“Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that
nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he
admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.”

– William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12

1 Fell off writers’ block into a pit of tigers.Bad layout.
2.Strangled by over-loving cat.Verdict: guilty
3.Large bottle of ink bounced back off wall . thus broke skull.Suicide denied by dead man or wife as appropriate [Delete one]
4 Forgot to eat while writing long novel.Was not worth it
5 Forgot to sleep owing to inspiration.Stupid despite possessing genius
6.Killed by malfunction of new laptop.[Can be returned to Amazon  free when body is removed]
7.Tried to meditate and fell out of the window. Accidental death
8 Tried to clean outside of the window with a microfibre cloth.A pane broke and cut his throat.Incidental death
9  Got depressed by lack of air.Jumped and lost balance killing two cats on the patio.Verdict Unfurred
10.Thought he was sleepwalking and walked off roof of extension [only just completed].Insurance will be paid.
11.Fainted in  church and was used as a human sacrifice.Jesus wept
12 Hit head on bannister while falling down the stairs.Euthanasia while dizzy.Resurrection imminent
13.Fought off wife but bitten by the dog .Both dead.Verdict, pointless end.
14 Wrote a best seller, got drunk and died of shock!
15 His blog was declared a threat to humanity.Died of shame.

The lavender I dried lies in between
The   past, its  memories, and the present day
These  pages of the book you wrote and dreamed

I see you writing and the way you leaned.
The cat across your shoulders loving lay.
The lavender I dried was not yet seen

Now empty is the room  that held those scenes
The old cat  died, depriving me of play
Here still  are the pages of  books  dreamed

Is life a lesson, what does living mean?
Are those wounds of  battle or dismay?
The lavender I dried scents the unseen

That was life eternal, so it seemed
But you have gone and none are here today
Except the pages of  these books  we dreamed

When will we reach the harbour, fine and gay?
For God is smiling as we cross  the bay
The lavender I dried lies in between
The pages of the life that we once dreamed.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/how-power-corrupts-the-mind/277638/

“Though it’s not that the powerful are bad people. “There is a tendency for people to assume power holders are uncaring, they’re cold, they don’t care about the little people,” says Pamela Smith, a power researcher at the University of California San Diego. But that’s not always the case. It depends on who gets the power. “You put someone in an experiment, temporarily, in a high-powered role, and what you find is that people who say they have pro-social values, the more power they have, the more pro-social they are. The people who say they have more self-centered values tend to be more selfish the more power they have.””

To be a writer you must buy a block
Then you need a pen and paper both.
I don’t what my shops have in stock

You have no right to find another dock
So stand in court  and take a solemn oath
To be a writer you must buy a block

Quickly  stir your dinner in a wok
For brains need food when energy falls low
I don’t what omens are in stock

You might need more paper, hire a truck
Fill it up with reams  of  stuff in rows
To be a writer you must buy a block

Once you write a line, you’re  called unstuck
To its fellows you must be the host.
I don’t what  sentences we stock

The sentences must run out  unenforced
And between them we ignite  further words
To be a writer you must buy a block
Just see what  the Bailey’s got ad hoc

Remembrance, anniversaries in the mind
The date, the number, year return again
The painful feelings flood up, unresigned

Yet were these rituals once a  good design
To shed the many tears that still remain?
Remembrance, anniversaries of the mind

And to the lonely mourners are they kind?
They make the loss of love so very plain
The painful feelings well up, unresigned

Those who cannot see, the wilful blind
And those who withold love cause helpless pain;
Remember in the solitude of  mind

For the lost, our little heart will pine
The wildness of the feelings is untamed
The painful facts are noticed, undermined

Death is  here and tears flow out unfeigned
The symbols of normality disdained
Remembrance, anniversaries hit the mind
The painful feelings rise up and resound

You revealed the face within your face
Human, lowly, humbler than an ant
The pathos in your eyes made sad my gaze
The other face, defended, has no grace
With it , you appear quite confident.
Yet you revealed to me your hidden face
I know so well the suffering of your days
A fear of tragic pasts feared imminent
The pathos in your eyes made sad my gaze
The mental torment heavy all your days.
Yet you must hide from men intolerant
You revealed the face within your face
Like martyrs, you were tortured and disgraced
You wandered feebly, lost, itinerant
The pathos in your eyes makes sad my days
If God exists then would  he not embrace
The lost, the lonely mad, the poor vagrant?
You revealed the face within your face
The pathos in your eyes makes me ashamed

I declare reason is fake
For aught a case it can make
Choose the right axioms
Choose the right factions
Then take it all home to re-bake

Since my husband died I’ve burned eight pans
And  just like him I’ve got eight wireless sets
I leave the hot tap running and I’m banned
For breaking all the cups I’ve not caught yet.

