Thursday 7 February 2019

My Poetry

I've had a few requests from blogger friends to post up some of my poetry but once a poem has appeared on a blog it is considered to have been published and, as such, most poetry magazines would refuse to accept it. I am working towards producing a poetry collection and so it is important for me to have my work published by poetry magazines in order to get my name out there. Therefore I can't post up a selection of my poems at the moment. What I can do is to post the links to three poems that have been published so far this year...

Youth

I wrote Youth in response to a piece of artwork called Messiah by Ernst Neuschul. I am fascinated by this kind of writing. It's called ekphrastic writing and our tutor on the MA Course introduced me to it. He took us to New Walk Museum and told us to find a painting and see what writing it inspired. Youth was the first piece I wrote. I went on to write a number of other pieces but this one was accepted by the Ekphrastic Review last December and so you can read it here:


Klezmer Men

Having been inspired by art, I moved on to music. I love listening to Klezmer music, popular in 19th century Ashkenazi communities of Eastern Europe. Klezmer bands would roam from stetl to stetl often playing for very little money and a bed for the night. The music fell out of fashion after the Second World War but during the 1980s its popularity reemerged. Klezmer music makes me want to dance and so I wrote two poems about men playing and dancing to the music. They were both published in last month's Jewish Literary Review. You can read them here: