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Scottish author Jim Murdoch discusses writing, his own and other authors, and muses at length about his fascination with the perversity of language. Veering from the nostalgic to the acerbic his blog will amuse anyone with a love of language.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'poetry'
Where are all the poetical prodigies?
If you were asked to think of a prodigy, who would jump to mind? I would suggest that that list would be topped by Mozart. Wee Wölfi began to play the harpsichord when he was 3. By 5 he was performing publicly and had begun composing. But w...
Wanted: a home for used poems
This post is not original. The original is in the recycle bin on my laptop. There's a copy in my 'Sent Items' and a proofread copy in my wife's 'Sent Items'. Oh, and there's a copy on my test blog, the place I tweak my posts before they go l...
Dead End Road
A poem should be able to skim the surface before descending underwater – Richard Wink You notice this especially in winter. You're on a bus, all is dark outside, and then you pass someone's house or flat, the curtains are open, the ligh...
Poetry for kids (part two)
Link to part one. Here's an interesting chart for you: I've cut the chart off at four entries because that's all there were. Is no one writing new nursery rhymes or are there simply quite enough to suit our current needs? In the previous ...
Poetry for kids (part one)
Now, let's not pretend for a second I know anything about this subject. Well, that's not quite true. I have a daughter and she was a kid for quite a wee while. And, of course we did all the nursery rhyme stuff, the classics, 'Humpty Dumpty',...
An interview with Dick Jones
Sometimes a poem just happens in plain air. – Dick Jones, 'Song Without Words' I first discovered the poetry of Dick Jones a couple of years ago. He posted a poem on his site called 'Fox Hunting' which I stumbled...
Breathing life into dead poems
What is this? Maybe it's some kind of avant garde poem, Jim? It kinda looks poemy doesn't it? Okay, we'll go for it. (There's no money involved is there?) Okay. It's a poem. And you would be wrong. There is a ...
Philip Larkin: some personal observations
Ugly beauty – title of an article reviewing Larkin's Collected Poems A poem is a difficult thing in itself, open to many interpretations; a collection of poems, by extension, must be a still more complex thing. What then of the life of the ...
Say what you have to say and get off the page
My father died about thirteen years ago. January 1996. He had a heart attack, his second. It was all very sudden and all over very quickly. When I was about thirteen he had his first heart attack and that was the day he started to grow old. He'd b...
I hate nature poetry
Now, there's a sweeping statement if ever there was one. Of course it's not completely accurate. I have read very little nature poetry and when I do run across one I rarely get more than a few lines through it before I've decided that it's n...
It all boils down to brown sauce
We'll never see eye-to-eye until Glasgow chip shops start serving brown sauce! Gogs, Edinburgh I've spoken before about the relationship between Scotland's first and second cities, that would be Edinburgh and Glasgow for those outwi...
Thinking poetry
Robert Frost is famously quoted as saying that poetry is metaphor, although I've also seen the quote attributed to Wallace Stevens. The view goes back much farther than that though. For Longinus, the 3rd century Roman critic, the essence of ...
Best Scottish poems 2008
About this time last year I did a wee post highlighting the best Scottish poems of 2007, that is, the poems that Poetry Online has deemed the best poems. I thought I would do the same this year. This year, in their introduction, the edito...
Painting the air
If poems could be created in a trance without the conscious participation of the poet, the writing of poetry would be so boring or even unpleasant an operation that only a substantial reward in money or social prestige could induce a man to be a poet...
What does mean mean?
Is anything truly meaningless? I think that we're back to the whole 'tree falling in the woods' scenario. If there is no one there to give it meaning then it has none. Meaning is an attribution. It is not intrinsic to anything. In The Day After Tomor...
Bloody Foreigners
I have said this before – and I will no doubt say it again – but I think it's amazing how any one person manages to communicate with another. We encounter the problem all the time online. The world may be shrinking but it is still a very...
Egocentrifugal poetry
When we understand, we are at the centre of the circle, and there we sit while Yes and No chase each other around the circumference (Chuang-tzu.)In an article in the New York Times, David Orr recounts the following anecdote which got me thinking:In a...
Whispers
Poetry does not have a lot going for itself these days – it needs all the help it can get – so when the postman arrived with a package and it wasn’t my eagerly expected new hard drive I can’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed that it was only a...
Drowning men and dead poems
Rejection is hard to take. Let's face it, no one likes to be rejected. But there's something worse. And that's the look on your kid's face when they've been rejected, they've not got the part in the school play or they've not been picked as class mon...
Why am I a poet?
A while ago Rachel Fox mentioned a new Scottish website that I should check out. Always keen to support my fellow countrymen and women I immediately clicked on the link. One Night Stanzas is a site committed to supporting up and coming poets. This ex...
Wise words of wisdom
Me today (yes, I always look that annoyed)I'm feeling my age. Actually I'm feeling someone else's age, a guy of about eighty-four. Suffice to say I'm getting to the age where I'm starting to see how well I might measure up to that eighty-four year-ol...
Is there anybody out there?
I have nothing to say and I'm saying it. – John CageI've been fortunate to have another couple of poems accepted for publication in Apple Valley Review. The poems are 'Petrified Poem' and 'Communication Gap'. It's a good choice by the editor since ...
4am, Reading Larkin
"Life? Don't talk to me about life!" – Marvin (The Paranoid Android)I don't sleep well. I'd put it down to my age but the truth is I've never slept especially well. I could blame it on a guilty conscience but we'll stick with the dickey bladder if ...
Our cockatiel loves Woody Allen
Heil, Poirot!The nice people at Caffeine Destiny have included two of my poems in the Fall edition of their magazine. I submitted them yonks ago and I'd half-forgotten that I'd even sent them. The poems are 'Sometimes' and 'Scrap Values' both very re...
Making a pig of myself
It's been a while since I've been able to advise you of the publication of any new poems. There are a couple of reasons for this: a) I've been lax about sending stuff out and b) those that have been out just take so long to come back.So I made a dent...
Poetry and art (part two)
Painting is mute poetry and poetry is speaking painting. – Simonides of Kos, 6th century B.C.Poetry first (illustrations and collaborations) In the last section we ended on poetry inspired by art. It can work the other way round, of course, Charles...
Poetry and art (part one)
Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace – without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself. – Joan Miro (clearly a pre-AIDS quote) In his lecture 'The Relations Between Poe...
The Joy of Libraries
Books and sex have a long and not especially illustrious history. This, however, is not going to be a blog about erotic literature nor indeed pornography. Maybe one day. What I want to waffle on about today are rooms full of books.Currently I am not ...
