I have been a member of the Highgate Poetry Society for 24 years. It was founded in 1977 in the Highgate Society, where I run my Highgate workshops. The Poets have produced 26 anthologies and we have many award winning and published poets who have been part of our group. I honed my poetry writing and reading aloud skills with the Poets and I owe the monthly workshops and the rigour of the critique a great deal.
However, in the past few years my focus has been so much on writing Y.A. fiction that my poetry has dropped off considerably. I still get a regular flow of ideas and my notebooks are full of starters, but taking the time to sit and carefully craft a poem always comes second to writing the next chapter.
I therefore decided that my NY Resolution, 2013, would be ‘To write more poetry’.
And then foolishly posted it on Facebook and Twitter – and NOW I'm even blogging about it. So there’ll be considerable egg on my face if I don’t DO IT!!
The first poem of the New Year therefore had a sort of taking stock theme to it.
If I become an old woman
not like Mum, dead before seventy;
I’ll ride a Harley down Route 66
Bob Dylan trailing in the slipstream,
drink moonshine brewed by cowboys
and learn to shoot straight.
I’ll eat chocolate with every meal
sell my Freedom Pass at street value
and wear jeans to fancy weddings.
I’ll push my Zimmer into Starbucks
shouting at my smartphone; looking mad
like business men and yummy mummies.
And when I need to go into a Home
I’ll start a squat, siphon off the leckie
from the streetlights, grow skunk in the living room.
I know I’ll never stand in Armstrong’s
footsteps on the moon, base jump El Capitain,
sleep overnight on the Antarctic ice.
But when I write
I’m standing naked on a beach,
the wind in my hair, 19 again
and all of life spreading out before me.
I know about the 'wearing purple' poem, but mine is for the hippie generation!
My next poem – which is currently in bits and pieces – is about Amy Winehouse. For lots of reasons, but mainly because she was the same age as my daughter and mine is alive and well.
Here is the opening gambit :
Amy
She is a Jools Holland Boxed Set now
a birthday present for the better half
loyal fan, jazz fanatic.
She sang like Piaf but died like Janis
in a flood of poisoned blood and tears
broke all our hearts twice over.
In the yellow pub near Camden Square
she sings, “Heard it on the grapevine”
over the lunchtime crowd while we wait.
Then my girl bounds over the threshold
caught for a second in a halo of sunlight
her skin radiant, unpainted, veins running clear.
It’s a starters and we’ll see if it develops. And it’s only January. (excuses, excuses)
It would be nice to aim for a poem a week. I have one to write about visiting San Francisco last summer :
This town rings with writers/ Kerouac, Frost, Dashiel Hammett/
And notes for another one about my generation being unwired and all the other things we didn’t have like :
black, partner, celebrity jungles/ and the only X we knew was in x-ray/
I’ll let you know how I get on in another blog – of course this might be IT and I’ll stall at these unfinished lines. But I hope not.
You can read a couple of my poems from the 26thHighgate Poets Anthology on my website.
HarperCollins has bought rights to a memoir by the father of late soul singer Amy Winehouse.
Nick Canham, editorial director for Harper Non-Fiction, bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to Amy, My Daughter by Mitch Winehouse, from Maggie Hanbury at the Hanbury Agency.
Lisa Sharkey, senior vice-president and director for creative development at HarperCollins US bought North American rights from Robin Straus at the Robin Straus Agency in conjunction with Maggie Hanbury. The book will be published worldwide in summer 2012.
read more
Amy Winehouse’s death is such a tragic waste – talented singer, loving family, a voice of youth.
Drugs are ‘friends’ that invite people in for a party, but drugs are not friends and take everything:-
They destroy familes, young lives, community.
Young people are so vulnerable – I personally know young people trapped by drugs, some are in and out of mental health hospitals, can’t keep a job, live for the next hit and some have died like Amy.
Music is such a real way to reach emotions, express emotions, reach into lives – but it’s got to be NO to drugs.
Amy’s death is so deeply sad.
Scene from videoclip of Psycho Dad
By Nigel Young
Following the funeral, the British radio waves are full of Amy Winehouse music. Those of us who learned as teenagers about great women blues and soul singers from listening to the voices of Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith, had no such contemporary singers of our own “Beatles” generation, white or black. The emergence of great new talents in this genre was something remarkable.
With parents allowing looser rules over children’s media consumption in summer months (it’s no wonder kids dread fall and back-to-school time. During the summer, 49% of children watch more TV, 46% play more video games, 45% surf the Web... Read the rest of this post
I was planning to post about the debt ceiling in the US today. But then word came that Amy Winehouse was found dead in her apartment, of a presumed overdose. Her father is on an airplane, not knowing that she is lying dead, while millions of us are already reading and writing and talking about it. They have already made her a member of the Forever 27 Club, along with Janis, Jimi and Morrison.
So many people are FaceBooking, Tweeting about Amy that her death was a given, because of her addiction. That's easy to say now that she is dead. But people do overcome addiction, even when it looks as though they will fail. And there are celebrities who are still struggling while in the limelight. I want you to know, even though they don't, that I am pulling for them. Lindsay, Brittany, you're in that group. You CAN make it. Millions of people want you to.
It was a happy day when Robert Downey, Jr. turned the corner. He struggled mightily in front of everyone, and seemed lost so many times. Let's hope he never has to struggle that hard again. He is a brilliant man with so much talent and we are so lucky to get to be the beneficiaries of it. That is how I feel about all the people I know who are survivors of their addictions, who are making it in this world in spite of that terrible disease. They are heroes. Addiction is a killer.
We are going to have to do better as a society. We have recognized that addiction is a disease. We have devised various ways to deal with that. But we still attach a stigma on the one hand and glamorize it on the other. We lose family and friends and our celebrity darlings. These are real people with real talents. We have to do better. We need our people who have talents and skills in the areas of science, medicine, counseling, celebrity wrangling, psychology, to start putting their heads together to save our future generations from addition. And as for the rest of us we need to stop stigmatizing and glamorizing ... however and whenever we can.
Addiction runs rampant in my own family. I have survivors, I have practicing alcoholics, I have family members who think they have control. We all know which ones we are. How about you? Are you untouched?
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I admire your resolution Miriam and hope you write a great deal of poetry. My first love is poetry, but I'm in the depths of writing children's fiction. I console myself by reading my favourite poets.
Can I share you squat? Unless I'm living in a palazzo with Mary Hoffman, of course... What a lovely, joyful poem.
Good luck with your resolution, and I look forward to seeing more so hope you keep it.
I do admire you for being able to write poetry, Miriam. I can only write dum-de-dum rhyme. Hope you keep to your new year's resolution!
The world needs more poetry - thank you, Miriam!
Oh no! I've got comments tooo - which means you've all read the resolution. Ah well...just have to try,won't I/
And Stroppy - I expect both you and Mary in my squat, of course.
By the way SHARON OLDS WON THE T.S.ELIOT PRIZE!! My first choice too and I heard her read on Sunday night...she was sublime...