Matthew Hoh: Briefing to the UNSC March 22, 2024

Is this the speech of the decade, at the very least, as Matthew Hoh addresses the UNSC?

“The permanent member veto must be abolished.”

Posted in Politics, war | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Wittgenstein and Performance

Thank you, Mischa Twitchin, for inviting me to contribute to this fascinating publication.

Posted in art, Performance Art | Tagged , | Leave a comment

COLLECTED LONGER POEMS

This Grey Suit publication will be launched in May 2024.

Posted in Grey Suit Editions, Poetry | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

WRITING AT THE ROOM – Poetry, text, sound, song

3 pm Sunday October 6. Featuring Michelene Wandor and Anthony Howell

Hosted by Marian Eastwood and Patricia Ahern

*

The Room, 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale/Bruce Grove

London N17 9AS – enquiries: 0208 801 8577

Open mike. BYO – suggested contribution £5 – all contributions go to the featured poets. Bring your books to display.

Michelene Wandor is a dramatist, poet, cultural commentator and musician. She has written countless (well, over 60!) plays and dramatisations for Radios 3 and 4, as well as books about theatre and gender and Creative Writing. Her most recent poetry is ‘Ergo’ (Arc Publications, 2024), and, with her early music group, ‘Siena’, she made the first UK CD of the secular and sacred music of Salamone Rossi, the early 17th-century composer and contemporary of Monteverdi. The Italian world of the latter also forms the subject of her first novel, ‘Orfeo’s Last Act’, short-listed for the Society of Authors’ Paul Torday Prize.

ABOUT MICHELENE WANDOR

Anthony Howell is a poet and novelist whose first collection of poems, Inside the Castle was brought out in 1969.  In 1986 his novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars.  Another novel Oblivion has recently been published by Grey Suit editions.  He was invited to the International Writers Program, University of Iowa in 1971.  His Selected Poems came out from Anvil, and his Analysis of Performance Art is published by Routledge.  His poems have appeared in The New Statesman, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement.  His articles on visual art, dance, performance and poetry have appeared in many journals and magazines including Artscribe, Art Monthly, The London Magazine, and Harpers & Queen. In 1997 he was short-listed for a Paul Hamlyn Award for his poetry.  His versions of the Silvae of Statius have been well received and Plague Lands, his versions of the poems of Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim, were a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011.

The Room
Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

PUTIN’S DAUGHTER

x

Aged eleven, I was sent to meet Putin’s daughter.

She was a year or so younger. Smiling, she invited me

To go out for a ride with her. Two white horses were provided.

She of course rode brilliantly, but I was pretty good

And we had an exhilarating ride. Passionate at that age,

I fell in love with her, as Dante did when he set eyes on Beatrice,

As when as a dancer, I fell in love with Russians and with Russia.

x

From The Runiad, Book 5

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Losing a Slave Girl

Around my garden the little wall is low;

In the bailiff’s lodge the lists are seldom checked.

I am ashamed to think we were not always kind;

I regret your labours, that will never be repaid.

The caged bird owes no allegiance;

The wind-tossed flower does not cling to the tree.

Where tonight she lies none can give us news;

Nor any knows, save the bright watching moon.

Bai JuYi

771-846

reprinted from allpoetry.com

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

TOTTENHAM TREES POETRY READING AT THE ROOM

Hilary Davies has published four volumes of poetry with Enitharmon Editions. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at King’ s College, London and the British Library, is a former Eric Gregory award winner and and also former Chairman of the Poetry Society of Great Britain. In November 2023, a portfolio of her poems was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Award.

Anthony Howell’s first collection of poems, Inside the Castle came out in 1969.  In 1986 his novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars.  He was founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and his Analysis of Performance Art is published by Routledge. Plague Lands, his versions of the poems of Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim, were a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011. He is editor of Grey Suit Editions. He is a Hawthornden fellow and has recorded poems for The Poetry Archive. His latest book of poems is From Inside published by The High Window.

Wangarĩ Muta Maathai (1940 – 25 September 2011) was a Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist who founded the Green Belt Movement,[2][3] an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights

 

https://www.tottenhamtrees.org/

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

FACES AND VASES

Recent developments: drawing in lead pencil over indigo/black paint.

Several drawings done with the eyes closed. Erasure on vases done with the eyes closed.

The vases are inspired by a line from one of my own poems: the broken vase competes with the vase complete.

These works are the outcome first of drawing with the eyes closed, and then of painting with the eyes closed, and then of combining these activities.

Posted in art | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Of a Snake and a Stith

From Arthur Golding’s A Moral Fabletalk. Seems a bit like NATO threatening Russia. A “stith” is an anvil.

A snake, being in malice with a stith, laboured to bite off a piece of it. But the more fiercely he bit, the more he hurt himself. For whilst that being blinded with the witchery of presumption, he considered not that the hardness and substantialness of the steel could not be overcome by the tenderness and brittleness of his teeth, and that his contending was against an enemy whose revenge he might not hope to scape, and whose strength he was not able to impair. He unawares bereft himself of his teeth, and received of the stithy such answer as this: ‘O too, too mad and worse than mad! Although thy teeth were of brass, and as fast riveted in thy head as could be, yet could they nothing avail against the hardness and substantialness of my nature.’

The Morals: This fable reproveth the fondness of such as, being of no strength at all or having very little, contend with those that are of such force and power as is able to despise and subdue even the stoutest that be.

MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations (Volume 12) edited by Liza Blake and Kathryn Vomero Santos, Modern Humanities Research Association.

 

Posted in Politics, war | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Gonzalo Lira on Victoria Nuland

A piece by the intrepid journalist Gonzalo Lira – murdered recently in a Ukrainian jail.

 

Posted in Politics, war, Whistleblower Lit | Tagged , , | Leave a comment