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, the poet had a recognised… continue reading
Tag mental health poems
Word across Distance
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 of the university’s… continue reading
Rafts in the Flood
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 the site. It illustrates… continue reading
Dignity and Light
Two new poem collections are about to be uploaded on the website of the project I run, called “Poems for…“.
One of them is on Learning Disability and is called “Poems for… Bridges to Learning Disability” The other is on mental ill-health and is called “Poems for…Self at Sea“.
The poems in both collections bring… continue reading