100 words a day project with J

100 words a day project with J

Last week I challenged one of my students to write 100 words a day for a week. To encourage him I decided to set myself the same challenge. Here are the results of my own 100 words a day challenge. 

I think it makes an interesting snapshot of a lockdown week.



Day 1 Wednesday 18 November

Today I've challenged J, one of my students, to write 100 words each day for the week. Next Wednesday morning I'm expecting to see seven 100 word texts written by J. I'm also going to write 100 words each day to share with him over the week.

I’m going to have to be quite careful what I write to him because J is only 11 years old. But I’m really hoping that writing a hundred words every day will give me inspiration for writing lots of poetry and other stuff.

I waited ages to get connected to J this morning.


Day 2 Thursday 19 November

This evening I had my weekly online meeting with my friend David. We meet to play music to each other. We decide on a music project then aim to meet once a week to listen to the music. Sometimes we can’t meet but since lockdown, we’ve been meeting regularly. This has been going on for ten years. Since the first lockdown in March we’ve been meeting online.

So we meet at 8.30. At first, we talk about the week that’s just passed. Then David plays the first half of the music. We have a break and talk about the music.


Day 3 Friday 20 November

Today I’ve spent the morning reading and the afternoon writing poetry. I’ve set myself a big reading challenge since the end of October. The T. S. Eliot poetry prize is a competition to find the best poetry collection published every year. The winner is announced every January. They announce a shortlist of ten books in October. The winner will be one of the shortlisted collections. Most years I buy as many of the shortlisted poetry collections as I can and try and read them all before the announcement. This year I’ve bought seven collections. I’ve read five collections so far.


Day 4 Saturday 21 November

Since the latest lockdown, I’ve ordered all our food shopping online and get it delivered. It’s a new way of shopping for us. A few times a week I log on to our online shopping account and I add to our shopping basket. On Saturday my wife and I sit down at the kitchen table and discuss what we’re going to eat during the week. Then we check to see if we’ve got the ingredients. If we don’t have the ingredients we add it to the list. I’m writing this and waiting for delivery. It will be here soon.



Day 5 Sunday 22 November

We’ve watched the last episode of series one of The Bridge. Since the first lockdown in late March watching television has been an important part of our everyday routine. We usually settle down to watch television after 8.00 and before 9.00 every weekday evening. We hardly watch terrestrial television so we’re not limited by schedules. We watch BBC iPlayer, Netflix and Amazon Prime.

The Bridge was originally broadcast years ago but now it’s been put on iPlayer we can watch it when we like. There’re ten episodes in series one and we’ll watch the whole series in about two weeks.



Day 6 Monday 23 November

This morning I went for a cycle ride. It is the first time I’ve taken the bike out for a week. I’ve not been out much over the last month or so. My aim, since I bought the bike, is to exercise regularly, for at least three times a week. But I’ve not been able to establish a good routine. During the first lockdown, I did very well. My daughter came to stay for about two months. Every two or three days she jogged and I cycled along with her. We got into a good routine but she’s gone now.


Day 7 Tuesday 24 November


Every morning I get up at ten to seven. I go into the kitchen and I make a cup of coffee for my wife and a cup of tea for me. I take my wife’s mug of coffee to her in bed and leave the coffee on a bedside table. Then I take my cup of tea into the sitting room. I put the tea on a side table then open the blinds. I settle down in a big armchair and I recite three poems aloud to the empty room. I’ve learned these poems by heart. It’s fun.

Douglas Stuart wins Booker prize for debut Shuggie Bain by Alison Flood

Scottish-American wins £50,000 for an autobiographical novel about a boy growing up in 80s Glasgow, which is ‘destined to be a classic’

Douglas Stuart’s Booker win heralds the arrival of a fully formed voice

Douglas Stuart describes himself as ‘a working-class kid who had a different career and came to writing late’. Photograph: Martyn Pickersgill

by Alison Flood

The Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart has won the Booker prize for his first novel, Shuggie Bain, a story based on his own life that follows a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with a mother who is battling addiction.

Stuart, 44, has described himself as “a working-class kid who had a different career and came to writing late”. He is the second Scot to win the £50,000 award after James Kelman took the prize in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late, a book Stuart said “changed his life” because it was the first time he saw “my people, my dialect, on the page”.

Shuggie Bain follows Shuggie as he attempts to care for his alcoholic mother, Agnes, whose descent into alcoholism coincides with her youngest son’s growing awareness of his sexuality. The novel is dedicated to Stuart’s mother, who died of alcoholism when he was 16.

Upon learning he had won, Stuart tearfully described himself as “absolutely stunned” and thanked his mother, who is “on every page of this book – I’ve been clear without her I wouldn’t be here, my work wouldn’t be here”.

