Streets of London

We travel to London in this issue of your weekly dose of fresh poetry #132

Looking out
the London cab window
we see the city's streets glide by. Not
all twenty-five thousand,
but enough.

Did you know that to become a taxi driver in London, you need to not only know by heart the names of 25000 streets, but you also need to be able to recite the best route from A to B without hesitation? Quite a feat, right? Well, as a passenger, you fortunately don’t have to do that. You just have to sit back, look out of the window and watch the city roll by. If you’re lucky, you get a driver that can tell you about the city, about life there. Or one who stops for a homeless person and gives him some money.

Driving through a city means driving through many stories. Real stories, human stories. And that is something I really like.

How do you prefer to see a city when you are a tourist?

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Poetics of life

In the early days of social media, there were many wonderful campaigns. Companies and organisations seemed to be determined to do good deeds. Like Spanish airline, Spanair did when they surprised their passengers on one particular flight with unexpected luggage. Somehow, these days often seem lost. Then, I read this article recently, about ketchup makers who have been looking for a guy who survived on ketchup while being adrift at sea. They wanted to give him a new boat. Most lovely thing about this story: social media still have some remnants of that do-good power. Their search was picked up internationally. A good deed that also delivered highly valuable media exposure. We still have it. That makes me happy. Now, let’s eat something with ketchup.

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You can do a lot with form. For some, the poetic forms feel like straight jackets, limiting creativity. Others, like Bob Metivier, can take almost any poetic form and use it to create wonderful poems. Out of the many wonderful poems he writes, I chose this one to share, because it is about jazz and creativity. Enjoy reading Bending Beyond Tones:

Bending Beyond Tones

A lot of poetry comes from pain. The creation of the poems often serves as part of a healing process, so that in itself is already awesome. For me, the beauty I find in these poems is a better understanding of how others think and learn about their experiences. The poems of Leon Faesulis have that. And more. To make better digital works of art out of his poems, Leon uses AI to generate images that work in tandem with his poems. And sometimes, these images impact the poem as well. With his NFTs, Leon shows how you can create art with AI. I personally like Longing for new Horizons. Enjoy reading it (and collect an edition if you can).

Spring is coming to our parts of the world again, and I love it. The flowers, the blossoms, they all are so interesting to see and enjoy. Reena Kapoor writes about it in this poem, A gaggle of boys, in such a happy, spring-y way, you have to read it:

A gaggle of boys