http://userguide.vodafone.co.nz/web/nokia-301/calls-and-contacts/contacts/copy-contacts-between-your-sim-and-your-phone

Drawing by my sister

https://www.poeticous.com/margaret-atwood/precognition

Precognition

Posted in error

https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/new-fashion-trends-normcore-gorpcore.html?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=Paris+Review+Daily+Roundup+20170626&utm_term=Paris+Review+Daily+Roundup+20170626&utm_content=Paris+Review+Daily+Roundup+20170626

“Of course, there may be one other reason these clothes fit our current cultural mood. It’s an overreaching journalistic impulse to attribute every micro-phenomenon to post-election malaise, but the rise of gorpcore — which exalts activities that, in their environmental consciousness, have always been considered hippie-dippie or tree-hugging — is a political act. “It’s crunchy,” says Schlossman. “And in this political climate, these brands we’re talking about stand for good. I’ve not necessarily been someone to vote with his dollar, but it’s the perfect marriage of ideas.” Mother Nature has been how liberals — one famously — have been licking their wounds, and celebrating it is a rebuke of the president’s planned $1.5 billion cutfrom the Interior Department’s budget. To wear Patagonia is to stand in solidarity with the brand’s environmental advocacy. It’s no accident that Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson has worn the same Patagonia vest for nearly a decade. Sporting brands that give voice to your value system is its own form of silent protest.

Ideas in fashion and food and design and travel don’t occur in isolation. You can trace the philosophical throughline — that maybe nature holds some secret to self-improvement or emotional deliverance — in the rise of grain bowls and Moon Dust, the comforting, naturalistic principles of hygge and lagom, and the Ranch. Gorpcore’s not fashion for the 1 in 7 billion, nor is it fashion for the one percent — it’s live-good, do-good, feel-good fashion for the ones who care just a little too much.”

The soft flower  shows us love and beauty fine
To give us comfort with its grace divine

Black people living in Kensington will be painted white to make the rich white people forget black  folk exist and need homes.Poor whites will be given cardboard coats painted like mink.I know there’s  heat wave but they have to compromise.
Meanwhile in Tottenham white people can be painted black free of charge in the garage off Bruce Grove where the witch lives with the dentist.
People  who want to protest can be painted in black and white strips and given zebra to ride on.But not if they have red hair.
People with red hair have to move to Scotland or Northern Ireland.Or they could swim to the Irish Republic and ask for asylum.
[If you do this change your name to O’Smith,McJones   or O’Noah  etc before you leave]
All people who are light beige, yellow, green or light to dark brown can stay where they are.Do not put shoe polish or stage makeup on your face.It rains alot and it will ruin your clothes.Still that’s nothing to do with me,is it?
I’m only your new Dictator as foretold by Plato.Jesus wept!

Saturday , another film of war
Shall I read my manly palm instead?
I lost my glasses reading   tripe  on Blair

I see an actress easy on the eye
I’d like to cuddle up with her in bed
Saturday , another film of war

If I want  to marry I must  pay
To buy a house  before we are quite dead
I lost my glasses reading   tripe ,who cares?

I never read that book about things Grey
I hate to see pornography ill bred
Saturday , another film of war

In my youth we had such fantasies
About the kisses and the  marriage bed
I lost my glasses  seeking ecstasy.

Now I can see any act  or deed
Faster than an Eskimo can read
Saturday , another film of war
I lost my glasses,I need social care

Alice in Sunderland
Malice I understand
Alice in Blunderland
All is in, understand?
Walrus tinned under sand.
Sallies by guns unmanned.
Call us in Thunder Band
Phone is in Alice’s hand
iPhone in political scams
Trellis blows down in wind.
Four letter words gave me wind.
Before litter, we all must be banned.
Bellicose man in grandstand
I wish I could do a handstand.
Where was that Alice he stunned?
Algebra made me a man

I bought a brand new A to Z.
I bought a map of Wales.
I roamed around the whole day long
Despite the snow and gales.
I bought the Ordnance Survey too
of all of the UK
I looked at maps on Amazon
and even on E Bay

I studied charts of Greenland
And Africa and France
I talked to expert geographers
Who looked at me askance.

