We have written many poems from sonnets to satirical works, free verse to songs. We are conscious of having to “make it new” as Ezra  Pound said.  (The play THE VORTEX OF THE WILL is partly in verse and examines the tragic but ultimately glorious destiny of Pound - see VORTEX - PRINCIPLES OF VERSE for an extract.)  We agree with Pound that the three main principles of poetry are

“MELOPOIEA.....  - Sound!

PHANOPOIEA... - Light!

LOGOPOIEA...... - Meaning!”

And the first of these - the most important - is the SOUND of a poem, that which has kept poetry alive for thousands of years, that which hypnotises the listener or reader to open up his subconscious to the effects of the poem... If it doesn’t sound good, as DH Lawrence  said, your inner ear stops listening... the chief defect of most of what passes for poetry.

We are conscious of TRADITION - of thousands of years of poetry from the time of Homer down through the moderns to our own rather shrunken scene.  As an example of the tradition we have rendered an old Norse edda, from more than a thousand years ago, ODIN AND BILLING’S DAUGHTER, into modern verse.  The key poetic device in both old Norse and old Saxon, is ALLITERATION.  We learned this studying Anglo-Saxon, and to see it in action please check out our rendition of ODIN’s poem - which we have performed in New York, Paris, London and over Europe in various festivals, and which we call A VIKING SAFETY-MANUAL.  We admire the Vikings, a very democratic bunch of pirates coming from a democratic Norse culture that, for example, maintained equal rights for women, and of course they were very safety conscious...  We have rendered the poem closely, it seems to us as new as ever - and after citing a list of dangers, it tells how Odin, the Lord of the Nine Worlds, was almost destroyed by the most dangerous thing on the planet - a beautiful girl.