: About Me

My passion is ...

writing.

I know too much about ...

Jane Austen, old books, indexing, house-hunting and the history, geography, architecture and landscape of England.

My parents always told me ...

to value family, friends, knowledge and art above all other considerations.

My childhood ambition ...

was to be a writer. I still haven't grown out of it.

My favorite memory ...

is bound to have been overwritten (and vastly improved) by my imagination but it has something to do with a sea breeze and bare feet in grass during childhood holidays in Cornwall.

Why I write ...

because I have to.

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

As I type this I am listening to 'Peter Grimes' and occasionally glancing out of the window at the gables of the Edwardian terraces opposite.

My first job ...

has been efficiently dumped from my memory.

My best moment ...

is yet to come.

My inspiration ...

comes from anything I am seeing, reading and experiencing. My mind needs constant feeding and just chews the whole lot up.

Arts & Humanities > Poets & Poetry Can 'bad' poetry have value?

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First, to the issue of 'bad' poetry. I do not subscribe to the postmodernist view that there can be no such thing as good or bad in the arts. A work of art is only as good as the vision and skill of the person who produced it. Nor do I think it is especially difficult to know when a poem is bad, good or mediocre. However, while objective judgments can and should be made about a poem's quality this is not the same as judging its value. Although a poem may not have much artistic merit some small part of it, maybe a line or description, a thought or feeling, may jump out from the rest of it a...

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