I am still cataloguing books, clearing away rejects as I go and re-reading when I feel the curiosity. I placed the 2826th book for keeping on the catalogue I am making tonight (the rest boxed for various Fates) and then sat down to read that little book through again and reflect. It was a volume … More The art of not being looked at comfortably: Ron Mueck
A distant memory of a distant Peter Avery: “Between my vice and my religion, I find myself continually on my knees” A straightened memory of a queer Fellow. I have just read Simon Goldhill’s wonderful book published this year (2025) Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History and will, when I am able and have reflected a … More A distant memory of a distant Peter Avery: “Between my vice and my religion, I find myself continually on my knees.” A ‘straightened’ memory of a queer Fellow.
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].
Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher in Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’ , in the depiction made by Harry Furniss as frontispiece to the novel. A man who uses his fingers to point – did Furniss intend to capture the early etymology of the word ‘teach’. ‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but … More The influential teachers point out the multiplicity of ways forward not point their finger at you to absorb, from them as your authority, the ONLY answer they know.
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?
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].
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.
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 ‘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”. 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”.
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