I started using my iPhone as a voice recorder. The quality isn’t that great, but it’s good enough to get things down as you think of them and there are times when you just can’t find a pen and paper.<\/p>\n

Doing stand-up poetry has shifted my brain into overdrive in some respects; it’s made me think about words a lot more. It’s also made me think about what poetry is and despite Google, I still don’t really know.<\/p>\n

I always had problems with rhymes. When I first came to London I bought strange\u00a0books. One of my first pay-packets got me Betjeman’s Summoned By Bells, which wasn’t his greatest stuff . Anything qualifying as that would have to include Invasion Exercises On A Chicken Farm. There’s a brilliant original recording on Spotify.<\/p>\n

I used to hang around Motor Books, a small shop still down an alley off Haymarket, full of odd titles like Sniping Towards the Rhine and \u00a0The Improvised Munitions Handbook, which they refused to sell me unless I could prove I was in the police or the Army, on Home Office orders, they claimed. I wasn’t, so I left empty-handed. And I still don’t know what poetry is.<\/p>\n

Maybe it’s a song without music. I think it is.<\/p>\n

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Songs Without Music<\/h3>\n

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Some people think that poetry<\/p>\n

Should rhyme<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s more<\/p>\n

To words than that.<\/p>\n

Sometimes rhyming<\/p>\n

Just produces doggerel<\/p>\n

Or worse; very often<\/p>\n

You could hardly call it verse.<\/p>\n

Poetry was something inaccessible<\/p>\n

At school when your least<\/p>\n

Favourite English teacher<\/p>\n

Used to play the fool<\/p>\n

And do his funny voice<\/p>\n

For recitation, which bored<\/p>\n

Almost an entire generation<\/p>\n

At my school.<\/p>\n

Poetry my dear,<\/p>\n

Poetry simply wasn\u2019t cool.<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t call this poetry;<\/p>\n

I call this music without songs<\/p>\n

Or songs without music<\/p>\n

And just hope it may amuse<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re in the right mood for it.<\/p>\n

You see what I mean about rhymes?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get on. It\u2019s getting late.<\/p>\n

Besides, we\u2019ve all got other things to do<\/p>\n

Like drinking wine and reading poetry to you.<\/p>\n

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