The building pictured here is St Aldhelm’s Chapel. It is Norman, dark and damp and situated on the edge of a Dorset cliff, facing south. Sitting there, enclosed in those thick walls, you feel a bit like being in a deep cave, but placed up high and on an edge, stubborn yet precarious. Last Autumn, I gave a poetry reading in the chapel and wrote this poem in the days beforehand, so that I could include it as part of the programme.
Posted:
A few days ago, my partner pointed her rather basic smart phone in the direction of my aging mug and held the phone there, with amazing steadiness, while I talked at it for the next three minutes.
I argued that, if a holder of public office, or applicant for public office, or candidate for election to public office, is found to have lied, that person should be tried in a court of law.
As the theft, or forging, or defrauding, of money is seen and penalised as a crime, so equally should theft or forgery of the truth, through words, be seen and penalised. For language is no less central a currency for our society’s health and proper functioning than is money, and needs to be kept equally sound and trustworthy. Freedom of Speech is a right. But – and especially for those in positions of public responsibility – truth-telling is an obligation.
I argue finally that if, in our democratic society, we see the People as being sovereign, then to steal the truth from a Sovereign People, so that they cannot make a decision that is properly informed, is to strike at the heart of the state and its functioning and is therefore a crime of High Treason. I am not making that statement as a lawyer or in any precise legal sense, but in principle I believe the argument follows and holds.
I am supporting a campaign called Brexit Justice, being conducted by a young man called Marcus J. Ball. See : http://www.brexitjustice.com/ Ball is seeking crowd funding now to enable him to take Boris Johnson to court, for an offence in Common Law entitled “Misconduct in Public Office.” Specifically, what is being referred to is that notorious lie involving the NHS, writ large on the Brexit campaign bus painted red.
It has taken Marcus a while, first, to establish that there is indeed a case under this heading and, second, to form a legal team. But the case is now established and Lewis Power QC is ready to pursue it. If successful, it will set a precedent that will make all politicians pause before acting in a way that so grossly abuses their position and the people they are supposed to represent.
The video above can also now be found on the right of this blog’s home page and here on Facebook.
Posted:
(written for Sylvia, aged 90)
Does the moment ever shrink,
as if walls are closing in,
or skyline flattening
to some endless level of empty sea ?
As hour by hour the years accumulate
it might be thought that the high
moments of your life must lose
altitude, intensity, freshness. But I
question that conclusion.
Each moment I live
adds more of me to live with,
more collated time within
my living, more seeing
of what there is to see.
One day soon,
my moment
may not fit
me any more
and I’ll have to wear
a larger size of time
to hold this larger me.
Rogan Wolf, August 2018
Posted:
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 during the weeks concerned, in connection with Brexit’s mind-numbing progress through each day – day after day of intricate insanity in order to arrive at yet more of the same.
Each separate stanza went up here on this blog – and on my facebook timeline – almost immediately after it was written. They can all still be found on this site, each in its singularity.
But I have also put them together in chronological order and with footnotes and an afterword. That collection of them, kept up to date, can be found on the right of the home page of this blog, under this same title – “Parrot Addenda.”
After I had written several of the stanzas, I included a a lovely public poems by Michael Rosen, called “These are the Hands.” It was written in 2008 to celebrate the NHS. There are various fairly obvious reasons for its inclusion. Some explanation is given in the footnotes. But I also saw it as some kind of interval and refreshing contrast.
Incidentally, the term “rhyme royal” describes an old English verse form, introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century. It consists of stanzas of seven lines each, five beats to a line. And the rhyme scheme is as follows : ababbcc. Easy.
Chaucer himself used this verse form and in the next century, so did John Skelton in his long satire “Speak, Parrot.” (I have made my own short and contemporary version, part “translation,” of this extraordinary poem and later shortened it further into an audio-visual version, set in the top of a tower – the Tyndale Monument above North Nibley. For both versions, see the right hand column of the home page, here. Obviously, “Parrot Addenda” makes direct and constant reference to Skelton’s “Speak, Parrot” and – much less directly – to the work and life of William Tyndale. The two men were pretty well contemporaries).
Rhyme royal did not stop with Skelton. Shakespeare used it for one of his poems and so did Wordsworth. Later still, both Yeats and WH Auden wrote poems which used this form.
Thank you to my friend Roger Chaffin for suggesting the idea of delivering myself via rhyme royal stanza !
Posted:
Who is Mr Corbyn ? Mr Corbyn is a mist, a mild man standing on a platform made of our storm, carrying our projections. How to disentangle the yearnings of the young audience and the nightmares of the old one, from this slight, ageing man on the platform ?
He has a life time behind him of stubborn, non-compliant conviction and there is warmth in him.
But it is a lifetime of mainly solid and detailed work in committee, coming up with awkward little points of order with which to fluster the Chair.
Surely here is a man of small print and stubborn fixities, leaning on an old and clanky set of commandments as an extension of himself, just another fundamentalist among so many others. And he is dreaming his way to a version of Brexit that belongs, perhaps, in the minutes somewhere and accords, perhaps, with one or another of his own points of order somewhere.
But in the real and present world of flesh and devil and huge forces and rushing shapes, there is a gaping hole in this nation where a leader should be.
Posted:
They keep coming, still in Rhyme Royal. Once it was the parrot who begged liberty to speak. But now he’s become the town crier, in a cage, caught in a storm. Today’s stanza was brought to mind by a good piece by Matthew d’Ancona. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/05/networked-far-right-tommy-robinson It was featured in The Guardian, today.
Posted:
Is this latest little necklace of words in the Rhyme Royal verse-form only a portrait of Mr Trump ?
Posted:
“Humankind cannot bear very much Reality” is a quote from the poem “Four Quartets” by TS Eliot. If humanity is ever to be buried in a graveyard, once our work is done, this quote will be writ large on our gravestone.
Posted: