• Skip to main content
  • Skip to header right navigation
  • Skip to site footer
The Friday Poem

The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

  • The Frip
  • About
    • Masthead
    • Contributors
  • FAQ
  • Archive
    • Search the archive
    • Friday Poems
    • Reviews
    • Features
  • Subscribe
  • Submit a poem

What does Emma Simon say?

I got into poetry at school. I remember one hot sweaty day my English teacher saying that kind of weather always made her think of murder. Then she handed out Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. I loved it! A less happy school memory of poetry is reciting Charles Causley’s ‘Timothy Winters’ at a primary school harvest supper in our village hall. I was reading it with my friend and she got the giggles half way through, and then I did. The headmaster sort of bundled us off the stage. Can’t say I am entirely confident reading in public to this day! 

I relish poems with a bit of a surreal twist, anyone from Thomas Lux, Charles Simic and James Tate to Caroline Bird, Luke Kennard and Mark Waldron. I love the idea that poems can create brilliantly weird worlds that seem entirely relatable – more real than your normal life. But I also love really simple quiet poems that just pick out a few everyday details and change how you look at everything.

I hope reviewing will make me more disciplined and critical reader and inspire me to write lots more poems. Failing that at least I get a few free books! I don’t have any overarching view on contemporary poetry or any manifesto of what poetry should be about. And to be honest I don’t feel in any way qualified to pronounce on such things. I see reviewing as being a conversation between readers. Perhaps over an imaginary glass of wine and a few crisps. 

Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on Email

Read this next

What does Richie McCaffery say?

What does Richie McCaffery say?

What does Richie McCaffery say about poetry and reviewing?

Site Footer

MENU

  • About us
  • FAQ
  • Submit a poem
  • Contact
  • Privacy
  • Mentions Légales
  • THE FRIP

    The Frip is The Friday Poem’s reviews and features magazine. We run book reviews, profiles, interviews, essays, lyric essays and other features of interest to poets and readers of poetry. Read the Frip here.

    NEWSLETTER

    Why not sign up for our weekly newsletter and never miss a Friday Poem again? Pop your email address in the box and click the button.

    Copyright © 2023 · The Friday Poem · All Rights Reserved · follow the Friday Poem on Twitter · follow the Friday Poem on Facebook · ISSN  2968-7675 follow the Friday Poem follow the Friday Poem on