Surroundings: Education for Leisure
'It’s good to see the authorities finally getting to the root of the problem of street violence. For years it’s been obvious that studious poetry-reading youths have been terrorising our streets, and how it’s taken so long for the authorities to make the connection between poetry readers and knife crime is beyond [...]
Posts tagged with ‘poetry’
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6 September 2008 – 11:01 pm
‘Black Stone’ by Grace Mera Molisa
1 September 2008 – 12:53 pm
One for the Read The World challenge. Wikipedia only mentions one writer from Vanuatu: Grace Mera Molisa. There was a copy of Black Stone, her first book of poems, for sale on AbeBooks, so I thought I’d give it a punt.
This is political poetry: Black Stone was published in 1983, just three years after Vanuatu gained [...]
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18 July 2008 – 11:00 pm
Silver Lake on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Autochromes are a kind of early colour photography. This one is particularly fabulous, but check out the whole set.
(del.icio.us tags: autochromes photos )
Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner
OK, fair's fair, this is quite funny.
(del.icio.us tags: Kansas politics )
Marc Steinmetz [...]
‘Breaking the Rules’ at the British Library
28 March 2008 – 4:50 pm
I realised that Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900 - 1937 was about to close, so I popped in today for a quick gander. As ever at the BL, the range of material was impressive: they really do own a lot of stuff. Eliot, Bretton, Man Ray, Lorca, Mayakovsky, [...]
More modernism and art
27 March 2008 – 8:52 pm
One obvious point to make in passing: even if there is some kind of profound connection between someone’s political leanings and the form they choose when they write a poem*, that connection is not stable over time.
It meant something different to be writing sonnets in 1520 than to be writing them in 1820 or 1920. [...]
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
28 November 2007 – 3:34 pm
Today is William Blake’s 250th birthday. Happy birthday, William.
The Chimney-Sweeper
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying ‘weep, weep’ in notes of woe!
‘Where are thy father and mother? Say!’
‘They are both gone up to the church to pray.
‘Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter’s snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And [...]
‘Erasmus Darwin’ by Desmond King-Hele
25 October 2007 – 4:16 pm
This is a biography of Charles Darwin’s grandfather. He was a doctor by trade, and one of the most highly rated in the country, but was one of those classic Enlightenment figures whose interests included botany, meteorology, physics, chemistry, engineering, philosophy and just about anything else that came his way. And for a few years [...]
Welcome to a Golden Age
16 June 2007 – 4:01 pm
Apparently someone has declared that poetry is dead again. Or still dead.
As a critical stance this lacks originality, but never mind. I’m just surprised anyone thinks they can tell. Looking back at the canon, the total difference between a Golden Age Of Poetry and a leaden one is two or three great poets who happen [...]
Anglo-Saxon names
20 May 2007 – 10:48 pm
Teju has a couple of great posts about names and what they mean (1, 2), specifically relating to Yoruba. Which set me thinking about Anglo-Saxon naming.
I have no idea exactly what relationship the Saxons had with their names, and I don’t know what academic work has been done on it—I’m just going on the impression [...]
Poetry and ‘truth’
10 May 2007 – 10:53 pm
It’s Poetry Thursday, and I don’t feel like writing a poem after napowrimo. Instead, some thoughts about poetry and ‘truth’. It always used to annoy the hell out of me when I heard people suggest that poetry—or more generally literature, or art—was somehow a search for truth, or that the success of a piece of [...]
Napowrimo: consider yourself warned
31 March 2007 – 3:14 pm
If you started reading this blog in the past 11 months, you may not know about Napowrimo. Napowrimo is modelled on Nanowrimo—National novel-writing month—a scheme which encourages people to try to write a novel (or at least 50,000 words) in the month of November. Napowrimo is national poetry-writing month, and the target is a poem [...]
More crakery from the canon
9 March 2007 – 2:57 pm
I didn’t want my post on rails and crakes to suffer from poetry bloat, so I didn’t quote it before, but John Clare isn’t the only Dead Famous English Poet who mentioned corncrakes in a poem.
This is the mowing scene from Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax by Andrew Marvell. I went through modernising [...]
Fave books of 2006
28 December 2006 – 6:09 pm
It’s end-of-year list time. These weren’t all first published this year, and I daresay I’ve forgotten some, but they are at least all books I’d recommend. In no particular order:
Rembrandt’s Eyes by Simon Schama.
I blogged about this before. Simon is a serious historian (rather than, say, a journalist who writes occasional books) who writes brilliantly [...]
The market value of a poem
17 September 2006 – 11:00 pm
If poems were not easily reproduced — if, as with paintings, owning a copy of a poem was obviously a poor alternative to owning the original — how much would an original Armitage sell for? A Larkin? An Eliot? A Marvell?
Shelley the lost Victorian
6 September 2006 – 1:00 pm
Well, I’ve finished Richard Holmes’s Shelley:The Pursuit. I didn’t find it as gripping as his superb biography of Coleridge, but it became more enjoyable as it went along. Mainly, I think, because Shelley became much more likeable as he matured personally, politically and poetically. Not that he became less radical, or completely lost the restlessness [...]
The titling of poetry journals
28 August 2006 – 9:18 pm
Why is it that almost every poetry journal in existence is titled according to one of two models?
The [placename] [publication]
or
[catchy, non-poetry-related noun]
Surely the language allows other possibilities?
Shelley update
22 August 2006 – 12:28 pm
I’m still reading the Shelley biography. Remarkably, his personal life seems to have stabilised somewhat, I suspect mainly because his grandfather died and so, while the exact terms of the legacy are still with the lawyers, he’s not actually having to hide from the bailiffs any more.
The chances of his life running smooth are reduced [...]
Shellier than thou
18 August 2006 – 10:51 am
I didn’t mention in the last post that, as well as the two elopements, Shelley has been shot at by a Welsh ghost, is under observation by the government because of his seditious publications, and is going extravagantly into debt in expectation of an inheritance from a family which has disowned him.
Was there ever a [...]
Shelley, Shellier, Shelliest.
17 August 2006 – 8:49 pm
I’m reading a biography of Percy Bysshe. An interesting and talented man, but perhaps just a wee bit erratic; he’s just eloped for the second time, abandoning his first wife and their new child in order to run off with a 16-year-old. And her sister. And he’s still only 21.
Stereotyping, cultural appropriation and such
13 August 2006 – 1:29 am
Alan Sullivan has posted a poem called Long Bay Jump, both to his blog and to Erato, which is in a West Indian voice. It starts:
Sun drop down with a flash of green.
Moon lift up, and the palm tree lean.
Jack fish bake in banana wrap.
Pi-dog snatch all the table scrap.
Ganja and rum, ganja and rum–
Long [...]