There’s the fog of war and there’s the poetry of fog. A recent heavy mist in my patch of the mid-Hudson valley brought fog and poetry to mind. Not the yellow fog of an old-time London peasouper particular but rather the mysterious wreathing whiteness of an English mist in a damp December countryside – the unsullied sister of smog. And…
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,…
The day after the Brexit referendum our dear leader – then candidate for the presidency – was on his way to Scotland to re-open a golf course. As soon as he landed he tweeted: The response was fast and furious – an impressive torrent of inventive invective and obscenity that kept Twitter amused for days as the true significance of…
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…
A few November snowflakes and the hits on my all-time most-read post start climbing the “Most Read This Week” list. Chance of Snow is from 2011. You think it would have melted entirely from view by now. But no – 12 hits in the last two hours for a grand total of 12,052 to date. Must be those wishful thinking,…
I thought of going back to France, but realised the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong smell of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn’t face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat…
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…
In a time of political darkness – when the ugly power of racism rears up – it is good to remember that we all stand on the shoulders of giants in the long struggle for human dignity and justice. Sarah Parker Remond lived in the 19th century. We need to know her story. She challenged the forces of evil on…
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…
“I hate poetry and all its fucking ambitious son-of-a-bitches who call me a showman because I act myself”. Gregory Corso letter to Lawrence Ferlingetti, September 6th 1957. My poor life is so fucked up, what’s the meaning of it all? I don’t yet know, when I do find out i fear it will be too late.” Gregory Corso, letter to Allen…
There’s a cat sanctuary in the grounds of the Pyramid in Rome. This rather incongruous Egyptian style pyramid was built in 30 BC as a tomb. It was later incorporated into the section of the Aurelian Walls that now border a cemetery designated by one guidebook as being for “non-Catholic cults’. The graveyard is also known as the Protestant.cemetery or the English cemetery although…
My uncle – Geoffrey Nicolls – served with the 16th West Yorkshire Regiment in WW1 and in the same week that he was attached to his battalion this line appears in the official War Diary: July the 14th 1916 – less that a fortnight after the first day of the Somme offensive that had devastated the battalion and put the…
It’s been wet this August and last week was topped off by a cracker of a thunderstorm storm that dropped torrential rain and knocked out the power for a few hours. The routine stroll around the lake at Innisfree Garden was more of a squelch. Many paths were waterlogged and you could hear the roar of the waterfall from across…
I like the title of this book about how to do school right: Timeless Learning. The launch date is August 7th but from what is available – and from the published work of the authors on which it’s based – you just know it’s going to be good. Very good. The focus is on modern learning, innovative practices, change leadership…
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…