Category: Poetry
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[x] springs eternal
If a poet wants to say anything meaningful about the world, he must not push the world away from himself or seek in any way to avoid it. Despite the best of plans and intentions, the world is more chaotic than ever, and this chaos is pushing it with increasing speed toward self-destruction. The poet must…
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keep your shit straight
Currently reading, and finding assorted resonances within, Maria Dahvana Headley’s radical re-translation of Beowulf. I’ve seen (admittedly few) accusations that its linguistic choices, exemplified by the use—first line, first word, and throughout the piece thereafter—of “bro” as a parsing of the tricky-to-translate “hwæt”, are somehow gimmicky. It certainly marks it at a translation of its…
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caltrops
The things you can’t control will go to shit.So plan ahead, for caltrops in the roadawait unwary drivers. Baggage stowedas best you can, forget the tarmac, grit—keep watching the horizon, far aheadand still receding, still receding, still.I make no guarantees; perhaps you willsee roadblocks that would tip you on your head,and swerve in time. But…
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manifesto
Let’s make this clear: I do not want to die.I don’t—I want to live, and live againlike I remember living as a childin stories that I tell myself aboutmyself. To live that childlike life again—not like the lonely dead, reducedto mewling hunger past the fence of life—I must then be reborn, and shoulder offthis chrysalis…
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First There is an Island
Later this week I’ll be taking a trip down the country, and also down the years. On Sunday 12th June, I’ll be reading a poem in Sandown on the Isle of Wight. I started off writing poetry seriously around 2004 or so, as a kind of preliminary to practicing the longer forms of writing that…