Guest Poet & Author Christy Birmingham.
Silent Kin Howl by Jason Beacon
The Tube Train — Cyril E. Power
Just loved this
The Undercover Soundtrack – Philippa Rees
Friends to Meet Friends?
Dear friends (37). Could I invite you to meet others lurking elsewhere.? Will you stay with this site move…think of it as a holiday home? ( Right now we are sitting in the shade of the Marrakesh Market) where my book has taken over proceedings and is telling stories. Soon we will move to Africa. Please stay friends and register as such on the book’s site. That way my modest blogs will find you and I will be able to talk to you and give you things, mostly ideas.
I am relieved of duties and the book is taking over, offering small components it fed into my life to ensure its production. I never knew till now that it had commandeered my entire journey. There is a warning for all of you here, watch out for your book behind the door, it is quite ruthless. Even your convivial friends for supper will feed its appetite. It is always listening in!
CELEBRATION. New reviews from very kind readers have been posted on Amazon’s book page and when you visit my blog over there, you may want to link, but I’d rather just talk direct for now. Really grateful if you’ll come.
Gorging on Poetry
OPEN BOOK. I have been silent for months and I apologise. Soon nothing will stand between me and this clean sheet of virtual paper. Forgive a bumbling author playing publisher, and incompetently. Open Book will be my general blog about things that interest, events that occur, people I encounter and I suppose an unadulterated mirror to the world I see. It will be found here, as always.(poems ,reflections,indignations)
CARELESS TALK ( COSTS LlVES?) will be the book blog and you will find it over here
In the meantime I give you this poem posted on the Story Eating Ape’s Blog by Mark Strand and fela2fela. It expresses my recent life better than I could have done.
Eating Poetry by Mark Strand.
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
Introducing Careless Talk (Costs Lives?)
CARELESS TALK (Costs Lives)
This blog will link to my other post where ideas implicit in the book ‘Involution-An Odyssey’. are played about with. There are many and they spread into everything. The Philosophy of Self-importance, that where I reflect. (Others more impulsive will be posted here)
It is about the world of logos, and the lives that give them breath. Reasons to record. Not the market, nor the stratagems, for I have no knowledge of that kind to offer.
It’s central observation is that lives are shaped by the ideas that also give rise to the books; books are the debris left by life. If we have something to say it is only because we recognise our uniqueness, and the extraordinary. Not the ordinary. So I will begin by being candid. My lives ( more like a cat ) have been improbable, but I suspect any reader of this blog would say the same. So here is a place to say it. How has your life shaped your book(s) and why was it so important to write it? I will happily host posts that are relevant to this idea because those will touch us all at some ganglion of connection. Making sense of life, be it in universal story (your twist? Your exposure? Your solution? And your hopes?) or your wisdom ( How derived? Why necessary? How provoked? What solved?). So both fiction and non fiction for they are both imagination. We’ll come to that anon.
At Christ Church for the Oxford Literary Festival.
Jason and I met like ships passing in the night three years ago, and met again this weekend, to offer brief talks on self publishing from the same platform. As we were competing with Hilary Mantel and Jack Straw we did not expect a large turn out but it was, in fact, fully booked. (All those who would rather have been in the Sheldonian!)
Had a solitary walk in the dark through familiar haunts, and a glass of wine before realizing I had been locked out of the bastion portal, but somehow the silly plastic swipe key that looked like a toy (for the over fives) managed to release the Tudor gate for entry. Granted I was relieved, ( the snow and a night walking about did not appeal) but it seemed all wrong that tradition could be defied by something so cheap and nasty.
Anyway here we are
At Christchurch with authors Jason Beacon and Philippa Rees twitter.com/angusph/status…
— Angus Phillips (@angusph) March 24, 2013
But Oxford at night is always magic.
Shut Up and Listen
Shut Up and Listen.
Not me saying that but Dr Ernesto Sirolli on TED. The most inspiring talk that should matter to us all. Here is the link. Open on TED Talk.
The Poetic Definition of Love?
I have missed Friday! Sorry. Proofing a book to a deadline somehow collapses the passing days. BUT how can anyone ignore the euphoria occasioned by this enquiry?
‘I absolutely love this sonnet. I thought it might be one of Shakespeare’s but it sounds too new. Please tell me who the author is.’
I posted it to a thread on Linked In that asked for ‘Your poetic definition of love?’
Ergo…
If you bequeath me all your dreams unspent
that had their birth beneath the sheeted sky
Once dressed in music, they went penitent
Through gold and gorse, for you walk solitary.
If I can turn a page within your past
and my slow eye peruse your slow delight…
The landscape of your heart has found a mast
to lend perspective to its breadth and height.
I mapped your longing long before you thought
to give account of thirst, or dust or wine
I laid your blooms of hope amidst the grass of doubt
I spread your pasture, I reseeded time.
What can I know but what I recognise?
You are myself and yours are my own eyes.
The Sceptred Isle?
Since this is Friday and I am due to post I must revert to poetry and defer the discussion of names for another day and a wider group. I know what I think: what I hoped to engender was what anyone else who writes did, and although one contributor was creative (see comments on blog) a dialogue might prove rather divisive. Instead the poem below might bring violent disagreement which would be welcome. By all means shake up this blog! But don’t assume I am canvassing for UKIP, nostalgia lies much deeper than that,
Sworn Statement
I remember England before I ever came.
It held out not so much a hand
as a perfumed sheltering skirt.
Libraries of promises had told me it was so;
so kind, so empathetic… good laws kept
below the plimsoll line of progress, and never shook their fists.
Red-robed institutions and the wigs of learned men
in processions or procedures, stood up stoutly to defend
like a robin a single spade, abandoned to the rain.
Centuries had assumed much the same kind of thing.
Honour never easily perturbed by waved or shaking sticks,
shouting or enthusiasm, or new planted beds of change.
That picture merely skeletal like an architect’s token tree;
a profile of swinging twigs on which whole flocks might feed…
The glory came with foliage, later season, quiet street,
rows of modest gables, the certain corner-store.
The Pakistani, hollow eyed, exhausted and polite,
his jet-eyed child a clamour still at ten o’clock at night.
Inevitably Cathedrals, Warden Harding in the apse…
Overwhelmed by tearful vespers by half a few intoned
in a mediaeval choir with its candle cloistered lights,
its susurration of sandal, bowing tonsured pates…
Out into the winter fog hugging near the lamps,
the smoking billboard publican stamping frozen feet.
I fell in love with promises, smacked into full-tilt
round the corners of a heedless unintentional search, believed
England was for everyone, somewhere, Harry and St George
Or so for years it seemed.
Could I have been mistaken as little as thirty years back?
Could deception hold its nerve from Land’s End to John o’ Groats?
Grey matter finds it hard to shift something weightless as faith…
There was a certain…certainty?…Officer, I can’t tell you any more
I only notice now its gone, this Island has been robbed.
PHI lippa. Letters of Love 