This blog is dedicated to Emily Dickinson, author of the wonderful words (quoted above) which inspired it. The poems I choose will all be what I consider real poetry (as in “That is poetry”).
Or, as Sebastian Barker puts it in his perfect little two-liner, Poetry:
Not ‘as it is’, but blinding, like
Eros on a motorbike.
I mostly avoid living writers, not because I don’t think they produce real poetry (far from it, though the editors of most poetry magazines wouldn’t spot a real poem if it was printed on their beer-mat*), but because I haven’t the time to get bogged down in the hassle of obtaining permission to post poems. However, if you come across a poem of yours here and object to my drawing attention to it, please let me know. On the other hand, if you know of a poem or have written a poem that you think might fit in here, please email it to me. (It matters not at all – to me, anyway – if it has already been published elsewhere.)
* As Hermann Hesse wrote many years ago (in 1930): “Incompetent critics (who are aggressive because of their uncertainty, because they have always to judge values they cannot feel in essence but can only investigate theoretically and mechanically from outside) like to reproach poets with vanity and hypersensitivity about criticism, even with enmity toward the intellect in general, until in the end the bewildered reader is no longer able to distinguish between the true poet and the idiotic, long-haired poetaster represented in the newspapers and magazines.”
I shall do my best to avoid the latter.
James Munro