I do the stupid things I told him off for
Like putting empty pans back on the gas
And sometimes I have even thanked professors
Who tell me in my dreams I’ll  never pass

I’m back at Uni  feeling lost and lonesome
Wondering  if I’ll ever  find a room
Wondering if my mind will get some thoughts in
Or will my world come down to crash and doom?

I’m relieved I’ll never have to retry
To teach those undergraduates to knit pi

I got a new phone with an answering machine so I said to it
Why is the country in such a mess? But it didn’t anwer.I’ll send it back to BT and ask for a refund.No wonder the country is in a mess if answering machines are too lazy to answer my questions.Even if it just said,Noone knows,that might have helped me.As it is I shall see what the fridge says about it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/255411/bonhoeffer-brave-interview

“A new look at a 20th-century hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life was more riveting than most of the novels written this year. And Eric Metaxas, in his new monumental biography of the Lutheran pastor who was executed at the Flossenburg concentration camp after his participation in a failed attempt to kill Hitler, tells Bonhoeffer’s story with the fluidity of a novel. Metaxas talks about Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. ”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/255411/bonhoeffer-brave-interview

I thought I’d write fifty-five sonnets
And a novel as well, while I’m here
But the writers’ block fell on me
Fellow poets yelled at me
All I could  make was a tear.

Will villanelles be better subjects
If all I want is quantity?
I never knew what they were,
The very name seemed bizarre.
How hard is my job going to be?

Well, maybe the triolet being shorter
Will give me a kick in the pants
My husband is watching me
His ashes rise from the TV
He said ,why can’t you get a  big grant

I  used to write free verse when starting
As I never thought I’d  go on
But the demon-possessed me
It gets very pesky
And Jesus b’aint here, eeh by gum!

I wrote on some paper at dinner
For my husband had  got very slow
I wrote two good sonnets
I am very honest.
I  didn’t ken  that was death’s door

He said, why don’t you talk to me, Mary
Instead of misusing that pen.
But he knew nothing of logic
Which I felt was quite tragic
So I put him to bed with a hen.

I see the hens as a blessing
Instead of a duvet of down.
They may lay an egg in bed
But as Jesus , no doubt, once said
The cock will crow thrice for a noun

http://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/by-writing-goal/improve-my-writing/quality-v-quantity-do-they-need-each-other

“Now that I’m escaping from the vacuum of National Poetry Month and another successful April Poem-A-Day Challenge, I find myself wondering about the relationship of quantity and quality in writing. Is there value in writing every day? Is a writing routine a good or bad thing for poets? Questions such as these have been swirling around my head, and here’s my take: I think quantity can lead to quality.

First, let me be clear: Quality is the ultimate goal for any of the poems I try to get published. I’m not trying to publish as many poems as I possibly can for the sake of getting published. I wrote for more than a decade before I even tried submitting my poems, so quantitative publishing is not my end game, and I would not recommend that route to other poets. In my mind, one great poem is better than a million poems nobody remembers. So, let’s not get mixed signals about my views on quantity and quality.

I do think the way to be good at anything, including art, is to practice. If you’re a painter, you paint. If you’re a mathematician, you solve problems. If you’re a writer (whether you write fiction, nonfiction or poetry), you write.

Of course, there are many other layers of complexity that can be placed on the poet’s shoulders. Poets should read other poets. Poets should revise their work fearlessly. Poets should take chances. Poets should listen to the world around them. Poets should live. But at the end of the day, poets should write poems.

During the month of April, I wrote 30 poems in 30 days (actually, a handful more than that). Am I going to hold on to all those poems? No. But I am hopeful that a few will stick around and make it into a collection after revision. Or at the very least, maybe a few lines or images will find their way into another poem or two down the line. As my friend S.A. Griffin likes to say, it’s all about process.

Here are a few reasons why quantity leads to quality:

• Writing poems prepares you for inspiration. Inspiration strikes when it strikes, and everyone is struck with inspiration from time to time. What separates a poet from others is that the poet is ready to take that inspiration and turn it into a poem. A painter might take the exact same inspiration and turn it into a painting. A novelist a novel. And so forth.
• Writing poems opens your mind to more poems. Some poets hold onto an image or idea until it is fully processed. I think this is great, but sometimes I lose those images and ideas if I don’t write them down. Plus, I’ve noticed when I write I clear that space in my head for new ideas and images.
• Revision comes after the first draft. Great poems come from revision. It’s hard work, sure, but poets can’t revise unless they have first drafts upon which to play. In other words, poets need to write to revise.

