Thanks to Caroline Gill for bringing this to my attention over at the Poetry Society's website. I started off pretty well, but struggled quite a bit later on.
Still, there's a few of my favourite bird poems in there - The Sandpiper, The Windhover and Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird among them.
Other favourites of mine include Bernard O'Donoghue's The Nuthatch, any number of John Clare poems, and the Anglo-Saxon elegy The Seafarer, which includes such specific bird references that at least one expert pinned the location down to the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth in April.
Showing posts with label Poetry Society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poetry Society. Show all posts
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Day jobs
I came across this piece on the Poetry Society’s website the other day. It would have been nice to see a bit more on each person, maybe, and a wider cross-section of poets generally, but it’s interesting stuff.
There are certainly occasions when I curse the fact that a day job leaves far too little time for writing poetry (not least at the moment), but on the whole I think my attitude probably comes closest to Dennis O’Driscoll’s. Which is to say, however much I think I like the idea of having nothing to do all day except write, in reality I know it would involve a rapid descent into friendless, Crunchy Nut Cornflake addiction in front of repeats of Minder.
On reflection, I think having a day job forces me to be a bit more disciplined in my poetry writing, to make full use of my spare time. Plus, luckily, parts of my job are quite conducive to poetry – long drives, lots of yomping around looking for birds, and easy access to a computer, for example. So what do you think?
There are certainly occasions when I curse the fact that a day job leaves far too little time for writing poetry (not least at the moment), but on the whole I think my attitude probably comes closest to Dennis O’Driscoll’s. Which is to say, however much I think I like the idea of having nothing to do all day except write, in reality I know it would involve a rapid descent into friendless, Crunchy Nut Cornflake addiction in front of repeats of Minder.
On reflection, I think having a day job forces me to be a bit more disciplined in my poetry writing, to make full use of my spare time. Plus, luckily, parts of my job are quite conducive to poetry – long drives, lots of yomping around looking for birds, and easy access to a computer, for example. So what do you think?
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