April 2012
16 posts
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Penning Perfumes: Lindsey Holland meets Kate... →
penningperfumes:
This is the second of our perfumer meets poet encounters, which takes us even further into the mysterious, subtle links between the worlds of olfaction and language.
This time, poet Lindsey Holland (pictured) who has written a series of poems about dragons (cue much excitement our end) met with…
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Aqua Rosa by Sarah Crewe
Sarah Crewe’s debut is inhabited by warrior princesses, ghost girls, anarchists, elves, Marxists, kittens, brides – telling stories that are part manifesto, part personal testimony. It invokes a world where people’s songs are deeply concentrated and eerily beautiful. In her poems, the Port of Liverpool is a mythical, contrary place, where kisses are blown across the water, but sirens wail. These...
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reminded of this
“The phone rings unanswered
in a man’s bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She’ll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow
ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political.”
from Adrienne Rich’s ‘Translations’
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A new poem: Au Revoir, Baby
As, just for now, I want you flippant
as cocktails, and I want to drink the lot,
with a school-days length summer
to come. Just for now I want polaroid
dawns, sand in the sheets, gawky
handling of personal administration.
I’ll be needlessly late, sense deprived,
forget all the messages.
The swag of what I may have in my eyes
and an aquarium-coloured bathtub
to paddle in. I want...
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An old poem: Dry Stone Walls
You can find me in the Xs, marking random dates in my teenage diary.
In the felt-tip dots that mark keys of the piano, one black smudge on the middle d, e, f#, g.
Looking closely at my left ear you’ll notice it’s been pierced three times, the right ear twice.
My carpet’s fluff could provide a clue.
There is something to the perfect hot-rock holes in my oldest jeans,
the certain degree to...
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Reading poems, I mean really reading poems
Yesterday, while rehearsing for I Gaze From My Kitchen Window Like An Astronaut, I read my poem Tight Dress perhaps 20 times. It’s the opening poem for my performance, so Phoebe, the show director, was extra keen for me to get the audience’s attention from the first word.
At first I read it in what I think of as my natural voice, then a ‘poetry reading’ voice, then deadpan, dominatrix,...
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Tim Cockburn Interviewed →
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The Susceptible Heart
Nothing to be done about the sky, its early fall.
You give me match-strike, candelabra, chandelier.
This year, autumn doesn’t matter.
If lit by dawn,
my mind will clamour to recall how our kiss left off,
how the evening’s talk – steeped in dramatics – set off
that wordless flourish. But tonight pours
into your absence. Take this half of...
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