It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the…
I began this post in 2017. The original focus was Louis MacNeice’s’s poem “Brother Fire”. MacNeice was a fire-watcher during the London Blitz which meant that he spent nights on rooftops watching for, and reporting, fires caused by incendiary bombs. The poem expresses a human kinship with the destructive power of fire: O delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire, O enemy…
Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today is moving to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris but you can see it now in NYC. It’s at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University until February 10th 2019. Just go up – or down – on the 1,2 or 3 train to 125th Street and you’re there. It’s free, worth…
I mostly associate the artist Saul Steinberg with the work he did for The New Yorker and the last time I saw an exhibit of his it was the traveling retrospective that came to the Frances Lehman Loeb Gallery at Vassar College in 2007-8. It was a full-scale survey of his work and quite amazing. And the last time I…
What use is poetry? …. We have poetry So we do not die of history. – Meena Alexander I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. – John Ashbery An Invitation to Poetry Come on in. Jump! You can do it. It belongs to you too. Paddle, splash about, swim, dive,…
Tammy Duckworth is a Senator from Illinois and fourteen years ago she was a captain with the Illinois National Guard serving in Iraq. On November 12th 2004 she was piloting a Black Hawk helicopter when a rocket-propelled grenade tore through the cockpit. Duckworth’s right leg was gone in an instant, shredded in a flash of heat and a spray…
If you’ve ever been young and full of dreams …. If you ever headed to the big city with your imagination teeming with the prospect of joining the generations of those who came before you and left their mark … this is a poem for you. Think Paris, New York, London – any great and storied city that has been…
It seemed to them that they were to go on living like that, and writing like that, for ever and ever. Then suddenly, like a chasm in a smooth road, the war came. – Virginia Woolf from The Leaning Tower, A paper read to the Workers’ Educational Association, Brighton, May 1940. Writing and speaking in 1940 – as another war…
We’re happier when we chat to strangers, but our instinct is to ignore them https://t.co/ExmL3GSCWw via @researchdigest — Tina Seelig (@tseelig) July 19, 2018 A tweet from Tina Seelig led to this interesting piece of research: It’s become a truism that humans are “social animals”. And yet, you’ve probably noticed – people on public transport or in waiting rooms seem…
Not bird not badger not beaver not bee Many creatures must make, but only one must seek within itself what to make from Lament For the Makers Frank Bidart Choosing what to make, with what, where, with whom and why makes us human. What to make? Where? And With What? But then there are so many choices:
When I was ten or eleven my primary school class was taken on a trip to Blenheim Palace. Big excitement as it included a boat trip on the Thames. I don’t remember too much about the trip but I did have this Brownie Box camera and a whole twelve picture roll of film. The camera has a now cracked leather…
When I was four years old I found a sixpence on the quay at Poole Harbour. I’ve been picking up stuff that catches my eye ever since. Beach glass, shells, rounded stones and the sea-drift that the tide brings in. Rusted nails and washers, Gate hinges and horse shoes, Marbles and chestnuts. The lost abandoned, dropped, and discarded; the…
Valentine for Ernest Mann You can’t order a poem like you order a taco. Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two” and expect it to be handed back to you on a shiny plate. Still, I like your spirit. Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell a secret…
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. Before the advent of motorways in the UK (first section of the first – the M1 opened in 1959) it was true that almost any straight road you found in England was built by the Romans. The burst of road building during the industrial revolution meant generations of British schoolchildren introduced…
This post was updated on March 9th 2019 with the addition of a postscript: A film about Hamilton’s life and work via ht @LucyLondon7 This is one of those “nevertheless she persisted” stories. The Canadian artist Mary Riter Hamilton had studied in Europe before having to return to Canada to care for her ailing mother. At the outbreak of the…