In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: poems for public display

  • The 70th Birthday

    Posted:

    I posted this poem up on Facebook on July 3rd. Two weeks later, it had received 1,146 “Likes” and “Loves” and had been “shared” 5,210 times. The poem is by Michael Rosen and, in turn, he shared it on his own Facebook timeline and that separate posting was further shared many times. Michael was originally…

  • Poems in Public

    Posted:

    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,…

  • Word across Distance

    Posted:

      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…

  • Rafts in the Flood

    Posted:

    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…