Poetry is all around us. It is in the music we love, the rhymes we remember from childhood, in the theatre that moves us and makes us laugh, in the quotes we quote and the jingles we hate, (but nevertheless hum a long to).
For something so universal, we seldom give it a second thought. Even in our most prestigious and popular cultural publications, if not ignored completely, it is ascribed merely a corner. A poet’s corner.
That’s why we now have a Poet’s Stage. To occasionally discuss, publish and feature poets and their work.
We will look at the professional and the amateur, the historic and the new, the famous and the infamous, the sublime and the ridiculous. Poems in word, poems in image. Here Shelley, Lear, Plath and Poe, Milligan, Mathers and Milton may be given equal weight.
Poetry can delight and infuriate, it can rouse men to battle and women to tears, and vice versa. It can illustrate, and pick, anger and annoy, and be obscure, confused, demented or stupid or obscene. Sometimes it can inspire, change, or simply be magic. It can do many things. What it always does is give you pause, a moment to think, a moment that takes you somewhere else, to someone else.
So take a moment.
From the Ashes features contributions from some of Australia’s most remarkable poets. Many are well known around the country, and indeed, the world. Others, almost completely unknown, except in their own backya... Read More...
Call for submissions.
The 2019-2020 bushfire season has seen unprecedented destruction, as well as an unprecedented national and worldwide response. To contribute to that effort, Maximum Felix Media is accepti... Read More...
For this year's Halloween poem I have chosen C.S. Hughes' A Prisoner of This Tower, for the eerie connection between the verse and those who perished in the Tower of London who have been on my mind of late.
... Read More...
I was walking on a local beach known for its dinosaur fossils, playing with pebbles and sea weed, thinking about the elapse of time in waves, and how the same amount of water has always existed, and... Read More...
A Diary of Anne Boleyn
My ladies weep in the vernacular tongue
kneeling in the French style
I caught the wren as another’s head fell
and later perched for witness
at the place near the abbey a hear... Read More...
Foxes have long been portrayed in literature as mischievous and sly, practical jokers or charlatans; from Aesop's The Fox and The Rook to Jemima Puddleduck's elegant gentleman. Reynard the Fox is a trickst... Read More...
For Leap Day we present the enchanting tale, The Untold Tale Of Tom and Zellandine, by our very own C.S. Hughes. The Untold Tale Of Tom and Zellandine is inspired by the 14th century Arthurian romance Percefore... Read More...
Tolkien scholar Wayne Hammond has just discovered two poems written by J.R.R. Tolkien in a 1936 school annual. One of the poems, The Shadow Man, is a much earlier version of The Shadow Bride, which was publishe... Read More...
In 1952, while J.R.R Tolkien was staying with George Sayer in Worcestershire, Sayer showed him a tape recorder. This was the first time Tolkien had seen tape recorder close-up, and, according to Humphrey Carpen... Read More...
Bilbo's Last Song was sung by Bilbo Baggins at the Grey Havens as Bilbo, Frodo and the Keepers of the Rings departed Middle-earth on September 21, 3021, marking the end of the Third Age. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote th... Read More...
For Halloween we present for your terror, delectation and amusement, Lord Bonyfoote's Dance, a poem in the classic Gothic tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and the young Conrad Aiken, a chiller by our very own C S H... Read More...
Perhaps the most familiar line from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind In The Willows is also the most misquoted, the misquote is quite jolly, and does reflect the joi de vivre of the story admirably, "There is nothing... Read More...
Godzilla has always been a tabula rasa, more than a monster, a symbol of nature, and nature's fury, of man's folly, the limits of science and knowledge, of the monster we inadvertently create returning to humbl... Read More...
By Sun, By Sea is a short poem by C S Hughes about memory, sadness, surf and old shoes. It is a wistful, whimsical piece that expresses a little of what the Japanese call mono no aware (物の哀れ), a sense of the re... Read More...
We all know most writers, instead of making a living, get paid in dreams, hopes and intimations of immortality, but mostly in beans, poets even more so.
For International Poetry Day, March 21, 2015, companie... Read More...