Definitely my maxim

A poem is "a momentary stay against confusion", declared Robert Frost, who "carved grace out of tragedy". Art can help us to "enjoy or endure", believed Larkin. Poets are, asserted Shelley, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" Says Josephine Hart.

I say poetry brings us back to the human.

Poem Perdedores of Jacobo Valcárcel in El Alambique

Llega hasta lo más profundo, la poesía de Jacobo.

Eye kicking  poetry of  Jacobo Valcárcel.

De perdedores de Jacobo Valcárcel

Se jugaba con el gatillo cada día, cada noche,

y mis cartas estaban sobre el tapete del sufrimiento, de la indignación,

de intentar perder y era la vida una copa desnuda de alcohol de espeso árbol

de vómito muchas, tantísimas veces,

que perdedor, soñador era ser lo mejor a veces,

brindar con la copa calva de ausencia

invitar a la mesa al último perdedor ausente.

Jacobo Valcárcel

Review in goodreads of Money by Martin Amis

Readable substitute to caffeine

Money by Martin Amis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


What I truly enjoyed is the language Martin Amis uses, or more precisely his use of language. It is so dynamic and energizing that I found myself re-reading some words to test their effect again and again.

Also the feeling it constructs, of tasting, hearing, living in a dazzling city like New York.

Martin Amis will always be a favourite because he is so different and new.

View all my reviews

Valentina Cano in Boston Poetry

Hollow Woman by Valentina Cano

While the woman watched TV,

the room around her decided to leave.

To take itself away from someone

who chewed air,

who thought of nothing

but of the empty spaces between words.

The room could not stand another

minute of her breathing,

silent, strong, and tasting of the endless

cups of cheap tea cooling like bathwater in her stomach.

The room left

and the woman never noticed.

Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy

Today´s the last day to see Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy 
Royal Academy, London

Anselm Kiefer’s monumental work in ash, straw, diamonds and sunflowers dazzles in a superb retrospective.

Here I quote from Rachel Cooke-

• ......he works on a grand scale in lead, sand, gold leaf, copper wire, broken ceramics, straw, wood and even diamonds, his ideas informed by, among many other subjects, the Holocaust, Egyptian mythology, the architecture of Albert Speer, German Romanticism and the poems of Paul Celan. He is the kind of artist whose physical presence – in his black T-shirts and rimless spectacles, he puts one in mind just lately of an executive from Apple – always comes as a surprise. How, you wonder, can a man who deals with so much weighty stuff have such regular-looking shoulders, such ordinary biceps? And why is he smiling? Doesn’t the darkness ever threaten to engulf him? Doesn’t his project – now more than 40 years old – sometimes pinch at his sanity?

A poem by Paul Celan, To Stand in The Shadow

To stand in the Shadow
of the Wound’s-Mark in the Air.

For no-one and nothing to Stand.
Unknown,
for you
alone.

With all, that within finds Room,
even without
Speech. 

I Eye

Need weekend inspiration look at the skies here-

AGNI Online: and today Proust paints distance by Mary Buchinger

And I felt the splashing looking and reading Mary Buchinger´s poem:

and today Proust paints distance by Mary Buchinger

glass jars—
                  the village children

    lower them
                      into the Vivonne for minnows


crystal containers   of    flowing crystal
        insoluble glass     impalpable water 

         the fish flashing,
         caught and carried for bait


     come, time, come
bite,

                                      that child-once-was
                                          that splash in a jar

Writer´s sleeping habits

Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized

by Maria Popova“In both writing and sleeping,” Stephen King observed in his excellent meditation on the art of “creative sleep” and wakeful dreaming, “we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.”...................

SLAM POETRY DOES NOT EXIST

Interesting article on poetry genre: Slam Poetry.


SLAM POETRY DOES NOT EXIST: HOW A MOVEMENT HAS BEEN MISCONSTRUED AS A GENRE

By Chris Gilpin

Lately, I’ve been meeting slam poets who have never participated in a poetry slam. Let me be clear. I’m not talking about spoken word artists working outside of the slam movement; these are self-proclaimed slam poets with no interest in participating in poetry slams. They’ve never attended one and have no intention of doing so.

This is a bit absurd but understandable, given how many people think that slam is a poetic genre rather than a grassroots movement. If you believe that slam poetry is a poetic genre, then you should be able to learn the technique and craft of making slam poems and do so in any context. Why bother with the potential let down of a poetry competition? Just find some slam poetry on YouTube and imitate whatever style has the most hits. Tada! You’re a slam poet!

 

There’s only one drawback to this approach: slam poetry does not exist.......

Drawings of my one of my best friends in The Protection - Maya Askari : Balboa Press

Drawings of my one of my best friends Julia Condon in

The Protection - Maya Askari : Balboa Press

POETRY: 53 BY FRED D’AGUIAR

53

Happened to someone else,
some place else. Until now,
I greet these hot, wet, wide eyes.

Here comes that red double-decker
bus, with this same number,
that I rode from South London

to those West End Saturday night
clubs, in my teens, in bellbottoms,
afro and high heels.

My father never reached my age,
dead before 52. I look like him now,
caught up with myself in rapid

time, in an offhand year, counting
down to naught by counting up.

Fred D’Aguiar

53 by Fred D’Aguiar first appeared in Bare Fiction Magazine Issue 1 in December 2013.

Urban ceiling Photo by Maria Castro Dominguez -- National Geographic Your Shot

Urban ceiling Photo by Maria Castro Dominguez -- National Geographic Your Shot

Look at what´s new here

Lifted by Jo Bell. You can also see film.

