Photo EL 2018 copyright

phttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/women-writers-infographic_n_5675866

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/national-poetry-day-five-best-living-poets/

Extract

Alice Oswald

A contemporary nature poet every inch an heir to the Romantics, Oswald’s poems are steeped in landscape and history and show just as careful an ear for light and warmth as for darkness and cold. Dart, her TS Eliot prize-winning book-length poem about the river Dart(2002), is full of visceral mud and water exploring British people’s relationship with our natural world and our past. Another long poem, Memorial, is hugely ambitious in scope. It’s an atmospheric and accomplished sweep of a poem retelling the Iliad through an extended elegy for its war dead, a response to the ancient tradition of oral poetry and another take on poetry for performance.

Read this: Wedding (1996)

“…and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it’s like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.”

Alice Oswald on how to read Homer

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-chameides/the-art-of-connecting-to_b_4310221.html?ir=Green

Extract

Facing “the Other”

I find a real resonance between Ishmael’s diagnosis of our species’ ills and the work of noted French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, specifically his notion of “the Other.” Tautologically, the Other is simply someone else, or, to use a term common to theology, “that which is not us.” Throughout history, otherness has triggered fear and violence and has been used as justification for slavery and imperialism.

But to Levinas, the Other provides a path to transcendence, a way to find meaning, indeed ecstasy. In Totality and Infinity Levinas writes, “Meaning is the face of the Other.” Face-to-face relations with the Other imparts knowledge, creates connection. As Levinas scholar Adriaan Peperzak writes:

“When Levinas meditates on the significance of the face, he does not describe the complex figure that could be portrayed by a picture or painting; rather, he tries to make us ‘experience’ or ‘realize’ what we see, feel, ‘know’ when another, by looking at me, ‘touches’ me: autrui me vise; the other’s visage looks at me, ‘regards’ me.”

From this notion flows a responsibility we all share for the Other.

Strictly speaking, Levinas viewed the face-to-face relationship as the purview of human-to-human interaction, which would leave Ishmael and his ilk in the Other category. But Ishmael is a special case — come on, the guy can communicate with a human, and there’s the whole parable thing. So, as other writers such as Barbara Jane Davy have done before, allow me to pull Levinas’s philosophy into the realm environmen

I broke my tooth on Christmas  pudding sweet
A silver coin had  steamed beside  dried  fruit
And after eating  sausages and beet
The pudding  tempted me from worried doubt

We had a goose and chicken  in a pot
Roasted carrots round potatoes dwelled.
I made the claim I  eat less than my   cat
Yet truly  has  my  super ego swelled

Then the pudding with its holly red
A jug of custard  and a pot of cream
I wished that I  had appetite  inbred
And all  the world was  an erotic dream

The dentist looked  with  care at my  clean teeth
Nothing broken,wonders never cease!

My friend had cystitis 3 times
Which made her face  grow many lines
She was so  struck by the blues
She was  on that night’s News
So fame made her feel  quite sublime.

The most anxious woman in Britain
Was cured by the love of a kitten.
It ran up her leg
And laid a new egg
It  had pinched from the hen  its  dad ‘d bitten

Schizophrenia  is caused by great shame
Humiliation, to give it a name
Oh, folk be not proud
For we are often too loud
As they tremble on the  cusp of our crimes

On the edge of the cliff of despair
Many of us  just hang on there
Throw us a rope
Help us to cope
Life is not  just,  so be fair.

In the  borders of sanity writhe
People with very tough lives
With no wealth or  home
With no brush of comb
They are waiting for us to arrive.

