Tag: writing

To whom is the skill or talent ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ and why is it better hidden than in the open?

March 15, 2025

A ‘secret skill’ is coolly agreed by the AI bots on the internet to be the equivalent of a ‘hidden talent’ but, even if this is a useful equivalence  it hardly solves the main problem of what either these skills and talents are. The main issue here is: to whom is the skill or talent … More To whom is the skill or talent ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ and why is it better hidden than in the open?

‘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].

March 14, 2025

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].

Each day is a chance to learn how to rely neither on what I possess, or wish to possess, and hence no longer, perhaps, to be possessed.

March 12, 2025

In her mid-career (in 1990), the mow deceased novelist A.S. Byatt wrote a novel called Possession. This novel attempted to bring together people whose actions running in parallel between two centuries learn about the values that gather around the term posession. to do so Byatt called on most of the meanings that the word ‘posession’ … More Each day is a chance to learn how to rely neither on what I possess, or wish to possess, and hence no longer, perhaps, to be possessed.

Today I found a poem.

March 10, 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.

‘I eat his friends’  /                applause’: a poem on ‘a compliment’, perhaps: Oluwayseun Olayiwola’s ‘There is Nothing Like That Black Voice’

March 9, 2025

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 (Ed.) [2025] ‘Leigh Bowery!’

March 1, 2025

‘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!’

Being ‘other than the things I touch’

February 20, 2025

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’

Is a day being a mythical version of someone else, worth the crashing out afterwards? “Jackie is just speedin’ away / Thought she was James Dean for a day / Then I guess she had to crash / Valium would have helped that bash”.

February 18, 2025

Is a day being a mythical version of someone else, worth the crashing out afterwards? “Jackie is just speedin’ away / Thought she was James Dean for a day / Then I guess she had to crash / Valium would have helped that bash”. It feels easier for me to say why not I would … More Is a day being a mythical version of someone else, worth the crashing out afterwards? “Jackie is just speedin’ away / Thought she was James Dean for a day / Then I guess she had to crash / Valium would have helped that bash”.

The ‘gnomic aperçu’ seemed once to be the quest of the literary academy. John Banville tells us that apparent words of arcane wisdom often turn out to be ‘academic writing at its most convoluted, most resistant and most sterile, the deathless products of the publish-or-perish academic treadmill’. [1]

February 8, 2025

It seems odd to take as the text behind a blog not a great work reviewed but the review itself. Nevertheless today I do just this. John Banville is a great reviewer – the grim and rather schoolmasterly distaste for orthodoxy in which he specialises makes him a resistible public speaker but a novelist of … More The ‘gnomic aperçu’ seemed once to be the quest of the literary academy. John Banville tells us that apparent words of arcane wisdom often turn out to be ‘academic writing at its most convoluted, most resistant and most sterile, the deathless products of the publish-or-perish academic treadmill’. [1]

Oscar Wilde is reported as saying the law ‘is an ass’, but was to find that some asses had incredible power to hurt.

February 6, 2025

Oscar Wilde is reported as saying the law ‘is an ass’ (as are many others – it is actually a misquotation of lawman Dogberry in Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’), but was to find that some asses had incredible power to hurt. I was born in 1954. The law was part of a vast symbolic … More Oscar Wilde is reported as saying the law ‘is an ass’, but was to find that some asses had incredible power to hurt.

Check your inner monitor for ambivalence!

February 1, 2025

I get some news!The first thing IDo, without thoughtApparentlyIs carelesslyInterpret it. News that you receive oft takes a moment to interpret. Is it good? is it bad? Or is it somewhere in between. Perhaps the news contains a mixture of good, bad, or nuanced degrees between positive and negative interpretation as well as a mixture … More Check your inner monitor for ambivalence!

“They say retirement’s a time for leisure / But not necessarily for pleasure”.

January 22, 2025

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”.