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Posts Tagged ‘poetry’

Kipling scholars discover new poem: ‘Iffy’

Stunned literature scholars have discovered a poem they believe influenced Rudyard Kipling’s famously inspirational verse ‘If’. Entitled ‘Iffy’, the poem, by Kipling’s little-known cousin Stamford Baines, contains the lines ‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster / and treat those two impostors just the same / you’ve probably been rogered senseless once too often at public school / and fallen for all that stiff upper lip crap.’

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Posted: Jun 16th, 2011
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‘Master of enjambment’ wins rail poetry prize

trainA man who reads out the buffet menu on First Great Western’s Paddington to Penzance route has won this year’s prestigious Poetry in Motion Prize. Buffet manager Jim Swindon says he was astonished when he was told he had won the competition: ‘I knew that there was this annual prize for poetry to do with rail travel, but I’d no idea that I’d been nominated.’

Margaret Derby, who regularly travels on Mr Swindon’s train, said: ‘When we heard about the competition, a few of us regulars got together and decided we should nominate Jim on account of the way he reads the buffet menu. It’s a delight to hear and something you never tire of. Even the intercom can’t destroy his mellifluous voice. Now I take the train just for his poetry.’

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Posted: Apr 11th, 2009
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