Sunday Supplement

It's been quite a week here at the mythical Poetry24 Towers. We have had many extraordinary, and heart-warming responses to last Sunday's announcement that we finish next month unless new editors take it up. Thanks once again for all your kind comments. We are exploring a couple of promising offers and should have news soon of developments.

We also received a poem from Anthony Baverstock - "...it will probably be the worst poem (well... ‘pseudo-poem’) ever seen on the site!" - he promises. We have published it below for your delectation, along with his excuses explanation.

But first, a quick review of this week's poems: As Poetry24 reached a turning point of its own, John Saunders reminded us in his jaunty The Bend in the Road to 'watch out for the hedgehog, rabbit and toad.' Something to bear in mind, especially when Kay Weeks suggests Eating Invasives for Thanksgiving dinner.

Care, and the lack of it, has been a theme running through the week, too, from Maureen Weldon's beautifully spare Where from? on failures in the treatment of schizophrenics to David Mellor's No 53 which questions how sympathetic we actually are when political decisions affect our neighbours. Two poems about Savita - Amy Barry's All for Nothing and Niamh Hill's The Other Side highlighted both sides of an emotive debate with a pair of powerful and very human poems relating to an Indian woman's death in Northern Ireland after being refused an abortion.

Meanwhile, a young man planning to cross the Atlantic with the aid of toy balloons inspired UP-- UP and Away! from the mysterious Pippa Sherman. Let's hope we don't vanish off into the sunset on a raft of hot air - please keep your poems coming during this time of transition... reports of our death (below) may be a little premature.

All the best, Clare


in memoriam, Poetry 24(with apologies to E. J. Thribb, aged 17½)

So. Farewell
Then
Poetry 24.

‘Where News is the Muse’ –
That was your slogan.
And we were a-
Mused.
Though sometimes be-
Mused.
Like when you didn’t publish my excellent
Limerick
About a sheep.
And by some of the clever poems.

Now you are the news.
Ironic, that.
I hope they have chip shops in cyber-heaven.
Time to call it a wrap.

© Anthony Baverstock

Author's note: 
Regular readers of the satirical magazine Private Eye at all will immediately recognize this as a eulogy in the style of E. J. Thribb (17½), as did the anonymous commenter who was inspired to write her/ his own Thribb-style lines.

In case you’re not a Private Eye reader, E. J. Thribb’s eulogies by-and-large have the following pattern:
1) A formulaic opening: ‘So. Farewell Then XXXX’.
2) The deceased person’s catchphrase + a line like ‘That was your catchphrase’.
3) Some biographical trivia.
4) A closing remark on the person’s passing which contains a pun (sometimes drawing on a word in the catchphrase).

Thribb also has a penchant for capitalising the first letter of every line and writes in ‘free verse’ of no discernible merit.

E. J. Thribb’s ‘form’ is, of course, intentionally appalling, and it is from this that its humour in part extends.