Category: mental health
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Live Music Sweeps the Board
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A few years ago, I worked free-lance in central London as a sort of facilitator on behalf of the local mental health services. I had been trained as a social worker and for decades previously had worked as a manager of community centres for people with long term mental health diagnoses. But nowadays, I…
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An Exhibition of Bilingual Poems
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I’m uploading below a set of photographs of an exhibition I organised a few months ago, in Clifton Cathedral, Bristol. The picture above is just one example. Several pictures show, as this does, how the exhibition looked in its setting. Several more show single poems close up, the words made somehow even stronger in their…
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A Poem Exhibition in Clifton Cathedral
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About three months ago, I organised an exhibition of poem-posters in Clifton Cathedral. This is a bold and wonderful Roman Catholic building in Bristol, designed and built in the 1960’s and 70’s. The exhibition took place on a balcony there, built above the font and overlooking the altar. As soon as I am able, I…
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Augustin Doing Life
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“Augustin Doing Life” is the title of a poem I wrote eight years ago. The Augustin of the title is Augustin Robespierre, younger brother of the much better known and also more fanatical Maximilien Robespierre, both swept along by the upheavals of the French Revolution, and quite early in their lives, destroyed by them. They were…
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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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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…