Check out "Lifted by Jo Bell" on Vimeo , Jo Bell´s poetry is alive.          

LIFTED

Lock 30, Trent & Mersey Canal            

The land says – come uphill: and water says
I will. But take it slow.

A workman’s ask and nothing fancy –
Will you? Here’s an answer, engineered.            

A leisurely machine, a box of oak and stone;
the mitred lock, the water’s YES.

We’re stopped. The bow bumps softly
at the bottom gate, and drifts.

All water wants, all water ever wants,
is to fall. So, we use the fall to lift us,

make of water its own tool, as simple
as a crowbar or a well-tied knot;

open up the paddles, let it dam and pucker,
swell and with it, lift us like a bride, a kite,

a wanted answer, breath no longer held
or like a boat. We’re on our way

and rising. Water rushes in like fools;
these tonnages that slip across the cill,

all dirty-bottle green and gathering,
the torrent rushing to release itself, a giddy hurl

then slower, slow until it ends in glassy bulges,
hints of aftermath: a cool and thorough spending.

Wait, then, for the shudder in the gate,
the backward-drifting boat that tells you

there and here are level, an imbalance
righted. Ask of it – water, help me rise

and water says I will.

Poem by Ko Un

Just my kind of poem. Says so much.

The Poetic Blending Machine 2: Thoughts on a Poem by Ko Un (with Ideas from Mark Turner) by Jerome Sala

In a recent issue of Poetry Magazine, I came across a translation (by Suji Kwock Kim and Sunja Kim Kwock) of a poem by Korean poet Ko Un.  It caught my eye because, in a few brief lines, the poem created a whole, mysterious imaginative world.

EAR

Someone's coming 
from the other world.

Hiss of night rain.

Someone's going there now.
The two are sure to meet.

One way to read this poem is as a reflection on birth and death.  A sort of balance is envisioned; one person leaves the world, another one comes (or perhaps returns).  What interests me most, though, is that moment when the poet imagines both persons meeting.

Where is it, I ask myself, that this meeting occurs?  I suppose it is a kind of Bardo state, a liminal space visible to the poet when things are murky (like on a rainy night) in the ordinary world.  But as mysterious as this imaginative space may be, it insists itself upon the speaker's consciousness, hissing into his awareness.

Picture the poet

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Picture the poet. Includes some of my all time favourites.

 

Benjamin Zephaniah, Les Murray and Carol Ann Duffy

A selection of photographic portraits of poets from the National Portrait Gallery Collection.

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 186, Salman Rushdie

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 186, Salman Rushdie

John Keats

Look at what´s new here

John Keats beautifully read, Just listen and feel- Great Spirits Now On Earth Are Sojourning - Read by Samuel West 
See it at  Poetry and New Writing News
  

Ursula Le Guin and Neil Gaiman

What a fantastic combination, Ursula Le Guin and Neil 

Gaiman . I do agree with what she says :

“We who live by writing and publishing want – and should demand – our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit,” she added. “Its name is freedom.”

Vampire comedy

What We Do in the Shadows 

U2 - With Or Without You

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Franz Liszt - Love Dream (Art by Monet)

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Claude Monet

Love this slideshow of Claude Monet. He is definitely the master of colour. 

NEW NEWSPAPER TODAY

The maría Daily

NEW ONLINE NEWS MAGAZINE UPDATED EVERYDAY

A moment to remember. They remain in ones mindscape.

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Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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One of my favourite poems by Schelley

Ozymandias

(1792-1822)



               
    I MET a Traveler from an antique land,
    Who said, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
    And on the pedestal these words appear:
    "My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings."
    Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
    No thing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Honoré Daumier

Honoré Daumier's scandalous French cartoons – in pictures

Adore his sketches. They  really say a lot.

Lost Dylan Thomas notebook

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Lost Dylan Thomas notebook may cast light on his most impenetrable poems

Love hearing such nice words from TheatreCloud @TheatreCloud

Look at what´s new here

#FF wonderfully creative poets! #WarPoetryToday @beardymanpoet @grannygal @PodsmeadBL @Dee_Nessaa @MrJMessy @Tjtrott @marcasdom

— TheatreCloud (@TheatreCloud) noviembre 14, 2014

Stephen Fry´s fun narration

Hope you enjoy this video as much as I did.

Stephen Fry narrates foul-mouthed paean to children's dinnertime  You Have to F***ing Eat by Adam Mansbach

Mapping Scotland in Poetry

Scotland in poetry

The idea is fanastic, geography and poetry in dialogue. Wouldn´t it be great to have a poetry map of every place in the world!

We all know poems about Scotland but can the shape and nature of Scotland be drawn entirely in poetry? asks STANZA .

SOUND LIKE YOURSELF

Kurt Vonnegut´s writing advice

Offers seven deceptively simple principles for writers:

• Find a subject you care about.
• Do not ramble, though.
• Keep it simple.
• Have the guts to cut.
• Sound like yourself.
• Say what you mean to say.
• Pity the readers.

More War Poetry

Gibson´s War Poetry

"Breakfast" from the ordinary soldier´s voice.

Breakfast

We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead.
I bet a rasher to a loaf of bread
That Hull United would beat Halifax
When Jimmy Strainthorpe played full-back instead
Of Billy Bradford. Ginger raised his head
And cursed, and took the bet; and dropped back dead.
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead.

Written by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962), a close friend of Rupert Brooke and a protégé of Edward Marsh.

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