
POETRY AND MUSIC a force of nature
With sometimes as many as four great instrumentaliss on the stage the music delivered tonight was brilliantly but tenderly played. No showmanship, no one-upmanship. Duende, like Jools Holland, conducted all this almost invisibly. He seemed to be a character comfortable working amongst this musical excellence, sure in the knowledge that his writing and performing fit in perfectly.

POETRY SPOKEN STATESIDE
the capacity poetry has, as a genre, to create cultural sparks with even the slimmest of collections means that for every deserving title we might manage to highlight here, a dozen more might have been swapped in.

CREATIVITY BACK ON THE ´WRITE´ PATH
Lanzarote Creative Writing Group, meanwhile, continues to fulfil exercises in genres such as flash fiction and generally create pieces of 500 to 1,500 words. I remember from my time with the group, too, that there was nothing to frighten the horses. Prospective members can be frightened off by technical literary terms but the remit of the group is to, first and foremost, simply enjoy putting pen to paper.

WHAT IS GOOD ART? WHAT GOOD IS ART?
Of course, it is not only poetry that academics might have us measure to within an inch of its life.

POETRY FORMS and #NaPoWriMo from The Vixen Of Verse
I am going back to short form poetry. I am going back to haikus, tankas, shadormas and triolets.

MAKING DARKNESS LIGHT: The Lives And Times Of John Milton
William Blake claimed Milton was ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’.

JACK GILBERT
Jack Gilbert suggests that love — the most intense and wide ranging emotion human beings are capable of experiencing — might be the most challenging to describe in words. It’s ironic how Gilbert acknowledges the imperfection of language with a poem that is perfection in itself.

HOW JAZZ INFORMS POETRY (plus special news announcements)
Jazz poetry is a literary genre defined as poetry necessarily informed by jazz music—that is, poetry in which the poet responds to and writes about jazz.

LISTENING TO A BEAT POET
Ginsberg recognized Dylan as his artistic heir

TALKING BEAT POETRY
Historians hold different views about why this style of writing was dubbed beat poetry. Some claim the writers felt beaten down and tired by the consumerism and lack of societal values. Others say beat poetry refers to the musical beat of jazz used in oral recitation. Still others claim Kerouac coined the term Beat Generation to describe his circle of friends.