‘A taste for the poetry of William Empson may always have to be queer one’, or so spoke my thoughts as I get to cataloguing my few books (alas the critical texts – even the wondrous Milton’s God disappeared under an earlier cull, a misadvised one, of my library). Empson felt poetry was about emotion … More The queer poetry of William Empson
I could be Dante because, as yet, I have read only extracts of what is considered by some the greatest poem of the modern world. Moreover, I have been preparing to read it for so long that the task of cataloguing these volumes is raising my cultural guilt to new and higher levels than ever. … More Let’s be Dante!
When I were five, I wore a plastic swordTo make my fantasy of Shakie’s ‘DickThe Turd’, heroic tho’ a villain, boredOf bowing to lesser kings, cringing sick-With-fancies sycophants to restrainingRealities. To change the sad bad worldEven then was my aim: rid of feigningWe would, I’d ensure it, red flag unfurledMake level those peaks of false … More ‘When I were five, I wore a plastic sword’: my child hero then, not Hugh MacDiarmid’s hero in his ‘Hymn to Lenin’ [but confused with Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ in my childish brain].
What is it to be confident? Usually mythologies are based around what ‘confidence’ should mean. The Viking sea captains and jarls of the Orkneyninga Saga are a strong subject for a literature in which boys dream of the men they might become but adolescence was a fraught and painful thing for George Mackay Brown (GMB), … More The queer confidence of a shy man: George Mackay Brown (GMB) and his late novel ‘Vinland’, where “boys love to range freely in the country of their imagination, and there they are captains and jarls”.
In an earlier blog post (see it at this link if you wish) about Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s Strange Beach, I ended it with a promise, or is it a threat, that: ‘I want to return to them. Maybe I will, for I have more to say of the brilliant things in Andrew McMillan’s book blurb on … More ‘The poetic phrase is constantly thinking, is forever rebuilt and remade on the shifting sands of language’. Rethinking new poetry, including Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s ‘Strange Beach’ again, and now Yomi Sode’s ‘Manorism’ [2025].
Before you turn off completely in fear that the poem I found was actually found inside me and written out in my usual sadly mechanical verse style, I need to say that this poem, typed (clearly on a typewriter) and on flimsy looking but actually quite tough semi-transparent parchment paper (or at least this is … More Today I found a poem.
The poet is visiting Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh on 11th March 7 p.m. I have enjoyed very much reading the debut volume of poetry by a new queer Black poet, Oluwayseun Olayiwola, called Strange Beach. For this blog, perhaps the first of two, I will concentrate on one poem because it centres on a compliment … More ‘I eat his friends’ / applause’: a poem on ‘a compliment’, perhaps: Oluwayseun Olayiwola’s ‘There is Nothing Like That Black Voice’
‘Would You Let Yourself In’ : Leigh Bowery’s inclusively exclusive or exclusively inclusive dilemma and other contradictions inside Leigh’s outside keeps us outside his inside. This is my blog reflecting on visiting the new Leigh Bowery exhibition at Tate Modern with the help of it the Tate’s publication Alice Chasey (Senior Ed.) [2025] Leigh Bowery! … More ‘Would You Let Yourself In’ : Leigh Bowery’s inclusively exclusive or exclusively inclusive dilemma and other contradictions inside Leigh’s outside keeps us outside his inside. This is my blog reflecting on visiting the new Leigh Bowery exhibition at Tate Modern with the help of it the Tate’s publication Alice Chasey (Ed.) [2025] ‘Leigh Bowery!’
The model of behavioural change promoted by Prochaska and DiClemente to describe the usual process of escaping addiction provides the best model of how success occurs and is more durable in nature. It applies to any human behavioural task and suggests that only when serial occurrences of apparent failure in the task occur (failures which … More Lapse and the Upward Spiral of Change, sometimes!
The ‘intentional fallacy’ was proposed by Wimsatt and Beardsley in 1954 in The Verbal Icon. It suggested that no work of art, especially a literary one, should be read with an assumption that the author’s ‘intention’ with regard to the poem’s meaning or function as discourse should or indeed can be made. Yet scholarship remained … More Being ‘other than the things I touch’
Hippocrene source on Mount Helicon By GOFAS – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11613794 Like everyone else I fancy a sip of the Hippocrene. Above is a photograph claiming to be the real source of the river on Mount Helicon, long famed in mythology as the haunt of the Muses – those nymphs responsible for … More Drinking to ‘leave the world unseen’ or drinking ‘life to the lees’
They say retirement’s a time for leisureBut not necessarily for pleasure. The little iambic couplet I composed, with obligatory soft and feminine rhymes (don’t blame me though for the sexist nomenclature of the discourse of poetic technique where double rhymes are named both feminine and weak), for this sad blog is meant to look at … More “They say retirement’s a time for leisure / But not necessarily for pleasure”.
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