and what does not. Poetry is simply letters on a page which make us go ‘that is a poem’. The only certainty we can have is that a great many people through the ages have been hailed as poets and it tends to be by these marking posts that we define what poetry is. Our small island of saints and scholars has proven a fertile ground for the growing of poets and that is as true today as ever before. One of those at the fore of Irish poetry today is Eavan Boland who has proven her worth as a chronicler of Ireland and the Irish time and time again.

Born to a career diplomat and a post-impressionist painter in 1944 Boland’s life was assured to be an interesting one. Following her father’s appointment as ambassador to the UK in 1951 Boland experienced how the Irish were viewed from the outside. The anti-Irish sentiment she felt in London would help to form Boland’s artistic identity and mission as she went on to tell the extraordinary story of ordinary Ireland and the ordinary Irish. With her combination of poetic skill and simple language Eavan Boland has proven that the existential exuberance, angst, and apathy of the everyman is as perfect fuel for poetic verse as the deeds of Odysseus or Beowulf.

Listen back as Susan talks with Eavan Boland about her life as a poet and find out what she thinks the difference is between a poet and someone who writes good poems.

My wife likes a hot bath
What’s  odd about that?
That’s what I am wondering
Is it good to wonder?
Yes, because there’s only one bathroom and I am bursting
Go outside and do it there!
Don’t the police mind?
With Brexit, racism, anti-Semitism, robberies, murder and low pay?
Is that worse than peeing in your own garden?
Can’t you make your own mind up?
No, but I can make this  up
Well, don’t wet your pants
It’s alright, my wife washes them.
So that is why she looks so awful
No, she looked like that even before we met
You sound like Henry the Eighth.You should have asked for an exchange.
It’s too late now.We consummated it.
When?
In that little room by the Confessional.
At the Wedding?
So that’s what it was! Thanks so much.I thought we were living in sin
Sorry to disappoint you
We can have a honeymoon now.

And  so can all of us

My husband likes to sleep on the rug
Without you?
There’s only room for his mistress and her cat and him
Do you allow it?
The cat is bigger than me!
Are you sure it’s a cat?
It doesn’t speak English so I can’t ask it!

My wife has twisted feet
What  a  pity she’s not a chair
Why?
You can unscrew them and replace.
I tried to replace her but she got angry.
I meant the feet.
I wanted to replace her whole body.
That’s really horrible.
Yes, how did you know?
I saw her once having a bath on the roof!
Where were you?
I don’t know.I repressed it
Is it unconscious?
It is now!
So is it unconscious in English?
Well, it could be in Latin.
Why?
Because I say so!

My sister is never jealous of me.
She has nothing to be jealous about.
How about my eyes?
What’s  the use if you can’t see?
A good point.What’s that spider on your nose doing?
Making a thread  in the conversation
I’ve had enough.
I’m afraid it doesn’t speak English
But it might understand it!
You are very stupid.
Yes, my IQ is 55.Yet I learned English.
How?
Well, that’s my secret along with the first 200 numbers in pi.
Numbers in pie.Are you bonkers?
And so  say all of us

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

Mary decided that she too, like many women, wanted a few new clothes for the winter.But she was too lazy to travel 10 miles to a large shop.Instead, she decided to look online.
Fascinating how to learn many clothes there are available.406 tops or T shirts.67 types of trousers,89 coats and 76 raincoats.How many of us wear raincoats when we have cars? Mary wondered.As she still rode a bike she did wear one.But her old one was fine.
See, Emile, she said to her cat, which Top shall I buy?Some have fancy sleeves with bell like cuffs.I like them.And look, red is back in fashion
Knowing you I’d only be waiting for the sleeve to dangle into some tomato soup, he answered cheekily.
A good point, she muttered.Some have short sleeves which may be ok if you work in a hot office but not when at home where we all try to save on heating bills.
I say, Emile, why are there so few wool coats and sweaters on sale?
Maybe the sheep have stopped growing new coats after being sheared!
Oh,dear, I hope that is not true as they will get frozen up on the moors.They will need coats too.I think it’s more likely that people will not save up and buy one good garment.They want a few new things after a week or two and they throw away the others.It is hard not to fall into this trap when you have 56  credit cards and a debit one tooI feel terribly worried.Shal I ring 999 and ask Dave what he thinks? Mary cried
He has no more idea than you, Emile said but some folk say we are heading for a crash again.So much for Austerity when people have to borrow money for food.
I’d rather have a cup of tea,said Mary.And so she did

Photo Mike Flemming copyright

This article is meant for teachers but it is so good I thought some other people might like to peruse it.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69588/the-start-writing-your-own-poem

Extract:

Practice of an art is more salutary than talk about it.
There is nothing more composing than composition.
—Robert Frost, from his notebooks[Poetry and Prose,
edited by Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson
(Holt, 1972)]

Leaving a Loop

Two thousand miles from home, I open a drawer
and—I’d have sworn it was mine,
the weaving lumpy, my fingers
still all thumbs but they loved the peaceful
push pull, pushpull
so much that one summer
on the boathouse porch with the tree growing
right up through the floor
I made thirty-two
pot holders on the square-jawed metal loom,
stretching colors soft as old rags
soft as this pale buttercup
this faded-eye blue, and the green
fresh as light on maple wings,
seedlight. I wasn’t making gifts,
it was the rhythm of the thing
and the small loom, square and safe,
like the four lines of a child’s house.
I was homesick,
this was spiderwork, nestwork, easy
till you reached the part where
you unhooked your web from the frame.
Here, see the braided corners, on the last one
somehow you pulled the right thing through
to leave a loop for hanging.
I didn’t know I was making gifts
but last winter when my mother died
she still had two, there were stains
and a burn mark, I never thought
of someone’s hand feeling
heat through the weave.