He also thanked “the people of Scotland, especially Glaswegians, whose empathy and humour and love and struggle are in every word of this book”.

Stuart, who has already written his second novel, titled Loch Awe, pointed to Kelman’s Booker winner behind him on his shelves. “When James won in the mid-90s, Scottish voices were seen as disruptive and outside the norm. And now to see Shuggie at the centre of it, I can’t express it,” he said. “Young boys like me growing up in 80s Glasgow, this wasn’t ever anything I would have dreamed of.”

He said he would now become a full-time writer, and joked that his winnings would be spent on settling his bet with his husband that he wouldn’t win. More seriously, he said he might use the money to return to Glasgow.

Margaret Busby, a publisher and the chair of this year’s Booker judges, said the work was “destined to be a classic”, describing it as “a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values”.

“It is such an amazingly emotive, nuanced book that is hard to forget. It’s intimate, it’s challenging, it’s compassionate,” she said, describing Shuggie as “an unforgettable character”.

“This is dealing with tough subject matter, with characters who are not having an easy time,” said Busby, who was joined on the judging panel by the writers Lee Child, Sameer Rahim, Lemn Sissay and Emily Wilson. “It’s not a story where everybody lives happily ever after … but this is a hopeful read in a different sort of way … anybody who reads it will never feel the same.”

Shuggie Bain was rejected by 30 editors before it was picked up by publishers Grove Atlantic in the US and Picador in the UK. Stuart, who was born and raised in Glasgow, moved to New York at 24 to work in fashion design after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London.

He has said writing about Glasgow from the US “brought clarity, but it also allowed me to fall in love with the city again”, describing it as “a city of reluctant optimists by default”.

“How would we have survived otherwise?” he asked. “When you don’t have the comfort of money, then you are forced to deal with life on the frontlines, and sometimes love, humour, optimism is all you can bring to a bad situation.”

Shortlisted authors, (top L-R) Douglas Stuart, Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, (bottom L-R) Brandon Taylor, Maaza Mengiste and Tsitsi Dangarembga speak at the 2020 Booker prize ceremony on Thursday evening.

Shortlisted authors, (top L-R) Douglas Stuart, Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, (bottom L-R) Brandon Taylor, Maaza Mengiste and Tsitsi Dangarembga speak at the 2020 Booker prize ceremony on Thursday evening. Photograph: David Parry/PA

Stuart was one of four debuts among the six novelists to be shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize, whittled down from 162 novels. The final six contenders made up the most diverse lineup in the prize’s history, with Stuart beating the US writers Diane Cook, Avni Doshi and Brandon Taylor, the acclaimed Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga and the Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste.

After last year’s judges provoked controversy by flouting the rules to choose two winners, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, this year’s judges’ meeting was “unanimous and quick”, said the Booker’s literary director, Gaby Wood. She added that “guidelines” had been added to the prize so that if the judges were split again, the majority vote would be honoured.

“There were no tantrums, that’s for sure,” said Busby, revealing that the final meeting took around an hour. “But it’s not easy to make a decision when you start with 162 titles and you’ve got to end up with one. The shortlist is full of some wonderful writers but in the end we all came together behind Shuggie Bain. I thought of breaking the rules and saying let’s have six winners this year but …”

Normally announced at a formal dinner in London’s Guildhall, this year’s prize was announced in a BBC broadcast from the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, north London, with the shortlisted authors joining in from their homes around the world.

The ceremony was moved forward by two days, ostensibly to avoid a clash with former US president Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land; last week, it was announced that Obama would be taking part in the Booker ceremony. In a pre-recorded message, Obama offered “my congratulations and admiration” to the nominated authors, citing Marilynne Robinson, Colson Whitehead and Bernardine Evaristo as past Booker-nominated authors who had offered him “a brief respite from the daily challenges of the presidency”.

The Booker has been criticised for having opened up entries to any author writing in English in 2014, with the British literary scene fearful the rule change would lead to dominance by Americans. This year, apart from Dangarembga, all the shortlisted writers were from the US or held joint US citizenship.

A Little Late - Eavan Boland

From The Irish Times
Eavan Boland obituary: Outstanding Irish poet and academic
Boland broke the mould of Irish poetry by making women’s experiences central to her poems

Born: September 24th, 1944    Died, April 27th, 2020

Poet Eavan Boland in Dublin in 2018. ‘In my generation,’ she once said, ‘women went from being the objects of the Irish poem to being the authors of the Irish poem.’ Photograph: Barry Cronin

Eavan Boland, the outstanding Irish poet and academic, has died suddenly following a stroke.

Boland, who was professor of English and humanities and director of the creative writing programme at Stanford University, broke the mould of Irish poetry – and drew new audiences to the form – by making women’s experiences central to her poems.