Borneo or Burma?
Malaysia or Spain?
Where does Father Brown say..
I must read his books again

But giving up, I came back home
And lay down for a nap
Suddenly it came to me!
God’s not on a map.

Poetry and the Subconscious

Extract

Charles Simic: “Whatever the eventual subject of the poem is, it emerges in the process of fumbling around.”

You get the point. Fumbling around. Feeling out. Following the trail. Listening for. To quote Robert Creeley, “I think the presumption that one knows what one is writing is pretty naïve, that it’s all planned and everything goes to some specific point of purpose or even understanding.” In other words, poetry isn’t an act of creation, it’s an act of pursuit. It starts with an itch—an image or a phrase, an idea stuck in your head. A poet feels a gust of wind, throws up a sail, and discovers where it leads.

This is why I prefer to use “subconscious,” rather than unconscious. The term subconscious appeared in Freud’s earlier works, but quickly grow out of favor for its ambiguity, yet I don’t think what we’re talking about can be described without ambiguity. Moreover, I feel like the word “unconscious” is inaccurate—we’re never completely unaware of these deeper thoughts that lurk below the surface of our understanding. We’re not randomly plunging our own depths like a trawler at sea casting its net; we’re fly-fishermen throwing our lines into the eddies where intuition and experience tell us a bass might rise. What many call “inspiration” is simply the soft pang of truth from below, a blip on the sonar telling us where to look.

If anything other than subconscious, it might be the preconscious impulse we’re chasing—not in the psychological sense of memories that we haven’t yet accessed—I mean preconscious in the truly precognitive sense—not necessarily seeing the future, but finding some harbinger of a future mental state. Poets press at certain material because they sense a broader understanding, a surprise, hidden beneath it.C

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/serious-art-thats-funny-humor-poetry

Carolyn Forché, someone who has never been accused of being a funny poet, has said “irony, paradox, surrealism . . . might well be both the answer and a restatement of [Theodor] Adorno’s often quoted and difficult contention that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But what did the philosopher and critic Adorno mean by this fatuous statement? No poetry? Or just a very, very serious and earnest poetry? Because, let’s face it–earnestness is almost always bad art. Good art makes us think; it has more questions than answers. Often, but not always, satire does this too. But earnestness almost never does this–that’s not its job. Earnestness is comforting. It wants to hug us. And we want to be hugged sometimes. But sometimes we want to laugh while poking holes in self-righteousness and oppression, whether it be literal political oppression or oppression of a quieter sort – cultural and aesthetic oppression. Irony and satire are such a good antidote to oppression because oppression needs to be earnest (or at least look earnest) in order to be feared by those it seeks to cow. Oppression cannot work alongside irony because it believes in its own righteousness and a monolithic concept of truth that must be asserted to the oppressed with a straight face. Irony and satire are the tools by which the oppressed get to make fun of the oppressors without the oppressors getting it.

The sun has gone but heavy heat remains
The trees wave feebly  in the subtle breeze
And paranoia over us still reigns

Sullen on a diet of men’s brains
With fire and indignation the world screams
The sun has gone but heavy heat remains

The population by sharp fear restrained
The fires of hell  lit up the world of blame
And paranoia over us still reigns

As the leaders blame the poor again
Do they wish to kill the weak in flames?
The sun has gone but heavy heat remains

No need to imitate the Nazis and their trains
Austerity, a nightmare not a dream
So paranoia over us still reigns

The poor are weak and seen just as a drain
Those who work  may eat yet danger looms
The sun has gone but heavy heat remains

The victims lie,  just burning ash entombed
The firefighters work daily, search resumed
The sun has gone but heavy heat remains
And paranoia over us still reigns

Thomas Tardy
Thomas Bawdy
George Hill He Hott
Jane Frosting
Jane Testing
Plane Basting
Sylvia Wrath
Ted Bemused
Ted Used.
Philip Larking
Kingsley Hey-Miss.
William Wordsmith
Samuel Callsmudge
Matthew Mac-Hainault
Matthew O’Hour-gnarled
Simone de Bove-Wire
Jean Paul Martyr.
Princess Iambic- pentameter
Thomas Core.
Thomas Done-Well