Being ostracised is kin to death
Rejected, driven out from your own  tribe
The hate, the spurning, the unholy wrath

Rejected when we follow our own path
The choice is hard to make and to decide
Being ostracised is kin to death

Cynical and with a hollow laugh
How shall we portray or describe
The hate, the torment, the unholy wrath

Like the martyr tortured on the cross
With no rapid  poison to imbibe
Being ostracised is kin to death

As for the tribe,it is their loss
For now we have new groups who’re  our allies
No hate, no torment, no unholy wrath

Now there  is  less permanence,few guides
We must trust the depths of our shared minds
Being ostracised is kin to death
The hate, the spurning, the satanic wrath

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/04/your-favorite-poems-on-hard-times/523191/H

Short-eared Durham owl
meditating over the dale's edge,
shadows the fields and folds
in elegant diurnal flight.

On windside,careful sight
may swoop to prey
and away.

Your yellow broad-eyed look,
at once both sharp and distant,
holds me.
Oh,silence,
Oh,wind on green,
Oh, earth,
Sky.

Immense your held  vision,
Hemisphere's height implicit

Pied geometer of flight,
Graph your swift drop and ascension

Trees bunched by dry stone wall
call heart home.

When I saw you  in that cafe
I knew you would be mine.
You were handsome, smiling,funny,you were specially designed.
You looked like men I’d only dreamed about in all those years before.
I’m so broke up,so broke up;you don’t love me anymore.

I saw you on the station as I came from out the train.
You wore an old green parka to protect you from the rain.
I wanted to be one with you,to make a Love entire;
But all we did was give  create pain too bad be endured

You walked away so quickly,I could not see you long.
I wish I had a big guitar to draw you back with song.
I looked at where you disappeared;what love has loss revealed?
I wish I could just lay down on this floor and keep my face concealed.

Railway stations sadden me, for I know we’ll never meet .
I won’t cry more,for tears are running almost to my feet.
I walk fast looking straight ahead past the entrance gate,
I pretend that you have missed your train,that work was running late/


I count from one and one to a thousand and much more–
But I know for sure it's far too late; you have closed that heavy door.
You are hiding in a dungeon
You are covered with white steel
But I know you had a heart and you must surely feel.

I lost all my illusions, and then I lost some more.
I wish I could lay down and die,right here on this floor

The innocence of children’s Christmas joy
Eyes wide open with surprise and glee
The candles lit, the tree , the love, the toys

When we’re disillusioned we fall  glum
And from the artificial we will flee
No longer wanting Xmas time to come

But later we find  other ways of love
We see new virtues in the life’s own tree
Silently, as fold the wings of dove

Our spirits rise like bread  by a warm fire
We love  and work to shelter family
And  then we are each filled with  true desire

Desire does not grab hold of sparkling toys
Desire  is  maintained by its  integrity
Not fooling those who look   both weak and sore

The best illusions  lead us into truth
That there is love and grace without a proof
The innocence of children gives us pause
The candles lit, the tree , the love, the law.

Did anyone believe that rage expressed
Could benefit the agent  without harm
Did anyone  read Freud and then digest?

Feelings need the heat  of blacksmith’s fires
Held inside until they  find their form
An image  worthy of our true desire

As well as rage, we should mistrust  love too
Be backward in expression till more’s known
Or risk an avalanche of cruelty.

Take care of  others, they are not our fools
From  sacred  conjunction  all humans are grown
We misuse  folk to test our charm and tools

Holding in the  inner fires   our wish
The blackness of the  heart can turn to gold
No contradiction  hides in sacredness

Take  your love and in your arms enfold.
The future of the world is growing cold
We liked to have the choice  for rage and death
Until we found the charred remains of bliss.

Here we sat in sunshine  and in cloud
Yet he’s gone and I forget his words
Enigmatic as a lonely clown

Here were daffodils but rarely crowds
His absence makes my being seem absurd
Where we sat in sunshine  and in cloud

With humour and with wit so well endowed
His  Whitby accent,  treasure to be heard
Enigmatic as a  gifted clown

The cat sat on his shoulders looking proud
At the garden table on old chairs
Where we ate in rain  and in dark cloud

A very private man whose mind allowed
Great kindness to his friends but never bared
Enigmatic as a  gifted clown

His most attractive quality was care
Yet he could suffer more than most could bear
Here he sat in sunshine  and in cloud
Enigmatic,curious and most kind

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/context

Happy to be purposeless and still
I breathe in my contentment and my soul
I let my heart rule rather than my will.

