Re: a comment on Uncontrolled scribblings one luch break by Nicholas Jones	15-Jan-06/12:38 PM
Have to disappoint but I actually 'borrowed' the iron January image.....
Re: a comment on [] by Prince of Void	10-Jan-06/11:25 AM
I do know quite a lot about post-modernism and my PhD engaged with different notions of intertextuality, notably Bloom's theory of antithetical criticism. Theorists are divided as to whether all texts are intrinsically intertextual (as Kiristeva might argue) or whether it is generally a conscious writing strategy, the deliberate use of allusion to create a complex matrix of potential meaning. Which, of course, leads us into reader-response criticism and the idea that King Lear is about nuclear war; not, of course that he consciously intended this, but that a modern reader will re-interpret the text in light of their own experience. Intertextuality is good. All poetry is written in response to what has gone before, all poetry is criticsm of other literature. Nicking lines from Dylan Thomas because you can't think of your own is just being a bit rubbish/
Re: a comment on Uncontrolled scribblings one luch break by Nicholas Jones	10-Jan-06/9:45 AM
I don't know what I've been doing, I just haven't written any poetry for a long time. Ceasing being a student and having to get a job in the big world wide was fairly traumatic. I scribbled this down in my lunch break in about ten minutes, deliberately without thinking about what I'm saying. So I've reproduced it without changing anything, keeping all the mistakes. As I say, I haven't written any poetry for a long time, and this seemed like a way of starting again. Oh, and I've actually misspelled 'lunch' in the title. Although actually I ate my lunch earlier at my desk while pretending to work.
Re: portrait of powerlessness by digipoet	9-Jan-06/11:59 AM
This one actually has some interesting writing, though your last line is entirely superfluous.
Re: [] by Prince of Void	9-Jan-06/11:56 AM
Sorry, this is pretty bad, and nicking bits from Dylan Thomas generally isn't a good plan. That's why Thomas, through being a genius, held Welsh poetry back for about thirty years.
Re: a comment on Nonsense POEM #14687 by Bankrupt_Word_Clerk	21-Jun-05/1:37 AM
I always thought cuppa was a quintessentially English word. I'm glad it's used somewhere else in the world.
Re: Nonsense POEM #14687 by Bankrupt_Word_Clerk	20-Jun-05/6:52 AM
Dylan Thomas, even though he attended a famous surrealist convention in London with a teapot full of string offering to pour people a cuppa, always strongly maintained he was not a surrealist, because that involved using images from the subconscious directly without mediating them. He argued that, while he was happy to use such imagery, he had to artistically arrange them and make them fit his own poetic vision - he could not abide the sense of randomness inherent in true surrealism. And basically what you've done is to fall into the trap of bad surrealism, which is just to stick a load of images together without any thought for anything much.
Re: a comment on Regime Change by Nicholas Jones	20-Jun-05/1:28 AM
This is about the post-September 11th attack on Afghanistan (before the world realised Iraq was next on the list) so it can't be another Afghanistan, unless you're referring to the Soviet invasion in the 1980s (which is actually a very neat and ironic parallel). And the poem doesn't say it's a new Vietnam, it only says that that is what the media said, which is true. In fact this dates from the period after the invasion when it looked like things might actually work out. I like to think this poem still has some resonance three years later, but you'll have to think harder about the historical context.
Re: a comment on Around 4am at this time of the year by Nicholas Jones	12-Jun-05/1:30 PM
Have you never woken up at four o'clock in the morning and been unable to get back to sleep and so suffered from a horribly intense irrational fear and sense of complete and total sadness, melancholy and ennui? Perhaps this only happens to me.
Re: a comment on Around 4am at this time of the year by Nicholas Jones	11-Jun-05/9:20 AM
But there isn't supposed to be a sense of wonder. It's the sun coming on on my garden, not very exciting. It's about the terror of not being able to sleep and seeing it get light (which it does very early in Britain in June). But that watching the light distracts me from the whole being unable to sleep thing. Hm. Perhaps the fact I need to explain all this shows the poem doesn't. First draft anyway, needs a re-write.
