Been there ... Photograph: Deshakalyan Chowdhury/AFP/Getty Images

After death, birth: the call for poster poems on the subject of our final end elicited a wide and fascinating range of responses, but now it's time to look at life's one other certainty. For humans, to be is to have been born. And birth shares a very important feature with death; few if any of us remember being born. So how do you write a poem about an unremembered event?

Seasonal inspiration... take a leaf out of a poet's book

As I think I might have mentioned previously, May 1 is the official start of summer here in Ireland. And so, three months later August 1, Lughnasadh, is the first day of autumn.

Hot on Higgins... Harold Pinter, who adapted Langrishe, Go Down for the BBC. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

The James Frey controversy once again opened up the age-old debate on where the borderline between "truth" and "fiction" in a writer's use of their own life as material should lie. It's a question that is forced to the front of my mind whenever I read anything by my favourite Irish novelist since Beckett, the wonderful but sadly neglected Aidan Higgins.

Grave matters... but there is always life in the subject of death. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian

Over the past year or so, the question of death has occupied me much. Not, you understand, that I'm getting morbid in my old age. It's just that the fact of death has touched me more than once in this period and so I have been forced to face it. And being the kind of person who thinks a lot about poetry, I have inevitably become more interested in how poets handle this thing, the one certainty for all of us after birth.

The hat may help ... early 20th century impression of Omar Khayyam. Image: Corbis

During the great recent Clerihew bonanza, it was suggested by a number of commenters that something a little more challenging would be welcome. My first thought was to ask for 100-canto long epics in terza rima, but as I could only find a single example to point to, I decided against that option.

And so, where to next? Well, there's nothing like falling back on old favourites in times like these, and one of my oldest is Edward FitzGerald's translation, if that's the word, of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. This was one of the first "grown-up" poems I ever read with pleasure, and it has stayed with me for over 40 years now. I'm always ready to jump at any opportunity to share it.

Portrait of Calliope (detail), muse of poetry, found at Pompeii guest house. Photograph: Pasquale Sorrentino

In his 1918 review of the Imagist movement, A Retrospect, Ezra Pound discusses, amongst other things, the difference between painting a landscape and writing a poem about it. He argues that the difference is that the painter describes the landscape while the poet presents it.

It's a nice distinction, and one that you (or I) might care to argue with. However, whether or not you accept Pound's position, it does raise an interesting question about the differences between the two arts. It also raises a number of considerations regarding the whole area of those poets who write about art and artists, a group that includes Pound himself, regardless of his proscriptions.

Go to work on a city ... Artist Ben Johnson and his team work on Liverpool Cityscape 2008. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

When I wrote about the poetry of places recently, it later occurred to me that I had focused almost exclusively on rural landscapes and locations. In fact, William Carlos Williams's Paterson was the only urban "place" poem I mentioned. Now I like the countryside, but I'm a city boy born and bred, so in retrospect this rural bias in my selections seemed odd to me. This week, I intend to balance the books by celebrating the poetry of the city and inviting you all to do likewise.

This be the (light) verse ... Clerihewist GK Chesterton. Photograph: Getty

Many of you who pass by this humble shop window in search of quaint diversions will already be familiar with the story of Edmund Clerihew Bentley, the dull chemistry lesson, and the birth of the light verse form that bears his name.

No slouch at musing on music but plenty of others got there before him ... Jack Kerouac. Photograph: Corbis

There is, I suppose it goes almost without saying, a long and complex relationship between the twin arts of poetry and music. At its simplest, this relationship is expressed in the widespread belief that during some long-lost golden age, all poetry was intended to be sung to music and all poets were troubadours or minstrels. Whatever the truth of this view, there are certainly strong affinities between the ways musicians and poets organise sound patterns to make their art.

The view from Grasmere, in Wordsworth's beloved Lake District. Photograph: Don McPhee

The Poetry of Place: what a great name for an essay, a conference, or even, dare I say it, a blog. But what does this fine-sounding phrase actually mean? What, if anything, is the difference between the poetry of place and poetry about landscapes or scenery? To my very un-academic way of thinking, it has something to do with a kind of interdependency between a place (in the loosest possible sense) and a poem, poet, or group of poets. And I think there are two main ways it could be said to work.

Looking back ... a scene from Theatre de Complicité's play Mnemonic with Simon McBurney and Katrin Cartlidge. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The muses, so the Greeks believed, are the daughters of memory, which may, I suppose, be a way of saying that the arts depend on, are born from, our ability to remember and our need to recognise patterns and meaning in the memories we have stored away in our minds. And poetry is no exception; a great deal of poetry mines memory for its matter. It may be that a poem grows out of the individual memory of the poet, or the poet might give expression to a race or group memory in telling "the tale of the tribe". One way or the other, memory is at the root of things.

