Category: Prose

green shoots and heart beats on a turn around my blog

When I tidied up this website to become a way for people to learn about my poems I decided to take a turn at blogging. I think it’s been a good thing for me. But in doing so I was keen to avoid working too hard at it to make it too smooth, to seem too pushy in a way. My ‘about’ page links this to Wabi Sabi. Maybe. Or maybe really that is a way of saying it after the fact . . .
read on here

blog thoughts

it’s coming up towards 2 years since I started blogging i commented today on ‘observations’ (original post) being my most liked post, with 19 i think i’ve not fretted too much over numbers, its just been a nice thing to do — and has led to me writing more (a good thing) i did some…

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Poetics (again) – Again

I was going back through my last year of posts and got to this:

poetics (again)

I still agree, and may have been taking for granted, but it seems obvious, but important to add – maybe this is where ‘all the best words in the best order’ come back in, in that that is the best possible path to the revelation, if we listen to what we hear very very carefully, which may sometimes mean sitting with it and distilling very carefully, which can be a bit scary when faced with the enormity you want to catch and maybe only comes with a bit of digestion, recollected in tranquility. Maybe that and the immediate revelation are two different poetrys. Maybe this is how to move a bit between the two — and maybe some personal circumstances render that more doable now, for now. Knowing to its best.

A. H / K. H-H (7th February 2020)

My Film Review of The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) is posted at Lapidus International blog

Lapidus International have kindly posted my brief review of this wonderful film about poets and getting lost in the world (much more could be said, but best is to just watch it). I’m grateful to them (especially Francesca Baker and Richard Axtell).

Lapidus International blog – The Kindergarten Teacher (2018), film review

toni (31st January 2020)

thinking about being an emerging poet in middle age

There was a famous observation I read somewhere (through a third person’s writing) that a poet is more like the captain in a painting of a ship than the actual captain of the ship. I’ve not found it in a quick google search, it may have been Emerson, I remember it as an American nineteenth century writer but can’t even remember where I read this now in recent years. But it may have been a painter or a philosopher as I think now that the comparison may have been to philosophers as sea captains, doing the bigger real task and the poet being in their small part in the painting.
. . .

thoughts

it is a false power that requires the destruction or inhibition of your power?

but that is the reality of power

and some may inhibit themselves when they see it

perhaps this explains free will – and I’d have to think and study if it relates at all to Old Nick and his hell

is it that we are allowed hell, in this sense, as removed from the divine, if we insist – we certainly do seem to insist a lot

Poetics

I’ve posted several poems recently – an intense few posts in the tradition of how I’ve been posting, very fresh and new and a bit raw. I’ve talked about that before and sharing process. There remains a sense for me that that may mean I’m posting half formed things, honest to process, but not always my best poems.

. . .

thoughts in the process of watching Killing Eve

i was thinking about Killing Eve – and wondering about kindness in it, its often not there yet in a way its central in its absence

her old boss, of the Berlin nightclub scene, there was kindness there (not in that scene), and as something they (Eve and he) could play against at times

Poetics (again)

you know all that ‘poetry is all the right words, just the right words, in the right order’ stuff well, who would argue with that? but, i was thinking – partly as i’ve been reading Rumi, and partly from my own, very occasional experience — and hey, maybe this defines my limits thus far as…

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Cairn, 2019

In ten days It will be a year since I started posting regularly and more seriously here. I’ve surprised myself, over one hundred and twenty posts – many poems written just to be posted, not all of them though and fewer recently due to work demands. Its been a great stimulus and to connect to…

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Thinking

do we create ourselves a problem if we make the lyrical problematic? even if doing so reflects what’s already problematic? like denying yourself a good hot bath? or even, perhaps, a dream of paradise?

Six months in – reviewing and thinking

First, thank you to all my visitors, likers, commenters and followers. I’ve not said much of myself really, but connecting here in the last six months has been a helpful thing for me. I rejigged these pages just to post links to published poems and writings of mine and to have a way for people…

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magician

They made me do trapeze because of my prehensile feet, even though I was scared of height, still am, for all the hanging I did by one foot from a rope catching nubile acrobats — always afraid and afraid in my fear and confusion, rebellion, I’d drop someone — I knew I must not, as…

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