Signed Poetry Books - Cliff Blake

One of the great advantages of being a part of a 'community' of poets is that you inevitably get back more than you put in. I generally think of poetry as a solitary activity rather than a social one but the benefits of turning up to the Portsmouth Poetry Society meetings over the last few years have been considerable.
I recently dished out copies of The Perfect Murder there and was delighted to get back in return Rhapsody, Rhyme and Rhythm by the great octagenarian rhymer, Cliff Blake, and so I got him to sign it so that he could be a part of my pantheon of signed poetry books.
It is a fine selection that begins with Cliff's outline of his 'modus operandi', not quite a manifesto but an explanation of his way of working. Some of it sounds exactly right to me, like,
Sometimes it appears to magically come from nowhere.

Not all of it does, though. And that is because Cliff isn't the same sort of poet as me. He says,
I consider a poem without rhyme as prose

but he qualifies that very acceptably by continuing,
although it may be associated with poetry by having the other attributes.

Perhaps we will talk about that next time, sir. The first meeting of PPS that I ever went to was in 1982 and the subject was 'What is Poetry?'
I don't know if I want to go through all that again or not. But thanks for the book, and a very articulate summary of how you do what you do. Welcome to my collection.