A bit of a puzzle ... Photograph: Rex

After the serious business of war last week, this time I thought we might try something a little lighter. Back when I was teaching English as a Foreign Language, I regularly got my students to write acrostic poems on their own names as a kind of icebreaker. Even students with elementary English could, with a little help, come up with enough adjectives to describe themselves and create a basic but functional verse:

Brilliant
Intelligent
Lively
Loveable
Yellow

An art less martial ... Members of the "Last Post to the Pals" march across the Somme battlefields, France, June 2006. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

"Arms, and the man I sing" wrote Virgil, or something very like it. Whatever the merits of Dryden's translation, the fact remains that arms, soldiers and war were key motifs in the Aeneid, as they have been in a great deal of poetry since, as they say, time began.

On an epic scale? ... Departure does not have to be as mundane as a routine takeoff. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA

A blog on poetry and travel could embark in any number of directions. Is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner the most ill-omened voyage ever set to verse? Is the Divine Comedy the most ambitious, or does that label belong to the Odyssey? Is Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken the most frequently misappropriated? Was the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer's the saddest? Was Charles Tomlinson right when he rejected the idea of travel altogether?

The many faces of the moon. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty

June, spoon, swoon, soon: is it any wonder that earth's largest satellite has been such a popular subject for English rhymesters from Tin Pan Alley to the Bard of Avon? And it's not just the rhymes, the moon comes laden with a rich cargo of connotations from folklore, mythology and religion that add hugely to the poetic attraction.

In the Germanic languages, the moon is universally male; the man in the moon is a lord of chaos who may be Cain. However, most lunar imagery in English verse seems to have been imported from the Mediterranean and its long tradition of moon goddesses. Hecate the witch; Astarte the cow-goddess with the crescent horns; Diana the chaste huntress; Selene the queen-mother; the Virgin assumed into heaven; the eclipse that accompanied the Crucifixion: all of these and more have fed into our poets' use of the moon in their works.

Divine inspiration ... WC Edwards' engraving of Ben Jonson, from an original picture. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Writing is a solitary art. Maybe this simple fact is enough to explain the degree to which writers tend to seek out the company and support of other practitioners. We flock to festivals, hang around readings, form movements, run workshops, and dedicate books, stories and poems to each other. In fact, most of the books of poetry you open contain at least one poem addressed to a fellow poet. It's a way of saying "I belong". It may also be a marketing tool; poets can be vain creatures and are likely to actually go out and buy a book that is, or contains a poem that is, dedicated to them. Then there's always the hope that a dedicatee might review your next collection.

Looking on the sunny side ... But summer has not been an unequivocally happy time for poets. Photograph: David Mansell

Here in Ireland, May 1st is the official start of summer. Like most of the inhabitants, I tend to be sceptical about this piece of state optimism; but this year the weather has confounded us all. The sun has shone, temperatures are in the high teens or low 20s, and central heating systems have been turned off. It seems like summer is indeed coming in. Since we started this series of calls for poems by celebrating spring, it seems reasonable to mark the change of season by inviting your summer odes this week.

Tiger, tiger ... Animal poems go far beyond the Blake favourite. Photograph: Toby Maudsley/Getty

Regular readers of these poster poem blogs may well have noticed that I have a certain fondness for the poetry of Marianne Moore. In fact, I like her work so much that when I first had the idea of a call for poems on the subject of animals, I considered compiling a list of examples using only the 37 poems in her Complete Poems that have animals, real or otherwise, in their titles. But then I reconsidered; perhaps it might be more interesting to try to ignore Moore completely for once.

The DNA sequence of a transgenic mouse. Photograph: Getty

As a teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was an avid buyer of paperback poetry anthologies. One of my favourites at the time was a little book called "Frontier of going: an anthology of space poetry" which was edited by John Fairfax. This book was interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, it introduced me to the work of a number of poets I still enjoy today: Norman Nicholson, Edwin Morgan and Nathaniel Tarn, amongst others. It also set me wondering about how other poets might have addressed science in their work.

Asking for it ... Boris Johnson goes leafletting for himself. Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP

It was said that a satire written by an Old Irish bard could result in serious humiliation for the target. Indeed, it might literally raise boils on their face. This was even more serious if the intended target was a king, as any blemish on an Old Irish king's body was liable to result in dethronement or even death.

Now, you might think that these potential consequences would have made people very wary around poets, but enough fragments of their satirical efforts exist to convince us that the Old Irish were no less prone to satire-worthy folly than any other group of humans in history.

