National Poetry Day

On National Poetry Day, how can you fail to have a 'what's your favourite poem' discussion?

Unfortunately for fans of brevity, I'm not one to pin myself down to having a favourite one of anything....especially in such a diverse area as the arts. I couldn't pick a favourite poem any more than I could pick a favourite film, or piece of music. It depends entirely on my mood. I have fond memories of some of the poems from the shelves full of poetry books I had as a child. Back then I unashamedly devoured poetry. I think I must have asked my parents for a new poetry book for every Christmas, birthday, and with every new issue of the Puffin Post at school.  There was Please Mrs Butler (Nobody leave the room / Everyone listen to me / We had ten pairs of scissors / At half-past two / And now there's only three), Roger McGough's Imaginary Menagerie, Robert Louis Stevenson's A Garden of Verses, and countless others I've long-forgotten. And I even remember raiding boxes of my parents' old books where I was delighted to discover Pam Ayres Thoughts of a Late Night Knitter.

Unfortunately, I think studying poetry at school took away some of the magic for me. Analysing one war poem in painstaking detail for two hours just doesn't hold the same appeal as dipping into a book of light-hearted, neatly-rhyming verse.  I like poems that rhyme, and I don't care who knows it! To this day, it still makes me smile when things rhyme, especially unintentionally.

But, there have been one or two poems since those days that have struck a chord with me. One of those is Seamus Heaney's Scaffolding, which describes perfectly the way I feel about true friendship, and is a definite contender for the title of favourite:

Masons, when they start upon a building,

Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,

Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done

Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be

Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall

Confident that we have built our wall.

And if you don't like that one, maybe you'll like my mum's favourite poem:

There was a man who always wore, A saucepan on his head.
I asked him what he did it for - ‘I don’t know why,’ he said.
‘It always makes my ears so sore, I am a foolish man.
I think I’ll have to take it off and wear a frying pan.

Pentametron

After seeing the Pointless contestants struggle over the poetry round earlier this week, I started thinking how sad it is that more people don't enjoy poetry -- how it seems to be marginalised and considered either irrelevant or pretentious.  I'm no poetry expert, but I've always enjoyed wordplay and I especially love it when things inadvertently rhyme. There's a Dr Seuss-like neatness to it that just appeals to me.

And that's when I discovered Pentametron.  It uses Twitter to "find inadvertent poetry in the endless torrents of language that slosh around the internet".  Pentametron uses algorithms to search through up to 5 million tweets a day and find those unwittingly written in iambic pentameter.  Then it puts them together in a collection of rhyming 'sonnets'. What a great way to bring poetry into the 21st century, social-networking spotlight -- I love it!

Follow Pentametron on Twitter @pentametron.

Pointless Poems

I'm a huge fan of the BBC quiz show Pointless, and I just had to share today's round on 'Poems and Their Poets'.  If you haven't seen the programme before, the basic idea is that before the show they've given 100 members of the public the names of twelve poems and asked them to name the poets who wrote them. The contestants on the show then have to choose the poem they think the lowest number of those 100 people knew…but they also have to be able to name the poet who wrote it themselves. The ultimate achievement is to get a 'pointless' answer -- that is, to know the answer to one that none of the 100 people knew.  I suppose it's kind of a Family Fortunes in reverse. Does that make any sense? I doubt it -- my skills of explanation are not my strongest point, and I know it took me a few watches to get my head around the concept! But rules aside, these are the poems:

I managed to name the poets of eight of them. And I kicked myself when I found out the answer to one of the others. The remaining three I've never heard of and should probably look up sometime.  

How many can you get?