Of course, there are many other routes to quality beyond quantity, but I often feel poets (and other writers) are afraid to write anything that’s not nearly perfect on the first draft. Don’t be afraid. Write, write, write. That’s the only path you can take to get to the ultimate goal: a quality poem you love.”

I’m in deep now, never been this deep before
The world’s hollow like a shell and I’m out its door.
In so deep, the ocean has its own startled floor.
I’m down, down. down.never been so dark , so more.

I can’t rightly tell how I got where I am
I think I had an accident, fell over, then I swam.
Sometimes it’s a loss, be times it’s a man.
I guess I only do it ‘cos I know some folk can.

I don’t know if the joy is worth the pain
Would I choose to relive it,  if I was born again?
The deep joy is the amazing gain.
But the sorrow is damn sad, let’s admit it plain.

I’m in deep and it’s over my head
What was I thinking of, when I fell out of that bed?
I look up and the sea’s so turquoise like that mist is red
When we get good and mad and wish some loon was dead.

At first, it was all just black, black pain
But from the bottom of the well, I looked up with awed love again.
That’s when I recalled ,feelings are sound and sane
Joy is much greater when we’re in the deep, deep zone.

I dunno if I’m ever comin’ out.
We can’t control it ,ain’t that what life’s all about?
I’ll never love with innocence again, nor not feel doubt.
But I’m no teapot and the devil ain’t got my spout.

I’m swimming and the ocean’s so mysteriously bright
Down here,we don’t have no day nor no night
Fish nudge me with big grins and teeth white.
Sea-flowers fondle me and whisper, turn off that light!

Original photo and art by Katherine 

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/stephen-king-22-lessons-creative-writing-advice-novels-short-stories-a8021511.html

I am too concerned with my mental life to  answer any phones phonemes and phoney operators so I will not listen to the messages.
My cat just died.Please don’t leave a message
I’m in the bath so I am afraid of the phone falling in.Thanks
I am asleep so hang up.
I have got ” do not  disturb” on my phone.So try to, please.I’ll tell you the results.
My phone has Call Control.I can throw it at the wall and it won’t break
My phone can block you.And you.And Boris Johnson
My phone is better than yours because I  stuck glitter all over it and some mistletoe.
My phone might have spoken to Bibi  Netanyahu but I don’t know anything about it or him.He left no message unless it’s in a bottle.It’s a good excuse to get drunk before I see Theresa May.
My phone is here but I am not.If you have any spare money put it in the post.I need it.Coffee is £2.75 now!
I can’t understand myself at all.Am I here or not?

We don’t live a good life to gain rewards.We do it because we feel better living that way.
But how do we do it?
We can’t be good entirely by willpower but maybe we can recognise when we do bad things.And try to learn
I believe perception is what matters.Change that and everything else changes.
Many terms from art  are good  for living

A  new perspective
A sense of proportion
Looking at what is NOT there.
Opening our eyes
Getting the balance right
Another point of view
Seeing what is there, not what we want to see
Letting life affect us.
Letting others give their picture.

I don’t think I’ll write a villanelle
I’ve done the form to death, if not to grief
I  feel like I am flying up a well

I have learned that only victims tell
That time is not a giver but a thief
I don’t think I’ll write a villanelle

I’m feeling poor; I’ve nothing I can sell
I’d better start a newer, fuller life
I  feel like I am spying in a well.

A sonnet is much harder yet they sell.
I realise I could now take a wife;
So I don’t think I’ll write a villanelle

I ponder over Patel’s Israel
Theresa May is getting all the strife
I  feel like I am drowning in my well.

Mortal sin has taken on new life
What about our loss of  love and grace?
I don’t think I’ll write about this hell
The government are fools and lie as well

I’ve got my landline on ” Do not disturb” but on reflection, I see it is cheaper not to have one at all.
Wasn’t it great going on holiday years agi with no post, no phones ringing and no-one asking you for favours? Now they can email  and text you all the time
I got  a message on my answer phone

Ahhh,uhhh,grrhhhh, cough, cough, vlah, blah,eff off, is that you Lord?Aaaah,uhhhhh,ohhhh.I did not sin after Mass.Ohhhh,grtoooom bum,la la kaaaa,bang.

That is interesting.Am I God or what?

