March 2012
43 posts
“I met Murder on the way—”
– Shelley
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“Callous is something that hardening leaves behind”
– Gertrude Stein
“The poet’s solitude isn’t romantic, though, it is constant bewilderment”
– Ishion Hutchinson
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'Earth is on the back of an ageless iguana'
I’ve been re-reading Christian Campbell’s book of poems Running the Dusk. One of the poems in the book is one I keep coming back to again and again, ‘Iguana’. It begins like a standard occasional poem: “My friend from Guyana
/ was asked in Philadelphia
/ if she was from “Iguana.”” What follows is a sombre affirmation of the value of the Caribbean identity.[[MORE]] The...
“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”
– Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’
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“Fame came to him at an age
when already long begun
was his way of moving off.”
– Vahni Capildeo, Undraining Sea
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“He was content with a shovel, sunlight
weeping in his arm-pits”
– Vladimir Lucien, ‘Stone’
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Love & impossible objects
“A trick vessel is a type of mechanical puzzle. It is an impossible object; a magical trick that seems to do something it should not; that should not, logically, be possible. I was fascinated by this idea and how it is a metaphor for so many processes: for art, for the imagination, for love, for memory; for history; for politics and for power. I hope the book deals with these things and...
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'And they flew'
Apollinaire said:
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high.
Come to the edge!
And they came
And he pushed them
And they flew
***
Christopher Logue, ‘Come to the Edge’
***
Reading a poem like this just makes you stop. Stop whatever you are doing and read it. Read it again. Study it, admire it, love it. The purity of its lines, the...
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“For all his work with words
a simple thing like
naming the dog eludes him....”
– Mervyn Taylor, No Back Door
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'Trick Vessels' is out now!
Find more information at the Shearsman website here.
“A human is an animal with his clothes off”
– Lucien Freud
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“Over the cage floor the horizons come”
– Ted Hughes, ‘The Jaguar’
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“I love you as the plant that never blooms”
– Pablo Neruda
“Work is love made visible.”
– Kahlil Gibran
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Two poems at tongues of the ocean
Photo by Andre Bagoo
Am grateful to have two poems from Trick Vessels in the current issue of tongues of the ocean, the online literary journal run by Nicolette Bethel.
Black ink declared All men to be equal but Spines, rigged like chains, Choked other limbs: Feathered men Replaced.
READ more from ‘Floating Vessels’ here and ‘Landslide’ here.
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“At the end of the year the stars go out”
– W.S. Merwin, The Pupil
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“What’s the point of words if I can’t
own them all?”
– Catherine Pierce
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“Unmercied, I am bound in my own veins”
– Nicholas Laughlin, from Small Husband
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“I too wish to know
Everything about flowering trees.”
– Benjamin Paloff, The Politics
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“She is like a knife blade
that has been too much sharpened”
– Vahni Capildeo, Undraining Sea
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“To you
dead slave
from me, a living one”
– Martin Carter, To a Dead Slave 