Re: a comment on Welsh Landscape Part One by Nicholas Jones	16-Sep-04/12:00 PM
Cultural annihilation and commodification is worse than simply displaying the scars. The past shouldn't be sanitised and made safe. Reading this again, though, I think mainly that I'd been reading too much R. S. Thomas. I think that R. S., for all his faults (his oversimplistic hatred of English language culture, the hideously patronising Iago Prytherch poems), was perhaps the greatest poet to come out of Wales in the twentieth century (in English, at any rate, in Welsh I'd have to suggest Gwenallt). But his influence hasn't really been healthy, because it has fostered this sense of isolation and a nationalism based on historical doom. (See Dafydd Elis Thomas in Poetry Wales sometime in the 1970s). As it happens, I'm English, and English is my first language. But my father is Welsh, and I've just spent three years in Swansea studying for a PhD in the field of Welsh Writing in English (on the poet Harri Webb). I've been learning Welsh for that time only.
Re: a comment on Poem For Times Such As These by Nicholas Jones	16-Sep-04/11:46 AM
I've never read much Hedd Wyn. If anything, the title of my poem could refer to Glyn Jones' novel 'Times Like These'. What I have read is in translation; my grasp of Welsh isn't strong enough (yet, I am still learning) to understand poetry, or, rather, I feel I can understand the words only on a very literal level without picking up the cultural baggage they carry. Gillian Clarke renders the final verse of 'Rhyfel' as Like old songs they have left behind, We have hanged our harps on the trees again. The blood of boys is on the wind, Their blood is mingled with the rain. Which I suppose is a fairly good description of what appears to be the current state of the world.
Re: Welsh Rain by Sasha	16-Sep-04/11:40 AM
Very nice indeed. I've just left Swansea, rainiest city in the UK. I would reply to you in Welsh, but I'm not really good enough to discuss poetry yet (I've been learning for about three years).
Re: Dan by dougsoderstrom	6-Sep-04/3:11 AM
Is this about Daniel, who went into the lion's cage but lived?
Re: a comment on (A)Gnostic by Nicholas Jones	3-Sep-04/2:09 AM
All of this is deliberate. My theory is that artistic expression is best when you are barely in control of what the words mean. My experimenting with the words, even if you don't understand them, you arrive at linguistic truths. Read 'Ash Wednesday' by T.S. Eliot. Editing would destroy the fact that this embodies my mind making connections between words and ideas.
Re: I Got A Girl by <{Baba^Yaga}>	23-Aug-04/3:16 AM
'I Got a Girl' was a song by Tripping Daisy, the lead was Tim DeLaughter who went on to form the Polyphonic Spree.
Re: a comment on Owain Glyndwr by Nicholas Jones	23-Aug-04/3:11 AM
Thank you. But it's not really supposed to be 'nice'.
Re: Panic by Bobjim	6-Jul-04/2:43 AM
Fine, but where's the rest of it? I feel strangely unsatisfied.
Re: a comment on Owain Glyndwr by Nicholas Jones	21-Jun-04/4:12 AM
Actually that is quite a bad line. Needs some more work I think.
Re: a comment on Now That's What I Call Music Vol. 1,087 by Nicholas Jones	14-Jun-04/8:58 AM
Excessive explanation of poem: 'Now That's What I Call Music' is a long running series of chart hit compilations. They come out regularly and are full of rubbish, though I have a fondness for one my brother had which included '99 Red Balloons' by Nena. In some sense they are stuck because they always include the same type of disposable pop music. But then they always reflect the period in which they come out so they are to some extent always different. On the other hand, I like music which deliberately sounds like the CD is stuck. An example of this is 'The Dance', first track on The Music's eponymous debut album. So the poem is a juxtaposition of these two possible readings. Paradoxically making a sound like a stuck CD is a fairly progressive thing to do (exploding traditional notions of music) where chart compilations are not. Think about it.