Do not knock on my back door tonight
Your face in dimness evokes dreams denied.
I only want to see you in daylight

I saw you on the town hall steps that night
Your makeup was too lush, though well applied
Do not  block  up both my ears tonight

I find your  touch gives me a rare delight
I said I hate you but, in truth, I lied
I only want to see you in moonlight

I have heard the signs and welcome any spite
My  goldfish ate my cat and then it died
Do not kick in my front door  when tight

My father told me men must never bite
When they lie in bed with their new bride
I rarely want to see you in daylight

The evidence is here that God has fled
He wanted us to think that he was dead
Do not snog alone with me tonight
I only have to touch you to ignite.

As wildflowers grow on bomb sites  and on  graves
We can love, despite our grieving hearts
Think not of the time nor of the place

Sorrow , opened up, creates new space.
Despite the pain  that comes in sudden darts
So wildflowers grow on bomb sites  and on  graves

A flower seed needs  little,  but its grace
Will help the heart that sees alas blank charts
Thinks not of time, just where there may be space

So an  Eden may be begin, embraced
Although our feet stand on this ground apart
For wildflowers grow on bomb sites  and on  graves

In love, the splits will heal at their own pace
And hatred held, contained will breed no shark
Think  of any time or any place

We look out today at visions stark
Yet sings the immemorial skylark
As wildflowers grow on bomb sites  and on  graves
There is no “right time” no “perfect place”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29538180

“Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary. What we very badly need to remember is that the things right under our noses are extraordinary, fascinating, irreplaceable, profound and just kind of marvellous.

Look at the things in the foreground and relish stuff that can lose its glow by being familiar. In fact, re-estranging ourselves to familiar things seems to be a very important part of what poetry can do.”

If you can, be choosy about what you do, so that the things you do write are the things that you do best.

The little cat from Grenfell Tower
Looked more confused than frightened.
Unless it had lived in Syria what could have prepared it for
A night illuminated in its heart by burning stuff
Some madman had wrapped around the tower
Like Xmas paper.
There,  looks nice, they said when they finished
What would become a crematorium, an inferno
Near the homes of the rich , and as they say, famous
A pity they don’t believe in the Last Judgement.
That doesn’t mean there is none, of course.
What we choose to believe makes no difference to reality
Only in our perception of it.
It wipes some stuff  off the blackboard but  the  truth remains
The little cat knows something is wrong.
It has a black smudge on its nose.
Looks so young.

http://www.creative-writing-now.com/how-to-write-a-poem.html

“In his book Poetry in the Making, the poet Ted Hughes talks about how to write a poem about an animal. The key, he says, is to concentrate hard enough on the animal, to choose the words that best capture the animal you have in your mind. You can use this approach with any subject matter.

In the beginning, you don’t have to worry about “style,” about writing in a “beautiful” or a “poetic” way. In fact, if you start to think about “being poetic,” it can distract you from what you’re actually writing about and hurt your poem. Have you ever tried to have a conversation with someone who was trying to impress you? Then you know how boring this can be. The person is really thinking about himself or herself, not about the conversation. Similarly, if your attention is focused on “being poetic,” if you are worrying about what impression your poem will make, then that takes your attention away from the animal or weather or whatever the subject of your poem is. “

Good Writing vs. Talented Writing

Extract:

Virginia Woolf knew subtlety was the key to craftsmanship when she counseled that “we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated.” “All bad writers are in love with the epic,”Hemingway admonished. The talented writer, Delany reminds us, is a master of induction, suggesting the general through the deft deployment of the specific, and in the process producing an even greater dramatic effect than the bombast of sweeping statements ever could:

The talented writer often uses specifics and avoids generalities — generalities that his or her specifics suggest. Because they are suggested, rather than stated, they may register with the reader far more forcefully than if they were articulated. Using specifics to imply generalities — whether they are general emotions we all know or ideas we have all vaguely sensed — is dramatic writing. A trickier proposition that takes just as much talent requires the writer carefully to arrange generalities for a page or five pages, followed by a specific that makes the generalities open up and take on new resonance. … Indeed, it might be called the opposite of “dramatic” writing, but it can be just as strong — if not, sometimes, stronger.

