Category: writing and writers

quibbles & niggles

Having picked up Pride and Prejudice to look up Bingley’s comments on accomplishments the other day, I decided to re-read the whole book.

Along with Kipling’s Kim, it’s one of my ‘comfort books’; this time, however, I wasn’t reading it while ill in bed, so perhaps I was more critical. Certainly it struck me that it would be hard to cite Austen as a role model for good writing.
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a ‘fuller’ understanding

I have finally had time to read the copy of the TLS that I bought over a month ago. There’s a piece entitled The brick-wall moment – What is poetry about? And other puzzles, which appears in a section labelled ‘Commentary’.

I’m not sure I’d have read it with quite the same attitude if I’d realised it was an edited extract from a book, but it was a lot more interesting than the formal review in the Independent of Who is Ozymandias? And other puzzles in poetry by John Fuller.
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motivation II

The survey I mentioned yesterday also had a question that asked “What is most likely to motivate you to READ a poem?” It gave the following list of possible reasons, from which you were allowed to choose up to three:

reasons for reading a poem

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motivation

I recently had an email asking me to take part in a survey about poetry. This was one of the first questions:

Q: Have you ever written a poem? A: 1. No; 2. Yes as a class exercise; 3. Yes, for personal reasons
I’m a bit bemused by the way the reasons for writing poems are divided between ‘class exercises’ and ‘personal reasons’.
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written in stone

decorative tile

A while back I commented on an engraving at Nottingham castle as it didn’t make sense to me to create a work of art using a nonsensical text.

I compared it to the phrases embedded in the streets of Chepstow, which I’ve always rather liked; these seem to make grammatical sense, and are mostly associated with the commerce and history of the town.
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