https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/07/cerys-matthews-poetry-and-music-closely-think

“The Welsh word “cerdd” can be translated as either “verse” or “music”. It covers both meanings, because, as we know from history, when the great bards were performing their poetry it would be accompanied by music. The two were always intertwined and music, poetry, spoken word and performance have been a part of our society for centuries. The festivals called “eisteddfod” combine literature, music and poetry. These cultural competitions were not just for the rich or educated, but were held in pubs and other meeting places and brought everyone together. They are part of an oral tradition entrenched in Welsh society as it is in many other cultures, as diverse as the Somali tradition of oral storytelling or praise poetry in India and Pakistan.

The Poet in the City festival of Poetry and Lyrics is another way of bringing people together and highlighting the idea that poetry and music are not, and have never really been, separate. The events will delve into the nooks and crannies of many different genres to draw out this connection and show how it lives in unexpected places. Take punk, for example: with the exception of artists such as Patti Smith, it’s not usually associated with poetry. But Steve Lamacq, along with the Adverts’ TV Smith, Pauline Murray of Penetration and Crass’s Penny Rimbaud, will consider a less celebrated side of the movement: the lyrics about tenderness, love and social commentary that articulated a generation’s experience of the world. It is work that fits easily into a poetic tradition.

Elsewhere we only have to go to children’s poetry and nursery rhymes for more evidence. The playfulness of poetic language makes much more sense to them and provides a highly imaginative means of connecting with the world – they don’t question it, and the music sticks with them. John Hegley will be exploring this in his PO-NG (poem-song) writing workshop for families.”

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/a-faith-that-crucifies-women/101241.article

Extract-

In Hampson’s worldview Christianity is on the scrapheap not only because it cannot possibly be true, but because it harms women. Since Christianity is anchored in a particular time, events from that point in history become a “benchmark” to which constant reference is made. “The circumstances of that past age are propelled into the present, influencing people, not least, at a subconscious level,” says Hampson. Obedience and worship are inescapably fundamental to Christianity. This, she says, must be a problem for feminists who have struggled to free themselves from patriarchal dominion. In her new book, After Christianity, she takes this argument a stage further: “I began to see that the very raison d’etre of the Christian myth was to support men as superior over women, that it served to legitimise how men see themselves in the world.”,

.

In After Christianity she acknowledges that the Christian myth is a symbol system “which has carried people’s love of God” – though “we need to reformulate what God is”. Like the 19th-century German Protestant philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher whose work inspired her and who talks of human beings lying “directly on the bosom of the infinite world”, she undertakes theology because she believes there is another dimension to reality.

The book explores case studies from the Oxford Religious Experiences Research Unit, one of them being the story of a woman who goes to the cinema with her husband. Part-way through the film she smells burning and has an irresistible urge to return home. On entering the house they are enveloped by smoke and manage to rescue their baby and babysitter just in time. “I don’t think one can rule out the possibility that something else is brought into play here.” She is at pains to point out that such an experience does not constitute a break in the natural order. “Such experiences always have been and always will be, they just have not been discussed in the annals of theological academia.”

http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=daphnehampson

http://www.daphnehampson.co.uk/Daphne_Hampson_Homepage/Home.html

MT: In your Preface you movingly acknowledge your personal debt to Kierkegaard, saying how important he has been for your own intellectual journey (“a source of delight and edification”). If, God forbid, Kierkegaard hadn’t existed who would you turn to fill (some of) the gaps?

DH: This is a lovely question but I absolutely don’t know how to answer it! I simply cannot imagine who I should be or what conclusions I should have come to had Kierkegaard not been on the scene. I have read him, as I said, since a teenager – and I am now 70. He has been inextricably wound into my life in that he has been a constant dialogue partner as I have engaged with his thought. That is exactly what he desired his readers should do.

For myself, Kierkegaard allowed me, at an earlier stage and with far greater clarity than might otherwise have been the case, to arrive at an understanding as to what it is that Christianity implies and claims. I may have come down on the other side of the fence than he; but it has been important to think this out – and at least we should have understood each other as to what the issues are. So I’m grateful. I’ve also thought a lot about what is the difference in historical context between us: what is it that has changed more generally?

But also in other subtle ways – as I’ve indicated – he has been endlessly edifying. Kierkegaard has enabled me to think out what my values are or confirmed me in what I already thought. Last but not least I think it has sometimes encouraged me that Kierkegaard could keep going, all those hours working on his own, while receiving little recognition. Kierkegaard speaks to one as an individual in a way that few authors do. That is why one comes to care about him – however much one might think differently.

MT: Why and how is Kierkegaard still relevant? Why should we read him?

DH: I think I may have answered this question. Or perhaps Kierkegaard can best answer it when he writes: ‘I know what Christianity is. And to get this properly recognized must be, I should think, to every person’s interest, whether he be a Christian or not, whether his intention is to accept Christianity or to reject it.’ People need to stop faffing about and to consider the validity of what it is that Christianity maintains. Anything else won’t do.

But others will surely read Kierkegaard for the sheer joy of the beauty of his prose (which comes through even in translation), for his insights into human life (including its pain), and not least for his wicked humour and his joy. At the end of the day I have to say of Kierkegaard that read him on account of his tender love of God, which I in some sense and in some moments share, even though I may have come to judge Christianity otherwise.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69479/the-poetics-of-disobedience

Extract

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58727/an-age-of-miracles

With this poem I thee glue to’t bed

With my singing I  thee shamed in ‘t shed

I’m that honest, we were never wed

With my gurglin’ voice, I drove him mad

Is Grandad ‘ere?Tell him  mi finger’s red

Weers our Mam?Am ‘ungry  for  new bread

Am just a girl from Nelson with his head

We used to say Am not I am

And we said in’t   shed not in the shed.We had no shed except for coal as we had an outside closet

And  we called mother, our Mam or mi Mam

My mother called her father, Mi Dad

And her sister,our Lizzie.

