Education, Food, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The Street of the Fruit Stalls

Amazing how hard it sometimes can be to find things on the intertubes. There was a poem I remembered from my London teaching days and I tried every which way to find it. It was about fruit piled up in a market so I tried all kinds of variations on a search theme and came up with nothing. I even…

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RattleBag and Rhubarb

Night Fog

Some left over words from another post and borrowed words not exactly put to music. Boundaries blur. The streetlamp a smudge. Steps behind you muffled. Stop. When you stop. The roots that clutch. Do they follow? Who is the figure in the window, watching? Nerves are bad tonight, yes bad. Just the street and the fog that dissolves and distorts.…

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Art, Film, Photography, City and Country, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

New York City Through the Window: Poetry

In 1975 the poet Allen Ginsberg was in hospital. At a later poetry reading he explained the causes in an introduction to a poem that he had written from his hospital bed.:  I got real angry and wound up sick in a hospital, for various karmic reasons, and woke up looking out the window, and started taking notes on what…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb, WW1

Who was May Herschel Clarke?

It started with a tweet from yesterday morning: So off to google where I found the same inaccurate one-line biography pretty much everywhere, including Wikipedia.  May Herschel-Clarke (1850–1950) was an English poet. She is chiefly known today for her Anti-War poems Nothing to Report and The Mother, the latter of which was published in 1917 as a direct response to Rupert Brooke‘s famous poem The Soldier.…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

#SherlockPoems and Nostalgia: Claude McKay and D.H. Lawrence

I’ve been looking for a particular poem for a while now. When someone used the hashtag #SherlockPoems in a Twitter conversation I posted my inquiry. The poem I remember – but can’t find – is about a market stall heaped with glowing and colorful tropical fruits. It was used in a GSE exam paper sometime in the 1970’s. I didn’t…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

W. H. Auden and New York

Eighty years ago today – on January 26th, 1939 – the poet W.H.Auden – accompanied by his friend and sometime lover Christopher Isherwood – stepped off the boat and arrived in New York City. It wasn’t their first visit. They had spent two happy weeks in the city in 1938, arriving by train from Vancouver on their way back from…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

For When It Snows Part Two

Rain is no respecter of persons the snow doesn’t give a soft white damn Whom it touches -e.e. cummings, Viva, 27 51 Kinds of Snow 1. Zen-blissed Buddha snow silent, soft, fat flakes. 2. Born-again snow that melts into the baltering mountain torrent to baptize the redeemed of the river plains. 3.Episcopal surplice snow, of choirs and choristers. 4. Modest Methodist…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The Old Year

The Old Year The Old Year’s gone away To nothingness and night: We cannot find him all the day Nor hear him in the night: He left no footstep, mark or place In either shade or sun: The last year he’d a neighbour’s face, In this he’s known by none. All nothing everywhere: Mists we on mornings see Have more…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

For When it Snows Part One

No snow where I am at the moment but here’s a poem to enjoy now and also tuck away to use on snowy days.  And on the topic of words for snow and Eskimos it’s good to read about The Great Eskimo Words for Snow Hoax that’s been perpetrated on several generations of the educated. I was fed it in…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Bumbarrel, Mumruffin and Poke Pudding

It was Clive Bennett who got me traveling down this particular track. He’s a real birder and maintains a wonderful blog – Art in Nature – where he writes of his adventures in the hedgerows and fields and where he celebrates birds and the artists who paint them.  In a comment on a post about kennings he listed some wonderful…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Lament in December

Lament In December December’s come and all is dead; Weep, woods, for summer far has sped And leaves rot in the valley bed. Grey-blue and gaunt the oak-boughs spread Mourn through a mist their leafage shed. December, season of the dead! Brown-golden, scarlet, orange-red Autumn’s bright hues are faded, fled. December, season of the dead! Robert Graves For Robert Graves…

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Poetry, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Communist, Nationalist, Fascist, Poet and Glasgow 1960

“I have too many books but I only have my shelf to blame.” The pun came via Twitter. As does my very limited knowledge of celebrity news. Thanks to Twitter trends I know that this week Kanye and Drake have had some long-standing feud about something or other and now it has taken a turn for the better for some…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Thank You, Fog

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…

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Poetry, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Brexit, Beowulf and the Bum Trumpet

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…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb, WW1

The War is Too Much With Us

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…

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