She was the author of more than 10 poetry collections, an award-winning essay collection, prose writings and an anthology of German women poets (Princeton, 2004). Boland’s collections, In Her Own Image (1980), Nightfeed (1982), Outside History (1990) and Domestic Violence (2007) explore historical and contemporary female identity.

Her collection, In a Time of Violence (1994) which merged political and private realities, won the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. Her collection, Against Love Poetry (2001), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and her heartbreaking poem about Ireland’s 1847 famine, Quarantine, was one of the 10 poems shortlisted for RTÉ’s selection of Ireland’s favourite poems of the last 100 years.

Irish secondary students know her poems well from their English curriculum and the public identify greatly with such poems as Child of Our Time – in memory of the youngest victims of the 1974 Dublin bombings and Nightfeed – an evocative celebration of feeding her infant daughter under the cover of darkness.

Boland won the Pen Award for creative nonfiction for A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (2012). In 2014, many of Boland’s best-known poems alongside her own photographs of Dublin were published together in A Poet’s Dublin (Carcanet Press) to celebrate her 70th birthday. In 2016, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And in 2017, she received a lifetime achievement award at the Irish Book Awards.

Boland often said that she was a feminist but not a feminist poet. In her memoir, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet of Our Times (1995), she wrote how Irish poetry had objectified women as passive metaphors, emblematic muses and decorative motifs. In Eavan Boland: Is It Still The Same, the 2018 RTÉ documentary, she spoke about the “dull floating debate about what is the legitimate subject matter” for poetry and how it is “easier to have a political murder in an Irish poem than a washing machine”. Yet, Boland was adamant about not editing out the everyday experiences of motherhood and family life but instead to weave them into bigger truths of human fragilities, strengths and volatilities, history and mythology.

She was also a teaching poet who generously mentored new writers, encouraging them to put in the hard work that creative writing required. She also threw light on lesser-known historical and contemporary poets. Throughout her long career, she taught at various universities in Ireland and the United States and was writer in residence at both Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin and at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin to mark its centenary in 1994.

In 1991, she took a strong public stand against the exclusion of women writers in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) even though her poems were included. At the time, she said, “the extraordinary levels of exclusion of women [in this anthology] disfigured the national literature”.

Since 1996, Boland was professor of humanities, professor of English and director of the creative writing programme at Stanford University in California. During the coronavirus pandemic, she had returned home to be close to her family and continued to teach students remotely from Dublin.

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, the youngest of five children of Frederick Boland, an Irish diplomat and Frances Kelly, an expressionist painter. The family lived in Leeson Park, Dublin 4. Her mother, who had left school early yet won a scholarship to study art in Paris – where she met her future husband – was a huge influence on and support to the young Eavan. When Frederick Boland was appointed the first Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom, the family moved to London and then later to New York when he was appointed permanent representative to the United Nations.

Boland wrote about the loneliness she felt like a five-year-old Irish girl in London in An Irish Childhood in England, 1951. She didn’t settle well in New York either and returned to Ireland to board at the Holy Child School in Killiney.

Following her secondary school education, she studied literature and classics at Trinity College Dublin. While there, she became involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement. She also began a lifelong friendship with Mary Robinson then Mary Bourke who quoted from Boland’s poem The Singers in her inaugural address as Ireland’s first female president in December 1990: “As a woman, I want the women who have felt themselves outside history to be written back into history, in the words of Eavan Boland, ‘finding a voice where they found a vision’.

Boland cherished married life in the new Dublin suburb with its view of the Dublin mountains and often included references to nature in her poetry

As a young woman, Boland was appalled by what she called “signal injustices in a society” which included the marriage bar [which prevented women from working in public service jobs after marriage] and the ban on women on juries. She never lost that radical impulse to fight for women’s voices to be heard. She published her first poems while still a student and graduated with a first-class honours degree in English literature and language in 1966.

Boland met novelist, Kevin Casey in the late 1960s. The couple married in Dublin in 1969 and bought a home in Dundrum where their two daughters, Sarah and Eavan, were born and grew up. Boland cherished married life in the new Dublin suburb with its view of the Dublin mountains and often included references to nature in her poetry.

In 2018, Boland was commissioned to write a poem commemorating women winning the right to vote and casting their first ballot on December 14th, 1918, by the Government of Ireland Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the Royal Irish Academy. That poem is Our Future Will Become the Past of Other Women.

She was editor of Poetry Ireland Review for the last three years and in her final editorial, she wrote “the life of the poet is always a summons to try to set down some truth that was once true and will go on being true. No poet should have to worry about public respect, to the lack of it, in which this art is held."

