I had a good poetry week. Well the end of it was good. I couldn’t make a couple of online events due to work commitments – I am now recruiting in the US as well as The Netherlands, Germany and UK – luckily the only role I was working on in Australia has been put on hold, and my Singapore assignments have been completed, so it’s not quite as challenging from the perspective of time…
Three poems added to my page of published poems. All 3 poems previously appeared on the Acropolis Journal website, (issues 1 & 2), last year. Two are from the sequence of poems I wrote with the general theme of running around Portsea Island whilst training for marathons. They are among the darkest poems I have written, which is why I won’t share them in a post. You’ll have to go looking for them – they…
That time of year again. A blackbird sings from a vantage point in a back garden somewhere along the street. And I feel a little more alive. Someone has lit a barbecue. And I don’t mind. The sun is shining. I used to view my life with a sense of disappointment. Compare myself to others who had made a better fist of it. Who had bigger houses, better cars, more glamorous lives, more exotic holidays.…
I’ve been away from this blog for a couple of weeks. Firstly work has, as is often the case, got in the way. For those who don’t know, I work in recruitment, and have been working on a range of assignments in the following countries – Australia, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, Singapore, the UK and the USA. Needless to say managing the time zone discrepancies isn’t easy, but it’s worth it financially – and I…
The deadline for this years’ poetry has been extended from April 14th to April 19th – you need to post your entries, so if interested, bear in mind it’s a bank holiday weekend coming up. Link follows. https://www.binsted.org/poetry-comp-22
I’m going to start sharing events , competitions, local news etc on my blog. Currently my day job is taking up a significant amount of time, so my ability to post long and thoughtful articles is limited. Basically I’m knackered. Currently I’m recruiting in Singapore, Amsterdam, Budapest and Frankfurt, and have recently been working in Melbourne and San Francisco as well. All remote of course, but the timezones can be a challenge! Anyway, first up…
The poems I shared here between May & September are now on my poems page. Both of them. One’s about climate change, the other’s about mental health. You have been warned!
I was an ornithologist when I was a kid. I say was. Once a bird-watcher, always a bird-watcher (I’ll leave others to supply the punchline). I still get a bit of a thrill when I see something unusual in our small city garden, not that we get many birds here – even the Magpie that perched on our fence this morning was a bit of a rarity. We had Peregrine Falcons nesting in the church…
A couple of poems originally posted here in April 2021, now added to the poems page at the top of this site. One previously appeared in One Hand Clapping Magazine, the other, I think, was first posted here (I’ll have to double check my haul of printed magazines at some point. Not that it means much, I’m just posting in an echo chamber really!
Do we need to explain the meaning of what we write, or should we let the reader work them out for themselves? Does it matter whether they fully understand what we are trying to say? What if they come up with their own interpretation that the writer hasn’t considered? Obviously lots of poems, including many fabulous, famous and regularly anthologised ones, have a meaning that is easily understood. This doesn’t diminish their power or worth.…