Re: Summer Festival by Christof	3-Jul-07/11:30 AM
This is actually rather lovely. I see that you too are enjoying the great British summer. The irony of using the word 'flood' to refer to the sun rather than the water is nicely done.
Re: a comment on Portrait of the artist as [insert adjective] by Nicholas Jones	23-May-07/2:42 PM
Well, it's just meant as a list of adjectives, language stripped of embellishment. Perhaps that makes it anti-poetry. Also I've been listening to an album by Malcolm Middleton (who used to be in Arab Strap) which is full of savage self-loathing. By the way, and in case anybody has got the wrong idea, in a British context republican means to be in favour of abolishing the monarchy, not to be a supporter of the neo-conservative fuckwits currently in control of the White House.
Re: a comment on behind the banister by FreeFormFixation	16-May-07/4:00 PM
I like colons. I hope to do for the colon what Ezra Pound did for the forward slash.
Re: a comment on Les Imagistes by Nicholas Jones	16-Feb-07/4:34 PM
It seems to me you have fixed ideas about what poetry should do. I don't want it to flow. It's about watching a frozen lake, that's the complete opposite of flow.
Re: a comment on Advent by Nicholas Jones	16-Feb-07/4:31 PM
What's all this about flow? I'm not an MC trying to win one of those rap battles (I'm way too white and middle class, for a start?). Who says poetry has to flow? Well maybe Keats did, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe it should stutter from line to line like our minds, my mind flows but it flows all sorts of crap over me, to create order is to lie, to tell stories is to tell lies, if I'm going to attempt to articulate the process of living inside my own head then there has to be some chaos. This is what Eliot and Pound did for us, they showed that artistic fragmentation is necessary to meaningful discuss a fragmented culture in a fragmented world. So fine, say it's a bad poem, that's ok, but don't say it's bad because there's no flow.
Re: a comment on The Horror The Horror by Nicholas Jones	16-Feb-07/4:23 PM
It is supposed to be all over the place, because that is the postmodern condition which is what the thing is all about. If you think that's just pretentiousness then I don't care; this is the life we all lead whether we want to or not. The joining a party to fight for socialism thing is specifically about the Labour in Britain (which I still belong to). It's gone in fifty years from creating the welfare state to being best friends with George Bush. But that isn't the point. It's about wanting meaning, objective truth, to assert that George Orwell is better than Celebrity Big Brother; but how can I do that because I share in the shallowness of our culture? Ok, so the Conrad / TS Eliot thing isn't exactly subtle, but fuck it, all poetry is really about poetry anyway.
Re: a comment on Around 4am at this time of the year by Nicholas Jones	16-Feb-07/4:16 PM
Blimey, that's a lot of critiquing you've been doing in one day. It's not about convoluted language. It's about wanting to be able to not think. But to require a mental activity to stop yourself thinking. Because otherwise the horror comes. Looking at the stuff I've written there are many poems about not being to sleep; it's a subject that means a lot to me. It's why I'm writing this past midnight having got home from a gig; because I'm scared when I do go to bed I might be awake for hours yet. So this poem is about waking up, it's summer, it gets light early, intently watching the changing colours of the sky as the sun rises distracts me from that four am sense of emptiness. I'm not saying it's a perfect poem, far from it, but the horror and the terror isn't directly in it because it's a poem about avoiding that rather than confronting it.
Re: Romantic dreams by John Rambo	17-Dec-06/7:42 AM
Yep, misogyny is hilarious, isn't it?
Re: a comment on Edna's Video Library by Edna Sweetlove	10-Dec-06/12:39 PM
Edna, you may well be right. However, I'm actually quite pleased you've felt the need to go to some of my old poems and say they are rubbish. You have done this to annoy me, but it has the opposite of amusing me no end.
Re: a comment on The blankness of his life by Nicholas Jones	10-Dec-06/11:22 AM
Once again, thank you. I'm afraid I'm not really very good at happy (in poetry or reality), but I may give it a go. But it may have to be happiness mixed in the melancholy knowledge that happiness is transient.
Re: Ode to the Bun by Stephen Robins	10-Dec-06/4:51 AM
Laughable.
Re: a comment on The Mountain by Nicholas Jones	9-Dec-06/3:43 PM
Thanks, I'm glad it creeps you out, I think this means the poem works.
