Ruddington.org - Poets' Corner

Welcome to Poets' Corner, the section of Ruddington.org which is devoted to poems of all shapes and sizes. Here you will find comedy, tragedy, romance, depression, addiction, agoraphobia and obsession, expressed in a variety of poetic forms including haiku, limerick, sonnet ...and some which are yet to be named!

The aim of Poets' Corner is to provide a space where local poets can showcase their work. It is hoped that the audience will not only read and enjoy the poems, but also be inspired to write their own poems and submit them to the site. You will quickly gather that the site is not about 'great poetry', but about ordinary people getting pleasure from writing poems and sharing them with others.

Selected Poems are chosen by the creative panel from those poems submitted for inclusion in the site. The process is of necessity subjective and the panel is looking for overall appeal, rather than technical expertise. As the poems in this section are by a variety of authors, they do not follow a particular style or theme. The selection will change quarterly, or more frequently if sufficient poems are submitted.

Young Poets is reserved for poems written by authors under the age of 18. The initial contributions came from pupils of Rushcliffe School, but poems by any school age children would be welcome. It is hoped that we will shortly be in a position to initiate a competition for young poets, as cash prizes can have a remarkably energising effect on young poets. Again, the selection will change periodically provided that sufficient new contributions are forthcoming.

The featured poets are those who have submitted a sufficient body of work to warrant their own section on the site:

Pat Dring writes deeply personal poems which focus on her family and her nightmare years suffering from agoraphobia and addiction to valium. Later works are more upbeat and deal with her slow and painful recovery and subsequent life as a Ruddington's foremost poet and a local celebrity. Some of the poems featured appeared previously in Pat's Poems, a collection published in 1998, but the site includes updated versions of a number of these poems, together with a number of new poems.

Patrick Winstanley writes funny poems, both 'funny ha ha' and 'funny peculiar', which are nominally aimed at children but hold equal appeal for adults with a suitable temperamental disposition. He is absolute in his insistence that he does not write 'funny poems for kids', on the grounds that immature goats do not possess the necessary critical faculties to appreciate poetry. This has resulted in an impasse between the technical controllers of the site, who are intent on chasing search engine rankings, and the creative types who agree that curmudgeonly irascibility is probably the last outpost of The Empire.

Collected Poems has poems by a diversity of authors and covering a variety of styles and themes, many of which will have featured previously in either the selected poems or young poets section of the site. Some of the writers have submitted a large number of poems but declined to be a 'featured poet', whereas others have produced only one or two poems to date. Simon Auchterlonie has provided us with more poems than all the other contributors put together, but has chosen at this stage not to have his own section of the site. I very much hope that Michelle Hubbard will become a featured poet in due course, as she is a writer of great talent and has a growing following on the performance poetry circuit. Michelle describes herself as 'a Nottingham born and based black female performance poet, storyteller, African drummer (at times combining all three!) and active community member.'