…reading the many and varied books in my ‘To Be Read’ shelves. The latest one is an edited version of Leo Tolstoy’s marvelous anti-war Sevastopol Sketches which I see I bought in 1974! All books yield up something worth recording and, apart from Tolstoy’s incisive anti-war rhetoric, this one gave me a ‘Found Haibun’. A […]
Back in the summer of 2018, I found myself offering some guidance to my grandson who, for his A Level studies, was then in the business of making a literary comparison between The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane and Edward Thomas’ The South Country. A lovely hard-back copy of the latter had been on my […]
Having finished a rather long immersion of reading, I picked a book out of the TO BE READ shelves completely at random and began to read the complex and mystifying pages of Jean Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime which in his own terms cannot be explained. One of the ways I find it useful to tackle […]
IntroductionFor a whole week to the 9th April 2018, I suspended all other daily avocations to set about reading John Redwood Anderson’s three volume poem Triptych which I’ve had on my shelves for some years, unread, many pages uncut. Oh, the pleasure of slitting them as you read with a sharp kitchen knife. Can’t get […]
It’s good to have an enthusiastic correspondent who sends me strange presents and parcels full of thoughts & ideas from time to time. For some reason, she does not believe in the hoarding of books and so I, being a constitutional hoarder, am so fortunate when she sends me her castoffs. One of these recent […]
Shakespeare Did It Since 1986 I’ve been crafting ‘Found Poems’ from texts while reading them, an active reflection on the text in front of me, a kind of creative note-making. I established this habit at a time when it used to irk me that when I was writing I wasn’t reading and when I was […]
A Few Preliminary Examples • Three years running at the beginning of the 1990’s I chose to begin the academic Summer Holidays by cycling solo 1000 miles in a fortnight from John o’Groats to Lands End, from the top to the bottom of island Britain, a different way each time, averaging 92 miles a day. […]
I go into my library at 3 o’clock of a winter’s afternoon and pluck from the shelves a book I acquired a few years ago, obviously intended to be read just at this moment right now. It’s a beautiful old hardback book called Things that have Interested Me (1921) by Arnold Bennett, the ‘Five Towns’ […]
As a theme for presenting a keynote address to a local poetry group this summer I chose to look back over sixty years of my own making of poems. The result was something like what follows and the presentation of a small book of Selected Poems which is available free to anybody who might choose […]
So often one hears, “I can’t draw…” “I can’t write…” “I can’t figure this out…” Many adherents of the Gurdjieff canon have a general belief that human beings are simply unable to DO anything because there’s a belief that we are asleep, not in control of our lives. Certainly any attempt to DO is futile […]
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