I called my father Daddy and as he died he  never got to be Mi Dad

Inverted photo of table lamp

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51607/casualty-56d22f7512b97

Last week I felt happy all  alone
Remembering how I wound my mother’s  wool
Doing nothing,there I felt at home

But now I’ve banged my  pointed funny bone
I sit here clutching elbow, keeping still
Last week I felt happy and alone

What is it that makes the elbow prone
To throbbing  as it hits the window sill
Doing nothing,how I felt at home

When no-one hears ,there’s no motive to groan
Though eyes can weep when pain makes us feel ill
Last week I felt happy and alone

Would we turn to statues of grey stone
If no-one ever hears our crying shrill
Doing nothing,how I felt at home

My elbow is alright but I’ve no will
I’ll have to let Len Cohen sing me well
Last week I felt happy all  alone
Doing nothing,thus I found my home

http://www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com/danagioiapoetrya.html

This is well worth reading

Extract

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises.

—Caliban, The Tempest

let me begin with three crucial observations about the art of poetry. First, it is the oldest form of literature. Indeed, it is the primal form of all literature. Poetry even predates history because it not only existed, but flourished before the invention of writing. As an oral art, it did not require the alphabet or any other form of visual inscription to develop and perfect a vast variety of meters, forms, and genres. Before writing, poetry—or perhaps one should say —stood at the center of culture as the most powerful way of remembering, preserving, and transmitting the identity of a tribe, a culture, a nation. Verse was humanity’s first memory and broadcast technology—a technology originally transmitted only by the human body. In Robert Frost’s astute formulation, poetry was ‘a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.’

Frost’s pithy definition is usefully ponderable. He calls poetry ‘a way of remembering,’ which is to say a mnemonic technology to preserve human experience. He claims the loss of what it preserves ‘would impoverish us,’ which is to say that poetry enriches human consciousness or, at the very least, protects things of common value from depredation. Finally, he asserts that poetry maintains these virtues against the human danger ‘to forget.’ Here Frost acknowledges that the art opposes the natural forces of time, mortality, and oblivion, which humanity must face to discover and preserve its meaning. As Frost s

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/28/can-you-be-too-intelligent

“You could, of course, say that intelligence, properly understood, is a combination of wisdom, good judgment, logical dexterity and factual knowledge, and by definition, you can’t have too much of that. I’d like to agree, but I fear it is already too late to reclaim the word “intelligence” for this well-rounded cognitive amalgam. Intelligence has been broken down into small parts, and we can rely on each one to excess.”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2005/dec/17/familyandrelationships.family

” The less literal we are about families, the more the best qualities of that unit can be woven into wider, social relations. We have many offspring from our behaviour and only some of them are children.”

http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/16681/auto/Henrik-Nordbrandt/AT-THE-GATE

I have spent ten thousand hours just writing
Poetry and thoughts, some  pretty humorous
I tell you now, my  writing  is exciting

If I were  male tiger I’d be biting
Eating little creatures , oh so numerous
I have spent ten thousand hours just writing

I clean  my nails and all the kitchen gratings
While hoping politicians will get more Profumous
I tell you now, my  writing  is exciting

With  my  female intellect so  under-rated
I managed to be a mite consumerous
I have spent ten thousand pounds on lighting

I believe  that poetry is delighting
I write on paper  leaves , they claim deciduous
I tell you whoo, my writing is exciting.

I know my inspiration’s pretty wonderous
And God has a loud voice some  folk call thunderous
I have spent ten thousand hours just writing
I tell you now, my  writing  is surviving

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/apr/27/poem-of-the-week-aggression-diary-by-annemarie-austin

Aggression Diary

They had become concerned about him and started 
to keep an aggression diary.

The leaning is a clue. Intent controls
the spine’s tilt towards whatever.
See how he slants in his not-so-easy
chair, ignoring the burbling television.

Try to know exactly where he’s looking.
The file shows the outside signs
of inner roaring can be small. A knuckle
gone white. The stretched-out throat.

*

Piranesi’s Carceri: a man is racked,
the only sky above shows through a giant
treadmill, several pulleys dangle ropes
over indeterminate spiked objects.

Be careful what the eye feeds on
when it can’t get out from inside
the walls and all the stairs lead
nowhere, the drawbridge drawn up.

And consider the weaponry to hand
in fire, bunched cloth, a stone dislodged…

*

Lightning ignited a dry tree in the garden.
He leaned still farther into the room
from his chair. Flames perhaps played
intermittently in the window glass.

The other spread his arms like a fierce
swan its wings, falling backward.
There was a white rushing, flailing.
There were teeth on show on both sides.

And then, and then: what you would, expect
in cries and interventions, heat quenched
eventually, the furniture rearranged,
a return to the vertical through the house.

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Inverted light turns blue like Plath moonscapes
The light of candles turns into strange flames
Thus  to breed  our fears, we ,stupid, ruminate

From a vantage point outside that evil draped
We see the loss and show the red of shame
Inverted light turns blue like Plath moonscapes

From our own dead-heads may we escape?
We want to grow and not  allot more blame
As brooding  on our fears, we ruminate

The ghost of Plath  shall  linger in dark shapes
And stutter as  the dead call out her name
Inverted light turns blue like Plath moonscape

And women murmur, shall I  too be raped?
All I want is sharing life and pain
Don’t brood  on your fears, they’ll germinate

In our sleep, we see the theatre’s dreams
Hear our minds bemused, old warriors’ scream
Inverted light turns blue like Plath moonscapes
Thus bleeding  from our  hearts, we  navigate