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

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.


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

x
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.
x
Bai JuYi
771-846
reprinted from allpoetry.com















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.

MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations (Volume 12) edited by Liza Blake and Kathryn Vomero Santos, Modern Humanities Research Association.
A piece by the intrepid journalist Gonzalo Lira – murdered recently in a Ukrainian jail.

Colonel Macgregor is to my mind one the most astute commentators on the state of affairs that exists in the world today, and this interview with a German site gives a very good introduction to his thought.
Douglas Abbott Macgregor (born January 4, 1947) is a retired U.S. Army colonel and government official, and an author, consultant, and television commentator. He was a leader in an early tank battle in the Gulf War and was a top planner in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. His 1997 book Breaking the Phalanx argued for radical reforms inside the Army.
After leaving the military in 2004, he became more politically active. In 2020, then-president Donald Trump proposed Macgregor as ambassador to Germany, but the Senate blocked the nomination. On November 11, 2020, a Pentagon spokesperson announced that Macgregor had been hired to serve as Senior Advisor to the Acting Secretary of Defense, a post he held for less than three months. Trump also appointed him to the board of the United States Military Academy, but the appointment was terminated by the incumbent president Joe Biden. Macgregor regularly contributes to Fox News and has appeared on the Russian state-funded channel RT.