Amazon prime now food delivery was free albeit a £2 tip was suggested and I paid this as getting food the same day os useful midweek.Today I discovered I would be paying an additional £3.99.Unless I spend £40.But the access is not to the whole Morrison’s site so it’s not  good for all your shopping
.I also noticed last week they were charging me £3 for some tissues which were £2.38 in Morrison’s  own shop.They were an own brand mansize
So if I had not been careful I’d have been  paying £5.99  and the £3.99 goes to Amazon not Morrison.I could have removed the tip of £2 but the delivery person gets that and as they are not paid much I didn’t mind it~
So if you are somewhat disabled like I am, then plan ahead carefully.

I am even thinking of using real hankies, as I have loads of my husband’s here!!
Another helping hand cut off.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/144562/political-poems

Political cartoon by James Akin (1773-1846), depicting President Andrew Jackson and the press, published 1824.

I’m in a Care Home now.They care and I moan.Just like being married really.

http://www.kristeva.fr/the-kristeva-circle/trump.html

“The phenomenon of Donald Trump’s ascendency to become the 45th President of the United States is surely overdetermined, meaning that there are likely many different causes for this. The one I entertain here is I believe significant, though I do not argue that it is the main or only cause. But it is one we should consider and address. In short, I argue that the rise of Trump is in part due to a paranoid-schizoid politics found both in the personality of Trump himself and in a large-scale regression of many in the populace to a more primitive state of denial, splitting, and demonization, coupled with a syndrome of ideality. In other words, both Trump and his supporters split the world into good and bad (or SAD!!!! as Trump likes to tweet). In his inaugural speech he repeatedly demonized foreign powers and idealized America. His America first policy is textbook paranoid- schizoid: “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.”

The Trump phenomenon shares much with many other nationalist politics on the rise around the world, but mostly an inability to tolerate difference and loss, including loss of a romanticized past or idealized future. Hence our politics today needs something that psychoanalytic theory has tried to offer: an understanding of how to work through trauma, loss, and persecutory phantasies. A politics of working through difficult choices and misrepresentations of others in our midst could help allay the paranoid politics that dominates politics today.”

After giving an account of the concept of working through in Freud, Klein, and Kristeva, I turn to the Trump phenomenon and then close with a brief account of a politics of working through.

I.

But because of the sadomasochistic nature of he drives, the adolescent’s belief in the ideal object is constantly threatened. Accordingly, Kristeva argues, “theadolescent is a believer of the object relation and/or of its impossibility.” [11] This gives rise to the ideality syndrome, the belief that there is a Great Other that exists and can provide absolute satisfaction. This is not just a syndrome that plagues teenagers: “We are all adolescents when we are enthralled by the absolute.” [12]Just as anyone can regress back to a paranoid-schizoid position, the temptation of ideality or its flip side of nihilism can tempt any adult as well as political bodies.

II.

Trump and many of his followers are perfect examples of both the syndrome of ideality and the repetition compulsion, caught up in playing out over and over an attempt to undo what they imagine they have lost, whether a good mother or a perfect country.

The cry Trump repeats at every opportunity—“Let’s Make American Great Again”—taps into a dual wager: (1) that those who imagine themselves as the dominant and quintessential “American” people need not mourn the loss of their presumed dominance at home and abroad and (2) that those who are undermining the old status quo can be undone, thrown out, excised from the body politic, making possible an ideal and perfect state. Those who will not mourn their losses nor tarry with indeterminacy, uncertainty, and democracy demand a politics of black and white and good and evil; and they presume that those who oppose them are the enemies of all things perfect and true.

Let me offer a psychoanalytic, though hypothetical account of the genesis of Trump’s character:

Just after his second birthday, his mother gave birth to a baby brother and then she almost died. After childbirth she got an infection, had to have a hysterectomy then several other surgeries. What trauma. First there was this brute fact that his mother was going to give birth to a rival, then there’s possibly some murderous rage for her doing this, then after that murderous rage she does in fact almost die, and then she’s gone—for how long?—in the hospital, almost dead, almost gone. The boy’s one true love has first defied him, then in fantasy been killed by him, then almost dies and is gone, perhaps he felt terrible guilt that he could not repair and so he could not internalize a good mother.

He grows up to be a bully. At his private school where his wealthy father is a benefactor, he becomes a troublemaker and tyrant, and eventually his teachers persuade the father to send him elsewhere. At military school, the boy learns the lessons that he is special and great and, in the course of this, he almost kills his roommate for not folding the linens correctly. He becomes fastidiously neat and develops a fear of germs, of anything that might invade his body. He goes on in life to purge any imagined invaders, including in his fantasies Muslims, Mexicans, and those who’ve deigned to ruin his imagined perfect kingdom.

