Today I was at my kid’s school assembly. Lots of awards, lots of missing teeth smiles, lots of parents with cameras. Today there were at least 10 awards for poetry. I found myself wondering if school was the last time any of us budding authors wrote a poem. So agreed, its not a dead art as kids still stretch the artistic boundaries but does anyone else still write a poetic verse ?

At 14 I fell in love with The Horses by Edwin Muir – a little post apocalyptic verse which hypnotised me. I think I was going through a goth period. Today I reread the verse and whilst not so hypnotised I fell in love with verse as an art all over again. I attempted the art myself. Nothing came. A cup of tea was made and still nothing came.

Is poetry a skill best left to those who have never had to write a 30 page management report ? Is it best left in the hands of those who’s sentence construction has not been critiqued by committee. I wonder.

The Poem Hunter  http://www.poemhunter.com/ is a great site to help you rediscover all the works that once hypnotised you and perhaps help you to find the unstructured one within once again.

Signing off with a bit of Edwin’s best

“Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.”

Edwin Muir “The Horses”