Re: Edna's Video Library by Edna Sweetlove	7-Dec-06/2:51 PM
Is this supposed to be funny or clever? And you actually went to the trouble of writing it? This I guess is effective as pretty makes me despair of the whole human race, and suggests that if we were all wiped out in a nuclear holocaust it wouldn't actually matter; in fact, it would be a good thing because this poem and its shitty pseudo-post-modern 'ooh look at me I know some dirty words' stunted aesthetics would be destroyed for ever.
Re: Take that thing off your head by lukehanney	25-Nov-06/3:05 PM
Hello there Luke, my old nemesis, back with a transparently racist and unpleasant poem. Unless it is actually a subtle piece of satire aimed at the current unfathomable media obsession with Muslim women wearing veils.
Re: How To Ride a Bicycle by Dovina	27-Aug-06/12:34 PM
This is nice, I guess. Though you're wrong about clipless pedals, they are a fantastic invention.
Re: a comment on On returning to a town where I used to live by Nicholas Jones	26-Aug-06/4:20 AM
Thank you to both of you for your kind comments. If you're interested, the town in question is St. Andrews in Scotland, where I was a student for four years. I went there a few months ago for a job interview, I hadn't been back since I graduated five years ago. And the thing that struck me really was the way the light is affected by the sea and the old stone buildings. I wrote the first draft of this in the little B&B where I was staying. I didn't get the bloody job though.
Re: Thinking by dancin_n_da_moonlite	3-Feb-06/3:10 AM
The cheap comment would be to say that I wonder if you were you thinking when you wrote this poem. The pretentious comment would be wonder whether the notion of something 'actually' right implies a belief in an objective and unchanging moral system and so the piece is effectively a piece of neo-Kantian thought and so an attack on the relativism of post-structuralist discourse. The kind comment would be to say that it is an interesting idea but really requires further work. The honest would be that this isn't a bad poem as such, it's just rather simplisitc, doesn't really seem to do anything, and leaves me cold. Take your pick.
Re: a comment on Les Imagistes by Nicholas Jones	2-Feb-06/11:47 AM
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I think the first stanza does make sense. Perhaps it needs the addition of the world 'place' - We would call this PLACE peaceful'. The point we would it peaceful, and it is in comparison to the town, but there are actually still lots of noises, including traffic. I could articulate the sense of place better, more description, but at this point the poem is meant to be pseudo-imagistic. No single image is sufficient - neither peacefulness or noise - because context is so important. So pure imagism would lead to distortion, because I could only a purely imagist poem by ignoring certain aspects of the scenario. It's not about the narrator being at peace or not (this isn't the pathetic fallacy at work) but about the place. Poetics = a theory or set of beliefs about poetry. It's a word, haven't you heard of it? Like Aristotle's Poetics. The influence at this point I guess is Hugh MacDiarmid, who wrote a long poem called something like 'The Kind of Poetry I Want' which lists many images - a poetry like a man playing a billiard shot or shooting a gun and who analyses and considers carefully all the appropriate factors. But I'm not writing MacDiarmid's poetry of fact (although elsewhere I do attempt to) but a poetry of imagery (the images are of course influenced by the imagists, that's the point) that contains other things besides. I want to include things that don't fit to create internal cohesion actually based on contradiction. Not sure if any of that makes sense. The point is, the duck on the frozen lake is confused, surprised, there's contradiction at work; that's what I'm poetry can do, whereas imagism is paring everything down to a level which denies complexity. I think.
Re: Valentine? by celticskatermatt1	1-Feb-06/12:50 PM
I hate postmodernism, it's become impossible to tell when something is cleverly ironic and deconstructive or just shit. On this one I'm going for the latter.
Re: a comment on Les Imagistes by Nicholas Jones	1-Feb-06/10:06 AM
I did invent the duck image; I was sitting in the freezing cold by a frozen lake during my lunch break scribbling in my notebook. The noise thiong comes from the fact it's a park just outside a town, so it is quiet in comparison but there's still the traffic noise. The point I think is that imagism is too narrow; there are many other things going on in poetry than just the images. I think a very austere imagist poem can opnly work by excluding everything else; I'd rather have excess verbosity that encompasses more than a clinical precision that excludes. I've just been reading an anthology of imagist writers, and I read the poems and think yes, that's very nice, but where's the rest?