Category: arts
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Poems in Public
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Poetry once belonged only in open space – the mead hall by a great fire, where flea-bitten warriors sat at table with their lord ; or a place of worship or ceremony, the wedding, the funeral. Not in private, on paper, let alone on screen. Poetry belonged in the air between people, out loud. Accordingly,…
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Word across Distance
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The collage of photographs above records a small exhibition of bilingual poem-posters that has recently been showing in a popular public setting managed by Bristol University. The poems were selected from “Poems for the Wall,” a project I founded almost exactly twenty years ago, and still run. The exhibition went up under the stewardship…
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Dust
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The poem I’m publishing here foresees the end of the world. The false god Me n’ Mine has too many worshippers to be withstood. Besides Greed, the angel which serves Me n’ Mine most faithfully is the Lie and it is the Lie by which the false god rules and will destroy us all. …
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Poet on the Cliff
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Let’s look again at St Aldhelm’s chapel, a small square Norman building on a cliff-edge. It stands at the very tip of a promontory on the Dorset coast called – a bit confusingly – St Alban’s Head. The chapel is small and dark and inside it is very damp. This is because the door…
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Poet on the Team
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Earlier this year there was a General Election in the UK. Beforehand, Theresa May had insisted she wouldn’t call one, but apparently changed her mind whilst out walking in the hills. Perhaps she saw a fox and got over-excited. For, as we all know, the election didn’t go well for her. The fox escaped and…
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I Send Greetings from this Place
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I send greetings from this place to my neighbours across the water I bid them welcome to my mind I bid them welcome to our future and I grieve that in the present some people on this small island have been bewildered and ill-led into thinking water can be wall and a…
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The Flotsam of Frantic Dreams
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We don’t know any more where our lives belong or even where to hide. The walls of home hold nothing up or out and the door hangs slack on the hinge. Where have our lives gone ? I consult the news and the world ended several days ago. Today it’s ending all…