Warning: includes expansionist tendancies

Well, the "empire" expands again.

(I use the " " because the idea that I have some kind of blogging empire is bizarre and rather laughable...)

There is now a dedicated blog for my poetry. If you read this blog (I don't think there are many, if any, of you...) and you're interested, pop along to http://duplo-philosophy.blogspot.com to have a read.

For the lucky, lucky readers who haven't been introduced to my poems, let me give a little background.

I rarely talk about this without being pushed. That's not to say that its something I am ashamed of - far from it - its just something I hold rather personally. Over the last few years, I've been writing. Stories, sketched, plays, poetry - whatever occurs, really. I started doing it as a way of expressing myself - and for a while as a strange kind of self-therapy to forget depression. It just became a habit and something that I enjoyed for the sake of doing it, after a while.

My poems and scripts have been used in weird and wonderful places and ways - from church services to magazine space-fillers to being performed as street theatre at a national festival, and I've written things that have then been read in school assemblies (well after I'd left school, I have to add), and even one that made it all the way to the wall of a child's bedroom (no, not Luke's...).

I have read some of the poems in public before, but it really didn't occur to me at first that others might like them. So, all I ask is that if you read them, and you have an opinion about it, please let me know. I've found that more often than not, that poems I don't like are well-received by other people and the poems I do like are usually ones that noone else likes...

The poems themselves aren't anyting particularly complicated or impressively intellectual, and I don't pretend to be another Seamus Heaney or T.S.Eliot... I've been more influenced by poets like John Betjeman, Roger McGough, Harold Pinter, John Hegley and Michael Rosen than anyone else, and I tend to keep to a simple style, without a huge amount of rhyme - I like finding phrasings and sentences that flow nicely and sound good to me. A curious phrase or an interesting fact is more use to me than a metephorical pretext...

Some are quite obviously influenced by my faith, and some are not. Some look closely at emotions, some expressing my thoughts on an event, and some of them are about nothing, really. Some are experiments, some follow distinct patterns, some mimic the styles of others.

If you do decide to have a look: Thank you. I hope you enjoy them, and I hope you'll let me know what you think.

http://duplo-philosophy.blogspot.com