In early spring a book arrived that I had been eagerly anticipating. Atomic Masquerade by Clara Etherin did not disappoint. Witty, exuberant, layered and innovative, this visual poetry collection is full of delights, from brooding palimpsest portrayals of Dracula and Frankenstein to the vivid pair of asemic sonnets “Heaven & Hell” – written in collaboration with AI – with which the book concludes.
Continue readingTag Archives: poetic constraint
The space within the nutshell
I was fortunate, when studying English Literature at A-Level, to have an inspirational teacher. Lynne Ruscoe was only a few years older than we were, full of energy and enthusiasm, with an engaging smile and a lively sense of humour. We read Chaucer and John Donne, John Keats and Gerald Manley Hopkins, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, and – of course – Shakespeare. Hamlet was one of our set texts and I vividly remember the emotional impact the play had on me, especially these lines from Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy:
Continue readingThe constrained poetry of sport
My mother taught me to swim before I could walk. This was sensible. We had a swimming pool in the garden, unfenced of course, a sun-glittered temptation to a small child crawling over spiky grass on a hot day.
Swimming, tennis, netball, rowing, squash… sport has always been a part of my life. It taught me to play by the rules, absorb the pressures of competition, survive the grim lessons of humiliation and defeat. Through practice and repetition I gradually developed muscle memory, so that movement and coordination became ever more instinctive. I learned to relish the sheer joy of cleaving through water like a dolphin, the exhilaration of a hard-fought squash match, the triumphant exhaustion of pushing my body to its limits.
Continue readingAudience as Constraint
When I write poetry, for whom am I writing? Who is my intended audience?
This is a question I have only recently started asking myself. Perhaps it is different for novelists, or storywriters, or memoirists. Perhaps it is different if you seek to earn a living from your writing; but my answer, at least until a few weeks ago, would have been in the first instance I write for myself. I need to translate thoughts, feelings, memories, impressions, imaginings, experiences, observations, into words and structures, driven partly, I think, by a compulsion to generate some sort of order and meaning out of chaos and confusion.
It continues to be a pleasant surprise when others read my poetry and relate to it in some way. My prime motivation for writing, however, is not a desire to be read.
Continue readingThe Seasons: Four Pascal’s Triangle Poems
I have always been drawn to the visual poetry of mathematics: the crisp clean curves of conic sections; the graceful graphs associated with trigonometric functions; the meditative intricacies of the Mandelbrot Set; even the simple, elongated elegance of the integral sign. I still recall the thrill I experienced as a teenager when I was first introduced to the triangular array of numbers known as Pascal’s Triangle. Mathematically, the array has applications in algebra, combinatorics and probability theory, but it is also intriguing as an object in itself, on account of the many patterns embedded in its structure.
Continue reading‘Everyone is invited’ – An Interview with Anthony Etherin of Penteract Press
Readers of formal and constrained poetry will, like me, have been saddened by Penteract Press’s recent announcement that it will cease publishing new titles after 2024. As part of my on-going series of interviews with editors of small independent presses, I spoke to Penteract’s editor Anthony Etherin about the press, its ethos, and the reasons behind the decision to close. Anthony also shares two poems from his new collection The Robots of Babylon, which will be published on the 21st of October and is now available for pre-order.
Continue readingRock, Paper, Scissors: Shape and Surface as Constraint
Messages from the past take many forms: ancient structures, buildings, and artefacts; burial sites; rituals and symbolism; stories, poems and songs shared through generations; sculptures, paintings, works of art.
Continue readingSeasons and Landscapes: A fortune teller origami poem
When I was a child, my friends and I enjoyed crafting and playing with paper fortune-tellers, a form of origami made with square paper folded in a sequence of triangles.
The illustration below is of my fortune teller poem Seasons and Landscapes in two dimensions. You can download a PDF version to print out and fold into shape here. Folding instructions are given here (or here if you prefer a video version).
A Penrose Stairs Poem
This poem was inspired by M. C. Escher’s lithograph Ascending and Descending (1960), which depicts figures on a staircase that appears to rise – or descend – in a continuous loop. This impossible construction is named the Penrose stairs, after Lionel and Roger Penrose.
The poem can in principle be read from almost any starting point, and in any direction.
The Gym
‘We imagine we are climbing: every step is about 20 cm high, terribly exhausting and where does it get us? Nowhere; we don’t get one step further or higher.’
M. C. Escher, On Ascending and Descending, 1960.
Double Mesostic
During a recent constraint-based creativity workshop, we tried our hand at writing a mesostic. If you don’t know what mesostics are, join the club; I hadn’t heard of them before either! A mesostic, I discovered, is similar to an acrostic in that it is a poem or piece of text containing a word or phrase that is read vertically through the horizontal lines. The difference is that in the case of a mesostic the vertical column of letters intersects somewhere within each line rather than at the beginning or end.
Just for fun, here’s a double mesostic that I wrote, inspired not only by the workshop but also a common occurrence in our household. Fill in the blank letters and then read downwards to reveal what’s missing.
