Poem A Week #5 is about the dislocation I felt when moving house from Birmingham to Cardiff, and what I did to remedy that. It’s about ancestral memory, and the sea’s power to make a new place feel old.
‘Nightswimming’ was shortlisted for the Bare Fiction Poetry Prize.
I don’t often write “motivational” poems. Poem A Week #4 is a motivational poem. It’s about feeling not good enough but then (SPOILERS AHEAD) actually being good enough.
The 3rd Poem A Week is about the Midlands: my birthplace, one-time sexual hunting ground of Lord Byron, and perennially ignored b-road between the affluent south and the quaint, charming north. It inspired much of Tolkien’s Mordor, but it’s home.
Poem A Week #2 is here. This one’s about generational bigotry, formatting errors, and amateur musical theatre. Yay! And it’s sort of set in THE FUTURE. Can we teach old dogs new tricks? Or encourage old dogs to be nicer to other, different, dogs? I like to think so.
Today sees me launch Poem A Week, which is my does-what-it-says-on-the-tin attempt to upload to YouTube a poem a week for a year. The first poem is called ‘Punchline’ and explores masculinity and mental health, lad culture, bad jokes, and escalators.
Ben Norris 