FutureLearn took its reputation in its hands by letting me know about its ‘Making a Poem’ course run by Manchester Metropolitan university. It’s just three weeks and covers some basics, including sources of poetic ideas such as random text, images, and individual words, and the protocols governing feedback. For such a short course, it does its job quite well, introducing the elements of poetry and getting participants to engage in a bit of practice. Tutors are Helen Mort and Michael Symmons Roberts whose videos head each section. I’m not sure what they’d make of what I made though!
A Found poem
This reusable collapsible keychain straw will be
Cheap.
It reduced my tendency to eat unhealthy things
At lunch
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Picture prompt poem
Help!
Au secours!
No more.
Stop peering
Stop piering
Go home
Leave me alone
You scare me with your eyeballs
You deafen me with your noise
Can’t you see for yourself
It’s just
Sea?
Prompt: photo of a frightened looking end-of-pier viewer by Drew Graham on Unsplash.
Word prompt – choice of one each in a left hand and right hand column
Hammer Yesterday
Into the ground
Ya big croak-faced divvil
Ya nine inch fail.
Bang bang the sound
of your cartoon drivel
shot down in frames.
Give us a banger
Something with a jaggered edge
You too can be rock.
Or minstrel,
A balladeer of
Faraway troubles
Of – hang on
A minute, that’s Yesterday
Innit? No frogs, no toads
Just a heavy load
Bro.
Something about metre, I believe
The leak
There’s a plop and a plip, and a drip falls and lands
On my head and I’m sat indoors so what the hell?
Well, that’s flat roofs for you
Innit?
He looks at me and sucks his teeth with a hiss
Miss, he says, his hands on his hips
His lips pulling sideways, making a banana of his mouth and him
Trying not to look pleased.
It’s not cheap, he says,
That roof’s steep.
Do yer sleep under there?
I don’t as it goes, but god knows my PC does
And that ain’t cheap neither.
There’s some crashing and bashing then cash changes hands.
Not literally because duh tax, and it’s as well
Not to be lax with builders
Y’know?
I have to confess to being a little irreverent at times. It was fun and I got something out of it, but I may not have moved too far from my view that the the way poetry talks about itself is essentially bonkers!
Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill 
I enjoyed your poems, even though, as Art, I think they’re somewhat questionable. I can’t write poetry either, but admire those-like Yeats for example- who undoubtedly can, so don’t completely agree with your negative at. However, after reading so called poetry on many online writing groups, I can see your point!!!
I can’t get past the arcane language it uses to refer to itself. It’s like a club where everyone speaks your language but you can’t order anything or find the toilets because they’re written in Esperanto. Surely that kind of divisiveness isn’t going to encourage diversity in the poetry writing population and that’s a loss to us all.