Autumn

ffinoccio- I haven't published any before except for a couple of competitions (which I won!) so I am still at the stage of seeing them as my babies and wanting to defend them. I will try to follow your lead and just 'publish and be damned'.

gracesmum; methinks you've lost your true vocation in life .

Just to be clear, I wasn't classifying beryl's remark as literary criticism

I appreciate that, jane, and I wouldn't really object to serious suggestions about how I could improve my poems.

Just to be clear: I read real confusion in Beryl's remarks (she mentioned confusion) and a real apology, so my post was an attempt to smooth the troubled waters a little. An abject failure, it would seem. Hey ho.

galen, the first poem I quoted from is Tithonus. It's miserable allright!

Just to be clear:
There is nothing bad-tempered in my posts on this thread.

I've got shelves full of poetry books inherited from a friend and would love to learn more, although I sometimes wonder if I should pass them on to someone, say a young student, that would really need them. But they're such beautiful books.

bags

Bit late on GN today!

Scarlet that is a beautifully constructed, poignant poem, and I loved it. Some of us do write, and post the occasional poem, and I for one am glad that you did.

Tegan, the only way to get into poetry is to read it and decide what you like - eventually you can work out why you like it. Your local U3A might have a poetry group you could join. I think ours has, though I have joined enough already, so haven't got into that one.

The one I've joined hasn't but I'm hoping the Derby one might have.

I have no wish to argue with any other member, so I will just stick to posting the odd poem.

Tegan - somebody gave me a book of poems called Palgrave's Golden Treasury when I was about nine and I was hooked! Don't worry if you don't understand every poem - I studied Gerard Manley Hopkins as part of my degree and I really enjoy his work, but there are many parts I don't understand. I just like the sound of the words.
I also enjoy Pam Ayres - a lot of her work is really funny. I have a very wide taste in poetry and I refuse to be limited by what some academic thinks is superior. You have a lot of pleasure ahead of you!

Please do, Scarlet .

..that was a reply to the one before.....[I think it was Lewis Carroll that started me off; my son loved poetry when he was a child, as well, and I gave my daughter an anthology when she was 18, with the inscrption 'what every 18 year old wants on her 18th birthday'. Start 'em young, I say!]

One of my most satisfying moments as a teacher was when a mature student came to me at the end of an A-level course to thank me for introducing her to poetry. Tegan, you will probably get more from poetry as an adult than you would have done at school.

What gets me is the depth to so much poetry even though it's been written by such young people.

Keats wrote some good stuff young.

Poetry has been my passion throughout my career as an English teacher and now I have time to read more and write more. DD teaches English too, and DGD1 is now in Y13 with English as her best and favourite subject. So, as you can imagine, I am kept well up to date, and it is part of the joy of being with them down here.

I'm sure someone started a poetry thread a while back where people posted their favourite poems. I really enjoyed that and I don't do poetry!

Scarlet21 please don't confine yourself to poetry - join in on other threads too!

La Belle Dame is my favourite poem; I'm in love with Keats .

"I have but two thoughts; your beauty and the hour of my death. Would that I could have possession of both in the same moment." (Keats to Fanny) one of my favourite bits of Keats' prose.

I love Keats, prose and poetry, too, Tegan.

This isn't poetry but something happened last night which made me remember a letter that someone once sent me which started with the lines 'extrasensory is inadequate to describe your vision'. No one has ever written anything to me like that before or since . Have you seen 'Bright Star' Ariadne?

Reading Sheila Hancock's book "Just Me" and she quotes Joyce Grenfell:

"If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower, nor inscribe a stone,
Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell,
But life goes on,
So sing as well."

I loved Joyce Grenfell.

If any of my lot speak about me in a Sunday voice, I'll come back and haunt them.

I loved that book, G'mum. In fact, I have great respect for Sheila Hancock. We have't had her for a web chat, have we?