Of peace and calm we never have our fill
Our heart  needs this to make us truly whole
Be happy to be purposeless and still

For if we cannot stop, we’ll pay the bill
Running till we’re weary after goals
So let the heart rule rather than the will.

In school we had imposed on us a drill
In the teacher’s image, in her mould.
Learn  contentment,peace  in keeping  still

Gently  let your mind its  own thoughts  mull
Let there be more emptiness, less pull.
Happy to be purposeless and still
I let my heart rule, hold back my quick will.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/why-poetry-misses-the-mark/497504/

Extract:

If you are an adult foolish enough to tell another adult that you are (still!) a poet,” he writes, “they will often describe for you their falling away from poetry: I wrote it in high school; I dabbled in college. Almost never do they write it now.” For Lerner, this is more than mere politeness, an attempt to find some common ground with the poet. Rather, it is an unconscious tribute to the sway that the idea of poetry continues to exert over our collective imagination. “Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility,” he asserts. Thus, “if I have no interest in poetry or if I feel repelled by actual poems, either I am failing the social or the social is failing me.” Poetry is a gauge of our mutual connection. If we can’t speak the language of poetry, it is a sign that human communication has been blocked in a fundamental way. This feeling of failure is what explains why people tend to hate poetry, rather than simply being indifferent to it. Poetry is the site and source of disappointed hope.

For Lerner, as his use of the term the social suggests, that hope is not just individual and spiritual, but collective and political. Poetry is linked, in his vision, to the possibility of a total redemption of human society, of the kind Marxism used to call “the revolution.” In particular, his fusion of aesthetic, political, and spiritual messianism brings to mind the work of Walter Benjamin, the 20th-century German Jewish theorist. Lerner’s previous book, the novel 10:04, was saturated in the Benjaminian concept of redemption: the idea that the world as we know it carries within itself the possibility for transformation. Key to this vision is the idea that salvation will come from within, from a rearrangement of the world, rather than through an external power or a god.

In the novel, Lerner associates this idea with what he calls “the utopian glimmer of fiction.” Fiction, he suggests, anticipates redemption in its power to alter facts and timelines, to summon alternative possibilities, to transcend the given. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner makes some of the same claims for the art of poetry. “ ‘Poetry’ is a word for a kind of value no particular poem can realize: the value of persons, the value of a human activity beyond the labor/leisure divide, a value before or beyond price,” he writes. Poetry is a figure for the unalienated labor and uncommodified value that Marx thought would exist after the revolution. This is a 21st-century artist’s Marxism, one that no longer hopes for real revolution, but looks to the imagination for anticipations of what a perfected world would look and feel like.

As lerner works sinuously through a chain of texts, he draws attention to the inevitable gap between the actual poem, which can only be a series of particular words, and what he calls the “virtual poem” (borrowing a phrase from the poet and critic Allen Grossman), which we can imagine as being perfect because it remains pure potential. It is in taking the measure of that gap that we can “experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.” Yet this approach to reading any particular work by any particular poet also leads to a certain monotony. Because actual poems are always primarily valuable for what they are not, the many different kinds of poems Lerner invokes all supply evidence for the same argument: Look at what these lines fail to capture.

The gap between the ideal and the real is, of course, the subject of many great poems. Lerner quotes Emily Dickinson: “I dwell in Possibility— / A fairer House than Prose—,” noting that “instead of the expected opposition of poetry with prose, the former term is replaced with ‘Possibility’—an immaterial dwelling, all threshold and sky.” But the ridiculous serves his argument as well as the sublime does. Thus Lerner quotes the opening of William McGonagall’s infamously bad poem about a bridge collapse in Scotland:

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

This is ludicrous, of course, and Lerner shows exactly why. Yet he also suggests that the poem’s very badness is its virtue: “A less bad poet would not make the distance between the virtual and the actual so palpable, so immediate,” he writes. A bad poem can perhaps point to utopia even more effectively than a good poem can, since its very badness reminds us of the impossibility of achieving the total goodness that poetry promises.

