Tag: Andrew Burke

Andrew Burke Recently I posted here about Collaborative poetry, citing examples by renga poets, a ‘mock’ poet, and an award-winning Canadian poet, Phil Hall, and myself. As usual, I stepped in blindly, and started writing before I had done the research. This is the creative side of me: I’m just an excitable boy, as some pop song said years ago. When I was a university lecturer, I warned students off relying on Wikipedia for their research. It was early days for the online encyclopaedia; many of the entries were biased and incomplete. I still believe Wiki has to be used…

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Andrew Burke hey cuckoo– are you scolding the loafer? – Issa, 1813 Friend and fellow poet, Canadian Phil Hall, has just won the prestigious Governor General’s Poetry Award for 2011. His winning book was Killdeer, published by Bookthug. You can read more here.I’ve been procrastinating for days about writing this. I have no idea why, but events have caught up with me and now is the time. Being only human, I tend to pay more attention to the books and poems of the poets I know personally, so I’ve been reading and, frankly, puzzling over a lot of Phil’s work…

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Andrew Burke Boarding cards were the ultimate bookmarks – you were issued one before you left and when you woke somewhere between here and Frankfurt they reminded you at bleary breakfast that Fiona had just been cornered in a grimy basement and you were winging now over Romania and would be free in two hours. From an unpublished poem Vanishing Species by Andrew Taylor. This poem is a wonderful example of a new breed of poem which has grown up since the Wright Brothers took to the air. When people say there is nothing new for poetry to say –…

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Andrew Burke Today, I read a sign which said, ‘When you write your life story, don’t let anybody else’s hand on the pen’. Now, that feels so right to me when I apply it to poetry – but then … there’s a multi-handed force directing my hands called ‘influence’. We all have them, no matter how we try to ditch them along the way. Even Tranter with his tricky manoeuvres – they’re learnt from Oulipo and his influence from Ashbery is well documented. Or the poets who murmur Sylvia Plath poems to their pillows and write their shadow texts at…

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