Here is a poem neither your students nor mine have ever seen before. I wrote it last night, so it’s about as contemporary as you can get, short of sitting down right now and writing your own. To me it’s a living, breathing organism—not set in stone; tomorrow I could change it. An organism made of words, that each reader will bring to life in her own way. Emily Dickinson says, “A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day.” (1)

Whatever my poem means to me, I couldn’t possibly reduce this meaning to a prose paragraph. I don’t want to say, “It’s about making pot holders when I was young and homesick at summer camp,” or “It’s really about my loss of my mother,” or “Actually, it’s about applied art versus fine art.” Or “It’s about the nature of home and separation.” I didn’t set out, at least consciously, to make a poem about any of this; I wanted to find out why seeing the pot holder when I opened a drawer gave me a sudden, inexplicable urge to write. Now that the poem’s written, and I’ve discovered some answers, I suppose I can say it’s all about these things.

But I’m much more interested in asking, “What does it say to you?”—you who are reading it, remember, as if your life depended on it, letting in your beliefs, your dreamlife, your physical sensations—and, I’d add to Adrienne Rich’s list, your memories and the mood you happen to be in just now . . . ?

You need to whine in again before we can sync you
You are disrespected.You cannot see the internet from there.
Chrome has dropped you.
Chrome stops are full
What kind of browser am I ? Guy Fawkes! Crosswords again.
Can I have opera mini on my sun dried surmise?
Why read the Guardian and write less hell?
Everything is a peer reviewed oddity now.
We went on the orientating express.
What is the Circle Line in mathematics? Why aye,hinny.A pie.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alexander-pope

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-finch

“As her work developed more fully during her retirement at Eastwell, Finch demonstrated an increasing awareness of the poetic traditions of her own period as well as those governing older verse. Her work’s affinity with the metaphysical tradition is evident in poems such as “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat,” which represents the distanced perspective of the speaker through the image of the telescope, an emblem common to much religious poetry of the seventeenth century. Finch experimented with rhyme and meter and imitated several popular genres, including occasional poems, satirical verse, and religious meditations, but fables comprise the largest portion of her oeuvre. Most likely inspired by the popularity of the genre at the turn of the century, Finch wrote dozens of these often satiric vignettes between 1700 and 1713. Most of them were modeled after the short tales of Jean La Fontaine, the French fable writer made popular by Charles II. Finch mocked these playful trifles, and her fables offer interesting bits of social criticism in the satiric spirit of her age.

However, Finch’s more serious poems have received greater critical attention than her fables. “A Nocturnal Reverie,” for instance, is clearly Augustan in its perspective and technique, although many admirers have tended to praise the poem as pre-Romantic: William Wordsworthmentioned its “new images of external nature” in his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” collected in his Poems, first published in 1815. Finch’s poem opens with classical references and proceeds through characteristically Augustan descriptions of the foxglove, the cowslip, the glowworm, and the moon. Finch imitates Augustan preferences for decorum and balance in her use of heroic couplets and the medial caesura in setting the peaceful, nocturnal atmosphere of the poem:

Or from some Tree, fam’d for the Owl’s delight,

She, hollowing clear, directs the Wand’rer right:

In such a Night, when passing Clouds give place,

Or thinly vail the Heav’ns mysterious Face;

When Odours, which declin’d repelling Day,

Thro temp’rate Air uninterrupted stray;

While Finch’s verse occasionally displays slight antitheses of idea and some structural balances of line and phrase, she never attains the epigrammatic couplet form that Alexander Pope perfected in the early eighteenth century. Her admission in “A Nocturnal Reverie” that her verse attempts “Something, too high for Syllables to speak” might be linked to the Romantic recognition of the discrepancy between human aspiration and achievement. But ultimately she retreats to God and solitude and displays a more properly Augustan attitude in the acceptance of her human limitations. At times her descriptions of natural detail bear some likeness to poets such as James Thomson, but Finch’s expression is more immediate and simple, and her versification ultimately exhibits an Augustan rather than a pre-Romantic sensibility. “

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A beautiful blog post

Source: Londinium – Its Genesis

There are so many numbers we can’t count
For we’d need higher orders to denote
So while accountants  deal with pence and pounds
We maths professors make travels remote

Some climb hills that all can clearly see
While others scramble on Himalayan walls
But mainly we are Alpine  engineers
And even there, we all have taken falls

Uncountable, how   deep that mystery seems
Some go mad and suffer frightful dreams
Godel took his work to fine extremes
No wonder Munch foresaw it in his Scream

If you want a rational way to live
Ignore the numbers I mentioned above