Category: culture
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Parrot Addenda
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Since the Summer of 2018, I have been writing a series of stanzas in rhyme royal, mostly on the subject of Brexit. Each has been written as a separate item, rather than as part of a longer poem. They were produced in response to, and often very soon after, various events and announcements that occurred…
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Parrot Speaks of Youth and Hope
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Skelton’s parrot is a bird of paradise. But he mustn’t go on too long. If he has truth to tell in our storm, and wants to be heard, he has to be strategic. His cage is also his sanctuary. … continue reading
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Parrot Speaks of Law and Dust
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The caged parrot keeps talking and seems to have quite a lot to say. His original author John Skelton was alive during the Reformation, another time in which England broke away from Europe in various ways. For the Reformation was not just a matter of religious upheavals and a royal divorce. There was also a…
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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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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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Rafts in the Flood
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The lords of misrule continue to flood our minds and lives with their disgraceful doings. But I can speak here of two small developments which, for me at least, are cheering and act in a way as rafts. One concerns a new website, designed by Joseph Wolf : https://poemsforthewall.org Here is an image taken from…