This is the perverse logic of invoking utopia, which is a literal “no place.” Like a Romantic poet, Lerner yearns for a transformation that poetry can intimate and promise but never enact. What he largely ignores in his book is the idea that poetry can also be a means of reconciling us to our place, to “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us,—the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all,” as Wordsworth wrote. The Hatred of Poetry is a subtle inquiry into poetry’s discontents, and a moving statement of poetry’s potential. It can also be read, though, as an example of the dead end into which modern poetic theory has been led by its grandiose aspirations. As long as we focus on what poetry isn’t and can’t be, how can we rediscover what it once was, and might be again

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• ADAM KIRSCH is the author of several books, including The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century.

A robot voice came out my landline phone
A computer was the first to speak today
Via a text a neighbour sent to me at home

This voice is affectless and cannot groan
Makes inhuman noises quite unlike a prayer
This robot voice came out my landline phone

It sounds like a someone with  a heart of stone
Yt gives a message uninspired and spare
Via a text a neighbour sent to me at home

At least it did not linger on or moan
Wittgenstein  might like the saying bare
Of a robot voice  from out a  landline phone

There is no accent, variation, tone
Essential in its lonely  act of care
This  text a neighbour sent to me at home

The wolf may howl, the fox sleep in his lair
The cat mioaw, the dog bark  on the stair
A  flat cold voice   was on my landline phone
It’s a text a neighbour sent to me at home

A nod is  good for I can never wink
Nor click my fingers while the cat’s eye blinks
I do not read between the lines as yet
But I can read a face and place a bet

Do you find it hard to signal love?
Does your lover wear a rubber glove?
Non-verbal signals are a tiresome pest
In mathematics, we avoid them in our tests

If you speak to me , be plain I beg
So far, I never got to work on eggs.
I need exact instructions as I fear
Being belted  hard for making Father swear

I ask only that you respect my core
And enter my world only by the door.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jason-holmes/poetry-art-form_b_6031180.html

Extract:

Let your lips meet gently

the top one resting against the lower

touching with tenderness

your own  skin to skin.

Forefinger  propped on chin,

I let the others dangle,

like leaves on a branch;

how softly gravity  tugs them downwards.

Let heart beat quietly,slowly

as  the blood circulates carrying  its music ,

a river,following the path of least resistance.

How the blood vessels receive willingly this flow,

touching it kindly as with tiny  open fingers,

helping and being helped.

How the hair on the head floats

on the breeze,like tentacles of an octopus

waving goodbye.

Top  eyelid loves the lower one;

as we blink they touch

like lovers kissing swiftly

behind a tree.

and how the light comes in

we see a world.

Mine may not be yours,

but the blink of my eyelid

sends waves through the air,

so we’re all touching and being touched,

lips kissing each other,

kiss all living creatures.

skin to skin

air to air.

And inside us,the rich darkness

of creative night

transforms  in turn

these touches

into visions and dreams.

Digital art  made from my photo of a tree using Artweaver. Katherine

Radio  Three is playing far away
Volume low enough to suit a mouse.
I look around the room,I think I’ll stay

The sun it shines,the wind with shrubs  still plays
I see it from  each window of the house
Radio 3 still playing far away

 

I’m writing with a pen from off E bay
Because the other pen  forgot to bounce
I look around the room,I think I’ll stay

Twenty five revisions just today
My mind is like a tiger fit to pounce
Radio 3  is playing far away

I see a denim coat that’s subtly frayed
Bring my mind back to the present joust
I look around the room,I want  to stay

To all the spirits of the house, a toast
For helping when this heart  felt like a roast.
Radio 3 is playing far away.
I look around the room,I think I’ll stay