And he imagines that he is the king! He takes up the great defense of undoing. This is the defense against felt harm that involves trying to do something all over again in a way that turns out better. How to undo mother’s death from his life when he was just beginning to become a little self? Maybe he could be a big self, maybe he could be so perfect and important and big and great that she would finally notice and love him. Maybe he could be so important and smart and wealthy that she would love him more than anyone else in the world.

Maybe also he could avenge his father’s loss, his father who had to grow up and take over the family business as a young adolescent when his own father died, the grandfather who made his wealth as a poor immigrant by setting up brothels where fools went looking for gold. And in the process maybe he could avenge his mother’s shame, a poor immigrant “domestic” from Scotland, leaving home at 17, arriving at 18, with only $50 in her pocket.

So the child who suffers these losses and sets out to avenge and to undo the harm. He cannot help himself; he isn’t even conscious of what he is doing. His loss turns into narcissism and grandiosity. At his rallies, he throws out protesters and crying babies. He doesn’t see his effects on other people, though most everyone around him is painfully aware of this great malformation. There’s an immense disjunct between how he acts and how he thinks of himself.

Something is terribly wrong. In public he makes great proclamations about his greatness, intelligence, and bigness, and has no sense of how bizarre all this sounds. He insults other people for their “smallness,” and seems totally oblivious that he is exhibiting his own obliviousness. In this respect, he is delusional.

He has no tolerance for criticism, no ability to appreciate other points of view, no capacity for self-reflection. He is like a person play-acting being a person, a person who is big and great and wonderful, whose enemies ought to be purged or imprisoned.

In all his attempts to purge his imagined perfect world of invaders, he purges his own internal shames and demons: the mother who entered the country as a poor domestic servant, the grandfather who made millions by prostituting land and women, all those immigrant foreigners who are trying to infect us. He purges anyone who interrupts him. He befriends those like him, other authoritarian figures. He belittles anyone who doesn’t try to be as strong as him. And because of his appeal to all those in his country who harbor similar wounds, who feel cheated, infiltrated, abandoned, and wronged, the people project their own anxieties into his anxieties and identify with his ways of acting out. He does for them what they cannot do for themselves. Where they are trapped in powerlessness, he can be their power player, their avenger, their hero. And so they nominate him to be their candidate for the presidency of their country.

The Trump phenomenon taps into a global political problem: a lack of public and shared means for working through ambiguity and loss, for coming to understand the strangers in our midst, that is, for moving from a paranoid-schizoid politics to and through a Kleinian depressive kind of politics.

The creation and destruction of a world
Slowly built  but rapidly laid low
Emptiness replacing what was shared

Each lover to the other lover bared
But trust reveals what can be overthrown
The creation and destruction of the world

With  one and zero all the world’s engaged
The letters Greek and Hebrew stand alone
Emptiness revealing all we shared

I do  not live in our old world absurd
In the ruins of my loss, I mourn
The broken-hearted,  insaneness of words

Life was peace and death was like a war
Where, by defeat, folk helplessly transformed,
Were seeing bones  then knew death of the shared

The madness of  our hope of love lies torn
No expectation  is one  way we may learn
The creation and destruction of a world
Bleakness  covers what was  by love shared

A cup of tea, a hot and damp reward
For housewives who bring theses untoward
Against the sign of Dirac,  be prepared.
A cup of four dimensions, what a card
In quantum theory, light is seldom stirred
Rocked by ages, particles feel jarred
A cup of tea  with sugar, neat reward,
For all  of us who write as well as care.

By Emily Warn

“Does the social function of poetry vary so wildly that we cannot generalize about it? What can be commonly said about a skeptic who turns for clarity to a Rae Armantrout poem, a plumber who searches on Yahoo for a wedding toast, a harried person who seeks in poetry refuge from a grueling job, or a Guantanamo prisoner who, denied pen and paper, uses pebbles to scratch poems on Styrofoam cups?

I’ll hazard an answer. Poetry binds solitudes. It enacts a central human paradox: we exist as singular selves, yet can only know them through our relations. A poem creates a presence that is so physically, emotionally, and intellectually charged that we encounter ourselves in our response to it. The encounter, which occurs in language, preserves and enlarges our solitude and points out our connections. Pyrotechnic poets, such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Adrienne Rich, set a charge that reverberates among multitudes, changing the shape of our social relations and, inescapably, our individual and collective consciousness. “