A few years ago yours truly embarked on an exercise of broadening my literary horizons by dabbling with scribing poetry. These approximately eighty compositions penned with intended pomposity, mainly due to their delivered in an olde worlde style. Sonnets whose links can be found within my website writesaidfred.org under the home page menu title of Pretentious Prose

These pieces of deliberately ostentatious, cryptic and self-indulgent work were presented with full intention to make the prose’s meaning a challenge to the reader. An assortment of verses which make their viewer have to work a bit harder to interpret GJ Strachan’s message.

Although perhaps a flippant approach to penning poems and without doubt gushingly over pretentious, this wasn’t a project to be taken too seriously. And it has to be said I enjoyed the enterprise which, in my opinion, resulted in some half decent literary offerings.

It was also good to receive decent reviews for my scribbles. Among them the magazine Horse Manure Monthly whose review Archie Enemy deemed my poetic endeavours to be ‘Insightful….. The very antithesis of mainstream predictability churned out by many of Strachan’s literary contemporaries’.

Notwithstanding the reviewers similarly pretentious writing style, it certainly wasn’t the worse review I’ve ever received. That accolade probably achieved by Cheesecloth Weekly’s reviewer Herst Rental-Car assertion “His blogs are so full of detritus they’re more like bogs.”

A critique I maintain was prejudiced and unprofessionally churned out after Rental-Car took exception to my controversial sonnet ‘Cheesecloth is Shite‘. His vitriolic diatribe retribution for my piece in which I mischievously opined cheesecloth lacked the textile integrity to ever seriously be classed as in vogue.

Fiercely defensive when it comes to cheesecloth ‘bullying’, Herst R-C is renowned for his bombastic nature. A temperament which habitually ruffles the peacock feathers of fashionistas in haute couture’s hallowed halls.

His hostility born from their overt dismissal of his beloved textile, leading to his criticisms the fashion industry reeked of institutional snobbery, cronyism and a penchant for “Talking out of their ring pieces!”

The industry may not his biting polemics, however, like all people fortune enough to reside in a democracy, he’s welcome to openly air his opinionated bluster. Subsequently, if he feels the urge to do so, I accept his right to question my art.

That being said, I don’t subscribe to his negative and overly hostile approach to evaluating creative work. After all, as Austrian TV chef Horst Chestnut-Tree once proffered “We are nothing without the right to non-conformity, protest, freedom of speech and a decent soufflé recipe.”

I raised the topic of poetry writing earlier as I’m contemplating penning more prose in that literary genre. Agreed sonnets are an acquired taste – Their structure and content sometimes lending to more difficult interpretation of the prose. For many reading poems is an empty experience, one leaving the reader unfulfilled and bereft of which message the poet posits.

Going back around three years when I scribed the aforementioned poetry, not only did I publish them online within my website strachan.blog, but also within the pages of a self-published book. Within the autobiographical details on the back of this tome titled Prose in Repose, I wrote the following parody chapter in the third person:-