sculpture by Dorothy Love at www.dorothylove.co.uk
Here is a poem about the last Emperor of Byzantium. I sent it recently to a married couple I know, who both liked it. She said it’s about me. He said it’s about Gordon Brown.
The idea behind the poem is that we are all now inheritors of fallen cities, walls of… Continue reading The Travails of Gordon Brown
Now that the new “One World…” poem-poster collection is up at last and as I begin to collect myself again and think about how to make sure that people know it is there, I want to record a good email conversation I had recently with Lakshmi Holmström, translator of the two Tamil poems selected for… Continue reading "No language is chauvinistic of itself; it is our misuse of language that makes it so."
A new collection of mainly bilingual poems has been uploaded on the Poems for... website. It consists of sixty poems, most of them bilingual.
Eventually this sixty will join and become one with the collection of forty five poems launched a few years ago, called "Poems for... One World."
The new collection has taken three years. Thank… Continue reading The "Poems for..." project - a new collection has been uploaded , crossing new frontiers
I run a small charity called Hyphen-21 and January can be an anxious month, with accounts and reports needed by the Charity Commissioners no later than the 31st. But I actually enjoyed writing the report this year. It clarified a few ideas and its overview brought out some pattern and coherence to what usually just… Continue reading Riding the Hyphen - but to what effect ?
Someone asked me recently for my thoughts on why I still seem to write poetry, despite everything. This was my reply :
...I think a lot of your day can flood out your sense of self. Writing a poem is a way of restoring your own distinctness and boundaries. The world can silence you. The poem… Continue reading Talking of Art - why write poetry ?
For the first time on this blog, on this New Year’s Day, I want simply to report on something I did recently. I’m proud of it, but am also still absorbing what it meant.
Half way through December, I ran a “Mental Health Arts” evening in a church assembly room, part of an inner-city church badly… Continue reading And what is Art for, then ?
Last December, I ran an arts evening which needed professional actors to perform a short new play. At the audition stage, one of the candidates wrote to me as follows : “If only the theatre world was run entirely by social workers and mental health professionals ! I hope I can speak for all of… Continue reading What are the "Skills of Love" ? Is it worth trying to name them ?
But how can there be a next when we haven’t even established a starting-point ?
I suggest that to be afraid of the world ending is pointless now. There is a sense in which the world has ended already. Certainly, the solid orb our parents knew has disappeared, along with the truisms and structures they could… Continue reading So when’s the Next Post due, then ?