Published in his debut collection, Our Numbered Days, ‘OCD’ details romance from the perspective of someone suffering with a mental health disorder.Read More
Tags : poem of the week
The Munich Mannequins was published as part of Plath’s acclaimed Ariel collection in 1965. Featuring characteristically strong imagery, the speaker suggests that models are little more than mannequins because they forsake their fertility in order to preserve their figures. Plath critiques the fashion industry and society as a whole for glorifying a destructive physical ideal […]Read More
This week, we have chosen to look at ‘Paper People’ by Harry Baker, a spoken-word poet and UK Poetry Slam Champion in 2015. WhatsOnStage described his collection as an “adventure of poems, puns and pole-dancing, German raps and gangsta maths”. The content of his work is certainly varied and eclectic. ‘Paper People’ is one of Baker’s […]Read More
Robert Burns, while a hero to many Scots writers and poets, rarely crops up when you ask for poets South of the border or overseas. Probably because of his commitment to Scottish nationalism just after the Jacobite rebellions, or his noble insistence in writing in what was then common Scots dialect, he has never really […]Read More
‘You never see a nipple in the daily express’, taken from John Cooper Clarke’s Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt, is an analysis of the right-wing tabloid press. The punk poet critiques the type of immorality displayed in these papers, arguing that while the Daily Express fails to exploit women, in the way other […]Read More
Utterly haunting – “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well”. ‘Lady Lazarus’, which features in ‘Ariel’, was published after her death in 1965. Much of her work was intensely produced in a creative burst after finding out that her husband, Ted Hughes, was had an affair. The continuing tone of […]Read More
Angela Innes’ eloquently spoken poetry resonates with many as she covers a wide variety of poetic topics. ‘Wildfire’ epitomises the anger behind feeling a lack of reciprocated love in a relationship and the realisation of it after a break-up. The first stanza establishes the semantic field of artwork. Innes illustrates her insecurities by weaving […]Read More
For this week’s ‘Poem of the Week’, I’m taking it right back to Keats in the early 19th century and his breathtaking medieval love story of Madeline and Porphyro. Older poetry can often seem daunting at first glance, however Keats’ language and imagery have timeless beauty and ‘The Eve of St Agnus,’ when put in […]Read More
Text I tend the mobile now like an injured bird We text, text, text our significant words. I re-read your first, your second, your third, look for your small xx, feeling absurd. The codes we send arrive with a broken chord. I try to picture your hands, their image is blurred. Nothing my thumbs press […]Read More
For the first Poem of the Week feature I thought I’d write about something contemporary. And what’s more contemporary than YouTube? Savannah Brown is a poet. She’s also a YouTuber who often uploads spoken word videos. Her poem ‘Hi, I’m a Slut’ is a slam poem, and a pretty amazing one at that. Brown interweaves […]Read More
