https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/04/fairies-fairy-doors-wayford-woods-somerset

Beginning

If you go down to the woods today – at least in Somerset’s Wayford Woods – you are sure of a big surprise. It is not teddy bears this time, but uncontrolled immigration and house construction without planning permission – by fairies. More soberly, the trustees of Wayford Woods, near Crewkerne, are perplexed about what to do about the 200 or so tiny doors that have been screwed on to trees, and which purport to be entrances to the homes of the “little folk”. The 29-acre Somerset wood is accessible – legally as well as physically – and children have been leaving gifts and messages for the fairies for some years now, part of a wider trend for fairy doors.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/caterpillar-butterfly-metamorphosis-explainer/

Extract

The caterpillar digests itself, releasing enzymes to dissolve all of its tissues. If you were to cut open a cocoon or chrysalis at just the right time, caterpillar soup would ooze out. But the contents of the pupa are not entirely an amorphous mess. Certain highly organized groups of cells known as imaginal discs survive the digestive process. Before hatching, when a caterpillar is still developing inside its egg, it grows an imaginal disc for each of the adult body parts it will need as a mature butterfly or moth—discs for its eyes, for its wings, its legs and so on.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?safe=active&source=hp&ei=xPn7XKr5GsKMa-eXq8AH&q=chrysalis+meaning&oq=chrysalis&gs_l=psy-ab.1.3.0l3j0i131j0l6.1228.6051..8015…0.0..0.304.1069.7j2j0j1……0….1..gws-wiz…..0.rNCFV2THxHc

Origin

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/05/on-poetry-social-change-claudia-rankine-discusses-adrienne-rich-at-new-yorker

Extract:

Midway through a cold and snowy semester in the Berkshires, I read for the first time James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” from 1962, and two collections by Rich, her 1969 “Leaflets” and her 1971–1972 “Diving into the Wreck.” In Baldwin’s text I underlined the following:

Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself.

Rich’s interrogation of the “guarding” of systems was the subject of everything she wrote in the years leading up to my introduction to her work. “Leaflets,” “Diving into the Wreck,” and “The Dream of a Common Language,” from 1978, were all examples of this, as were her other works, all the way to her final poems, in 2012. And though I did not have the critic Helen Vendler’s experience upon encountering Rich—“Four years after she published her first book, I read it in almost disbelieving wonder; someone my age was writing down my life. . . . Here was a poet who seemed, by a miracle, a twin: I had not known till then how much I had wanted a contemporary and a woman as a speaking voice of life”—I was immediately drawn to Rich’s interest in what echoes past the silences in a life that wasn’t necessarily my life.

In my copy of Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken,” the faded yellow highlighter still remains recognizable on pages after more than thirty years: “Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society, language, the structures of thought.” As a nineteen-year-old, I read in Rich and Baldwin a twinned dissatisfaction with systems invested in a single, dominant, oppressive narrative. My initial understanding of feminism and racism came from these two writers in the same weeks and months.

Read more at the New Yorker.

My photo

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/jun/18/poetry-can-heal-it-helped-me-through-depression

Extract:

For me, poetry is medicine. The poet Les Murray writes: “I’d disapproved of using poetry as personal therapy, but the Black Dog taught me better. Get sick enough, and you’ll use any remedy you’ve got.” In the 19th century, people in asylums were encouraged to write poetry, while William Cowper (1731-1800) wrote that, in his depressions, “I find writing, especially poetry, my best remedy.” Orpheus was both healer and poet and his lyre could vanquish melancholy.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n23/adam-phillips/the-soul-of-man-under-psychoanalysis

Extract

When Harold Bloom writes with his useful (and usual) fervour about Eliot that ‘to have been born in 1888, and to have died in 1965, is to have flourished in the Age of Freud, hardly a time when Anglo-Catholic theology, social thought and morality were central to the main movement of mind,’ he is writing with unnecessary triumphalism. The idea of ‘the main movement of mind’ was, after all, as precious to Eliot as it is to Bloom. If in some spurious, putative cultural competition the language of Freud has won out over Eliot’s language of Anglo-Catholic theology; if some of us, or most of us, are now more likely to talk about sexuality and violence and childhood when we talk about people rather than to talk about the soul and original sin and redemption, it is worth remembering just what this transition from the language of sin to the language of unconscious desire entails. It is naive to believe – as both Eliot and Freud showed us in their different ways – that languages could ever be anything other than the traces of their own histories. We would be right to assume that there were also continuities and evolutions where there seemed to be ruptures and revolutions. Both Freud and Eliot write out of a history of descriptions of self-division, of the individual in conflict, riven in one way or another. It is no accident, so to speak, that R.D. Laing took his title The Divided Self from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.

If we take self-division and conflict for granted, as Freud and Eliot clearly do; and if we take seriously the problem, and not merely the progress, of secularising a language; then the question becomes this: does this division, this conflict we experience in ourselves, reveal our sinfulness, and if not what does it reveal? It may just reveal the fact of division; and yet so much depends on the way in which we assign moral status to the combatants. In this agonistic picture of ourselves – by which we are clearly compelled if not actually bewitched – there is an anxiety about the division of the moral spoils. Once we relinquish the reassuring but sparse intelligibility of a world of good and bad we begin to experience the vertigo, the disarray of what is politely called moral complexity. When we don’t understand something – and especially when we have taken understanding to be our currency – we are prone to coerce and oversimplify. ‘It is human,’ Eliot writes, using the difficult word,

when we do not understand another human being, and cannot ignore him, to exert an unconscious pressure on that person to turn him into something that we can understand: many husbands and wives exert this pressure on each other. The effect on the person so influenced is liable to be the repression and distortion, rather than the improvement, of the personality; and no man is good enough to have the right to make another over in his own image.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/what-is-a-poem/281835/

Extract:

There is at least one kind of utility that a poem can embody: ambiguity. Ambiguity is not what school or society wants to instill. You don’t want an ambiguous answer as to which side of the road you should drive on, or whether or not pilots should put down the flaps before take-off. That said, day-to-day living—unlike sentence-to-sentence reading—is filled with ambiguity: Does she love me enough to marry? Should I fuck him one more time before I dump him?

But such observations still don’t tell us much about what a poem really is. Try crowd-sourcing for an answer. If you search Wikipedia for “poem,” it redirects to “poetry”: “a form of literary art which uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonoaesthetics, sound symbolism, etc.” Fine English-professor speak, but it belies the origins of the word. “Poem” comes from the Greek poíēma, meaning a “thing made,” and a poet is defined in ancient terms as “a maker of things.” So if a poem is a thing made, what kind of thing is it?

Photo by Katherine

Writing is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within

Franz Kafka

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/30/julie-myerson-my-writing-day

“The author and columnist on her powers of concentration, the importance of Pilates and the trials of co-existing with an inquisitive tabby cat

Julie Myerson

Sat 30 Dec 2017