poetry and motion

Well, the once mighty group blog The Sharpener dwindled substantially in the latter part of last year, and there's been nothing but tumbleweed there for several months now.

It's a great shame, as getting loads of differently motivated, intelligent, articulate people (and me) to post made for some great reading and, crucially, provided a ready way outside of the mutual appreciation closed circle we all tend to fall into.

It's no good having your ideas go unchallenged. How are you ever to refine them, to abandon the bits that are wrong, to get them out to people who don't agree yet but would do if they heard what you've got to say? The Sharpener's been an excellent forum for sorting that out.

I suppose it's inevitable that unpaid group blogs will diminish. In small part, it's precisely that challenge, having your treasured feelings ridiculed and politics lambasted, that will put people off. But also, lives move on, most bloggers seem to fade after a while and without a contrived effort to recruit new contributors, it'll tend to dry up.

Nonetheless, I've just done my bit and posted the first new thing on The Sharpener in ages. Having heard outgoing Poet Laureate Andrew Motion get sucked up to on Any Questions the other week, as if he wasn't just an adman for anti-democracy, I had to vent it somewhere.

The piece is called Poetry and Motion.