https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Sexton

 

I am a kettle made of stainless steel
I am a saint,  for tea  is brewed to heal
And , unlike kettles on an old  coal fire,
I am not dirty nor do I perspire.

My mirrored sides reflect you as you cook.
Look at me and read me like a book
I’m  full of love and hotter than a man
Oh, dear lady, love me while you can.

Superior mother,  yet inhuman  I;
Even electric kettles sometimes lie.
I shall never punish you, my dear
For perfect love like mine shall wield no fear.

All I ask is that you polish me.
For, in between your hands, I  yearn to be.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-british-jobs-david-davis-divorce-bill-spanish-pensioners-immigrants-a7934881.html

 

The success of the Brexit negotiations show that we’re finally getting our country back

“What is grace? I know until you ask me; when you ask me, I do not know.”
~ Saint Augustine

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/aug/07/mahmoud-darwish-poetry-palestine

Extract

For the last 12 years of his life, Mahmoud Darwish was my neighbour. He was a shy, private man who was rarely ever seen in public events unless he was reading his poetry. I served with him on the board of the literary magazine, Karmil, which he edited. Except for these work meetings, I rarely saw Darwish. Sometimes I would come across him taking a walk around the hills of Ramallah; sometimes at the house of mutual friends, but never in public places, restaurants or cafes.

The opportunity to find out more about my neighbour came when we were both under curfew during the invasion of Ramallah by the Israeli army in 2002. It was then that I got a call from the aptly named Bomb magazine in the US to conduct an interview with Darwish. I readily accepted hoping that through an intimate one-to-one discussion I would get to know my famous neighbour better.

We just had a few hours in the morning when the Israeli army lifted the curfew to allow people to shop. I asked Mahmoud to come to my house for the interview and he agreed. As always, he was immaculately dressed but, like all of us, he looked tense and concerned that we finish on time so that he could make it back to his house. We ended up spending three hours together, where I was able to find out how he was managing to write under these conditions.

He described to me his poem State of Siege, which he wrote in response to the Israeli invasion. It was “a poet’s journal that deals with resisting the occupation through searching for beauty in poetics and beauty in nature. It was a way of resisting military violence through poetry. The victory of the permanent, the everlasting, the eternal, over the siege and the violence.” Hearing him speak, I realised how fortunate I was to have found a kindred soul who was struggling with the same difficult issues I was having in my attempts to write about the invasion.

He was adamant that Palestinians “cannot be defined by our relationship, positive or negative, to Israel. We have our own identity.” In his diaries, A River Dies of Thirst, just out from Saqi, under the entry entitled “If We Want” Darwish writes: “We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying, ‘Our country is loftier and more beautiful.'”

http://forward.com/culture/books/382028/how-poets-and-novelists-are-mourning-john-ashbery/?attribution=articles-article-listing-17-headline

Quote:

“John Ashbery was among the very greatest poets of the postwar era, one of the most imaginative and accurate chroniclers of what he called “the experience of experience.”

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David Lehman, a poet and the editor of The Best American Poetry series, included in his remembrance for The American Scholar a mention of sharing an office with Ashbery in the 1970s. He noted that “It was also fun to observe as things JA said in interviews entered the general discourse. For example, ‘Often people don’t listen to you when you speak to them. It’s only when you talk to yourself that they prick up their ears.’ And: ‘I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.’”

Reflecting on him in the Times, poet Rae Armantrout reflected on how Ashbery’s down-to-earth humor manifested within his poems. “He is one poet who can somehow be simultaneously elegiac and playful, even goofy,” she wrote. “If you could find the impossible space where Franz Kafka overlapped with the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, John would be sitting there happily, grinning like the Cheshire cat.”

In a piece for The New Yorker, poet and novelist Ben Lerner imagined Ashbery inserting some jokes into his tribute in an august periodical, like Tom Sawyer spying on his pomp and ceremony of his own funeral. “I’m dizzied by my luck at having overlapped with John Ashbery, one of the good things about being born when I was,” Lerner wrote.

Then he channeled Ashbery in paranthetical: “(here he would probably make a joke: ‘Television is pretty good, too,’ or ‘Antibiotics can come in handy’).”

Read more: http://forward.com/culture/books/382028/how-poets-and-novelists-are-mourning-john-ashbery/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/09/08/depression-physical-illness-could-treated-anti-inflammatory/

 

“Current treatment is largely centred around restoring mood-boosting chemicals in the brain, such as serotonin, but experts now think an overactive immune system triggers inflammation throughout the entire body, sparking feelings of hopelessness, unhappiness and fatigue. “