Category: General
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Travels of the Last Emperor
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I wrote “Travels of the Last Emperor” at different times over a period of around twenty years. It is made up of five poems of varying length. This spring 2014, a friend filmed me reading them in Mallorca, in an old monastery on top of a hill. You can access the film here on You-tube.…
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Our present democracies will not rescue us from ourselves.
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For the young, it will already seem a long time ago that the Soviet Communist bloc effectively closed down, its remarkable leader Mikhail Gorbachev introducing “Perestroika,” its various constituent states, including Russia itself, “giving way” to democracy in remarkably quick succession. A major symbol of that dramatic and joyful time was the destruction of the…
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Resurrection
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You have left petals on old stones and memories that chase the rhythms of my blood and activate my bones and through my gathering shadow guide me. Are you re-born in me or have I eaten you, perforce, that I take your scent with me through my days and…
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Word Play
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May words work. May mine look you in the eye and having found you out work on you right there. Fraud and felon play with words, seeking only to deceive and buy and bend you to their will. I must work a cleaner way my words releasing you to where you belong. Words must…
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Fable 14 – Rome Burning
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This short piece offers a kind of action-guide for times of crisis and confusion. Here is a link to it. It proposes a system for prioritising what to do, when it seems that there are always several things that need to be done at once, and they are all clamouring for your attention. For instance,…
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Where in the World does Poetry Belong ?
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I run a project called “Poems for…” It offers poem-posters free of charge for public display. Many of the poems are bilingual, with over fifty different languages represented so far. The poems go to schools and libraries and healthcare waiting rooms across the UK and in fact all over the world. Here below is a…
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The Cleaning of Our Streets
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I have just signed the Hacked Off Declaration of Support for the Royal Charter for Press Self-Regulation. All three political parties are committed to this interpretation of Leveson’s recommendations. The rival version is known as “Ipso” and is favoured by most of the Press, all of whose previous systems of self-regulation have been a hollow…