Bilston - You Took the Last Bus Home: the Poems of Brian Bilston

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This is quite deliberate on my part. I do like a rhyme. But not all the time. Secondly, to demonstrate my poetic versatility, some of them do not rhyme . Those poems were harder to write as I had to select words from a much larger pool. It has been estimated that there are over one million words in the English language, and so hand-picking each word to go into a poem has proven to be something of a Herculean labour.

Thirdly, there is variation in length and width . Most of these poems have been shared in earlier, more primitive versions on social media, particularly Twitter. There are some which were written to be small enough to fit in a tweet. Other, more expansive efforts were photographed and posted up as pictures, grainy and indistinct like their author. Fourthly, many do not follow standard poetic forms and structures . This stems from a deeply held conviction that expression is more powerful when rules are abandoned and that poetry needs to free itself from the shackles of the literary convention.

That and the fact that I dont know what rules I am breaking. There are pieces in here which I am not even sure are poems in any academic sense, and you will discover words written inside Venn diagrams, organisational chart structures, Excel spreadsheets and the like. I wrote them simply because they were different to preconceived notions of what forms poetry should be found in, and they were fun to write. Fifthly, some of them may contain jokes . But not necessarily ones which are funny. I suppose that means I shall be disapprovingly exiled to the bleak, literary island commonly known as Light Verse with the expectation that I spend the rest of my writing career complaining about how I just want to be taken seriously .

Well, I dont. I want to be taken unseriously, at all times, even when perhaps especially when I am writing about serious things. Finally, many of these poems are about everyday places and situations : waiting for an online shopping delivery, going on a work awayday, staring at a mobile phone, taking the last bus home. They would often be partly composed while I was in the middle of these situations, either quickly thumbed into my phone or clumsily assembled in my head. I suppose these are not traditionally regarded as being the stuff of poetry. Brian Bilston,
March 2016