News of a collection of essays by Michael Heller on the American poet George Oppen, published this month to mark the centenary of his birth, has sent me back to this key figure in 1930s American modernism.

Not such a rosy outlook ... the bust of Goethe in Weimar Castle. Photograph: Jens Meyer/AP

I was reading Andrew Marvell's The Garden the other day and it got me wondering; what is this thing with poets and gardens? Is it just simply that poets see themselves as creating order out of the chaos of language as gardeners make order out of the chaos of nature, or is there more to it than that?

The view from Westminster Bridge: that's got to be worth some words, right? Photograph: Frank Baron

This week we're talking sonnets. For some, mastery of the sonnet is the ultimate measure of a poet's technical ability; for others it's just a 14-line poem that may or may not rhyme. It hasn't always been so, on either count. For the Provençal troubadours, a "sonet" was simply a little song, any little song at all really.

It wasn't until various Italian poets started to formalise it towards the end of the 13th century that the standard sonnet structure that we all know and love began to emerge. And even then variation was permitted. For instance, Dante included two 13-line "sonnets" in his Vita Nuova, and poets like Simone Dall' Antella, Niccolò Degli Albizzi, Guido Orlandi, and Cecco Angiolieri all wrote sixteen-line versions which Dante Gabriel Rossetti called "prolonged sonnets" when he translated them for his Dante and his Circle. However, despite all these variants, the Italian sonnet found its final form in the works of Francesco Petrarca.

This week, the call is for poems that tell stories, one way or another. For perhaps as long as we have been making poems, we have used them for this purpose. We can certainly trace the narrative impulse in poetry back at least as far as The Epic of Gilgamesh. Certainly, the texts that are usually considered to form the genesis of European poetry are the two great epic tales attributed to Homer.

Japanese influence ... the haiku is one of the best-known syllabic forms. Photograph: Getty

So, spring was easy; obviously I need to set a harder challenge. This week I'm going to wade through some literary history and a bit of theory, but bear with me, I hope it will be worth it in the end.

Inspiration can bloom in spring... Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

Anyone who spends a bit of time on the Books blog must have noticed the huge number of original poems, rhymes, pieces of doggerel and all manner of other verse that has been posted in recent months. Now, for me, this is something to be encouraged - celebrated, even - so I'd like to propose a dedicated space in which original poetry and verse can be shared and discussed.

About a year ago I was invited to contribute work to the sixth series of Cid Corman's poetry journal Origin. This was the second time I had been invited to contribute to the series. The first was over twenty years ago, but that series fell through because of lack of funding. What made this second invitation particularly interesting was the fact that Cid had died three years earlier, in Kyoto, where he spent 30 of the last 42 years of a long life dedicated to the art and fact of poetry.

Start here... A jewel-encrusted edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at the British Library. Photograph: Frank Baron

Chris Torrance ... Systematically written out of the official view of contemporary British poetry

On a recent visit to our local library, I borrowed a copy of Iain Sinclair's novel Landor's Tower. I used to be a fan of Sinclair's poetry back in the 1970s, especially the two volumes Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge, but I confess I've never read any of the prose works that made his name.

Poetry can quite easily be seen as the poor relation of the arts. Collections of poetry sell in remarkably small numbers and almost nobody earns a living from writing the stuff. And yet, if the internet is to be believed, hundreds of thousands of people seem to be writing poetry, and a lot of them are also discussing this most noble of arts in blogs and other online forums. One of the things most often discussed is the fundamental question, "what is poetry anyway?"

I'm doing a reading this weekend at the 11th SoundEye festival in Cork. Of the 11 festivals so far, this is the 10th I'll have read at, so it seems that I enjoy the experience, despite the fact that I have some reservations about the idea of the poetry reading. For the last week or two, as a result, I've been wondering about what readings are good for. Here's what I've come up with.

In a recent blog post about Alan Johnson's list of books for boys who don't read, Nicholas Lezard asked: "What's so good about reading, anyway?" It's a question worth addressing, with ramifications that stretch way beyond the merits of the education secretary's initiative to encourage teenage boys to read, or the specific titles that made his list.

The Irish poet, translator and publisher George Reavey was born a hundred years ago, on May 1st, 1907. Reavey was quite a figure: born in Belarus of a Northern Irish father and a Polish mother, he became a refugee from the Russian Revolution at the age of 11. Widely published as both a poet and a translator of Russian writers including Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Reavey was a key link between the emerging Irish modernists of the 1930s and their European peers and elders. This role was enhanced by his close contacts with many of the leading French Surrealists and Russian and Irish literary émigrés in 1930s Paris.