Category: Books
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So you want to be a writer?
“Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.” That’s what Susan Sontag advised writers. I haven’t read Sontag but could appreciate her words, quoted by Maria Popova in Brain Pickings. And I could thoroughly appreciate this poem by Charles Bukowski called So You Want to be a…
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William Zinsser: On Writing Well
Journalist and writing teacher William Zinsser says in his book, On Writing Well: “I’m occasionally asked if I can recall a moment when I knew I wanted to be a writer. No such blinding flash occurred. I only knew that I thought I would like to work for a newspaper.”…
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TS Eliot, ‘mixing memory and desire’
Today is the birthday of TS Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965). I still remember how strange and romantic it felt when I first read The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock in my last or penultimate year in high school. Let us go then, you and I,When…
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The metrical foot: Foot and meter in poetry
I just came across this poem by Coleridge explaining metrical feet, the unit of measurement in poetry. He wrote it for his son, Derwent. A metrical foot is a set of syllables, usually two or three, only one of which is normally stressed, as in the words, po´-em and po´-et-ry.…
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The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
He was more than 50 years old when his first book was published; he moved from Delhi to Oxford when he was 73 and died there in 1999 at the ripe old age of 101. Nirad C Chaudhuri was an extraordinary man. His first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown…
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Poetry Please: The 10 most popular poems
Here are the top 10 on Poetry Please, the 10 most popular poems on the longest running poetry programme broadcast anywhere in the world, according to the BBC. Started in 1979, the BBC 4 programme presents poems requested by listeners. It reaches two million listeners a week. The top 10…
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Poems that make grown men cry
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry. The title made me pick up the book. And it was revealing. It brings together poems which have made writers cry. So we have Salman Rushdie confessing he is moved to tears by the last lines of WH Auden’s famous poem, In Memory of…
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Aimless Love, Reader and Poetry by Billy Collins
I love the poems of Billy Collins. Quiet and intimate, they are like sharing your thoughts with your spouse or lover when both of you are feeling happy and have nothing to do. You make small talk, exchange jokes, comment on little details. Collins’s poems are similar in nature.
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9/11 in poems and stories
Today is September 11. The day two planes hijacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists flew into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, bringing them down in flames, killing nearly 3,000 people 13 years ago. I still remember the shock and horror of seeing it happen on television. After the…
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Love poems by Brian Patten
I am reading Brian Patten again – after years. I first read his poems in a Penguin paperback called The Mersey Sound. It was an anthology of poems by three Liverpool poets – Patten, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough. It was one of my favourite books and I have written…
Readiscovery 