“Words have their own firmness,” Susan Sontag reflected in her diary. “Use the right word, not its second cousin,” Mark Twain famously advised, but great writing isn’t just a mere matter of concision. As E.B. White reminded us, “Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound.” Delany bisociates this dual requirement for precision and eloquence, with precision and eloquence:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/21/poetry.writing.wendycope

Extract:

t seems odd to me that anyone who hates reading poetry should want to write it at all. Are there amateur painters who never go to an art gallery? Or amateur musicians who never listen to music? Sometimes non-reading poets explain that they are afraid of being influenced. They don’t understand that being influenced is part of the learning process. Some of my earliest (and unpublished) poems read like poor imitations of Sylvia Plath. Others read like poor imitations of TS Eliot. I was unaware of this at the time. Gradually I worked my way through these and many other influences towards finding my own voice. Nowadays I hope I sound like myself in my poems but I am still influenced by what I read, still learning.

Well, I have to keep quite busy as I do not like to think
I have 59 new credit cards  and I   wash them in the sink
I take each one quite carefully, rotating them in use
Or they may be jealous and accuse me of abuse.

Then I have to pay them off or  they incur interest
Not like handsome men might do when they don’t wear a vest.
Interest is money which the banks demand  be paid
If we spend just pence more than the limit that they gave.

I do it on the telephone so I can have a chat
Sunday is the best, I find, if you decide on that
Enter all the numbers that  run straight across the card
A pity there’s no hurdle and that gambling has been barred.

Also, you must tell them then, just what you want to pay
Make your mind up when you start or you’ll be there till May
And 59 in total is more than there are months  per day
My head is reeling from the bills, my canary has gone grey!

It seemed the fire of Grenfell Tower had spread
A hear oppressive like the fires of hell
London smothered in air dull and dead.

Flames that slobbered with a passion red
Water that  the sun burned up too well
It seemed the fire of Grenfell Tower had spread

God permitted Satan with his dread
Britain quarrelled, split , prepared to kill.
London smothered in air dull and dead.

A referendum showed us all ill-bred.
Neighbours spoke in words that I call vile.
It seemed the fire of Grenfell Tower had spread

By what person is our nation led
who fills our stomach with acidic bile?
The PM spoke in words both dull and dead.

Tempers raged  like fires all fresh and wild
Evil was to emptiness beguiled
It seemed the fire of Grenfell Tower had spread
People smothered in the fire lie dead.

Picked like a red flower,  smitten by  red earth
Invisible  at sunset, shaded at soft dawn
Hear a word made flesh, see a being but no birth.

What were blue and red saying, was it a curse?
As the graduates crossed, in red gowns , the green lawn
She picked  a red flower,   tore the  red earth

In the immeasurable ellipse, drawn into the next verse.
The sign of the cross broken, the illuminations torn
Hear a word made to be spoken, see a being of no birth.
Were the strangers forsaken, were their minds cursed?
See the decorations of fire, see the scars new born
Lit by  red flares, buried  with new  baptised earth

Oh,sweet-bitter eros  dying,  hanging gardens of death
Shall Babylon be summoned by the ancient ram’s horn?
Hear a word made dross, see a being but no worth.

Where is my silver needle, my  thread long and forlorn?
Where can we acknowledge the dead, the never to be born?
Picked out like a red flower,  shot down in  red earth
Hear his  flesh die wordless ; give a Bible a  slow birth

When marriage was a sacrament and life was  lived as prayer
We lived inside a structure; we knew  anatomy
The living hands of  God were there to hold us from despair

Each event had its rituals when ritual was pure.
Birth was baptism, death expected, Royal poverty.
Marriage was a sacrament and life was  lived as prayer

Meaning leaked  like ink runs down the page that is no cure
For those who cannot read the word  must live in gravity
Yet feel the living hands of  God  to hold them from despair

When angels dwell in gold serene and stars look far and bare
There may be cruel reckonings  as boats cross the dark sea
Yet marriage was a sacrament and life was  lived as prayer

But now it is the government who hear no poor man’s plea
Thus  hell is made by laziness, ignited  is  the Tree
If marriage were a sacrament and life a piercing prayer
The living hands of  God would  come to hold us from despair