Her latest collection of poetry, The Historians, will be published by WW Norton in the US and by Carcanet for the UK and Irish market in autumn 2020.

Boland is survived by her husband her daughters, grandchildren, Ella, Jack, Julia and Cian, brother, Fergal and sister, Nessa. Her sisters, Jane and Mella pre-deceased her.

Click here to read the article in The Irish Times

Forward Poetry Prizes 2020

 

Forward Prize for Best Collection (£10,000)
Caroline Bird The Air Year (Carcanet)

Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection (£5,000)
Will Harris RENDANG (Granta Poetry)

Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (£1,000)
Malika Booker ‘The Little Miracles’ (Magma)

Click here to watch the Forward Prizes for poetry 2020 from the Brish Library

T. S. Eliot Shortlist 2020

 TS Eliot prize unveils 'unsettling, captivating' shortlist

Judges say the 10 poetry collections nominated for £25,000 award are ‘as urgent as they are artful’

by Alison Flood

Thu 15 Oct 2020

Judges for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize: Mona Arshi, Andrew McMillan, Lavinia Greenlaw - (Chair)

The prestigious TS Eliot prize has revealed a shortlist that shows that poetry is “the most resilient, potent, capacious and universal art we have”.

Announcing the 10 titles in the running for the £25,000 award for the year’s best collection, the most valuable prize in British poetry, the poet and chair of judges, Lavinia Greenlaw, said the jury had been “unsettled, captivated and compelled” by the books they chose.

“When the pandemic hit, certain concerns of ours began to seem rather trivial,” said Greenlaw, who together with the poets Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan read 153 collections to come up with the shortlist. “We had to be convinced by them as relevant in a profoundly changed world, which meant that we had to be able to connect with them at the level of essential human experience, which is where I believe poetry is really produced, and poetry is really received.”

JO Morgan was shortlisted for The Martian’s Regress, which explores what becomes of humans when they lose their humanity, as a colonist journeys back from Mars to abandoned Earth. “Waking from his nightmare / The pressing blackness of the air / Failed to hide the martian from himself. / The nightmare too had woken,” writes Morgan.

Will Harris was chosen for his first collection RENDANG, which draws on his Anglo-Indonesian heritage to explore issues including race, culture, memory and identity. Two other first collections also make the cut: Ella Frears’s intimate Shine, Darling, and Daisy Lafarge’s Life Without Air, which investigates suffocating relationships and toxic environments.

Natalie Diaz – already shortlisted for the Forward prize – was chosen for her look at desire, environmental destruction and Native American culture, Postcolonial Love Poem, while Sasha Dugdale was chosen for Deformations, which puts Homer’s Odyssey alongside the life and work of the controversial English artist Eric Gill.

Poetry has been “under pressure to adapt and respond to a rapidly changing world”, Greenlaw said, “but also to a world in which there is a great deal of silencing and under-representation. And now is a particularly exciting time because we have these voices emerging that are as urgent and new as they are artful.”

Greenlaw said there was an assumption of a “divide between poetry as literary, and poetry that is culturally or politically engaged”.

“It is hard to write good, powerful poetry that is explicitly politically engaged,” she said. “But these poets are all political. And they’re all artful.”

The shortlist for the prize, which is run by the TS Eliot Foundation, is completed with How the Hell Are You, the new collection from Glyn Maxwell, Shane McCrae’s Sometimes I Never Suffered, Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart, in which Kapil explores the relationship between an immigrant guest and a citizen host, and Wayne Holloway-Smith’s Love Minus Love.

“People talk about the obscurity and difficulty of poetry, and yet when we are in extremis, we write and read poems, even if we’ve never written or read them before,” Greenlaw said. The collections had been written in the world before Covid-19, she added, but the “urgency and vitality of the 10 books on this shortlist commanded our attention nonetheless … Poetry is the most resilient, potent, capacious and universal art we have.”

Last year’s award was won by Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise, which judges praised for “finding in the bitterness of everyday experience continuing evidence of ‘sweet, sweet life’”. This year’s winner will be unveiled in January.

The shortlist in full:

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Faber & Faber)

Deformations by Sasha Dugdale (Carcanet Press)

Shine, Darling by Ella Frears (Offord Road Books)

RENDANG by Will Harris (Granta Poetry)

Love Minus Love by Wayne Holloway-Smith (Bloodaxe Books)

How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil (Pavilion Poetry)

Life Without Air by Daisy Lafarge (Granta Poetry)

How the Hell Are You by Glyn Maxwell (Picador Poetry)

Sometimes I Never Suffered by Shane McCrae (Corsair Poetry)

The Martian’s Regress by JO Morgan (Cape Poetry)






Click here to read this article at The Guardian website

Click here to read a review of  Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz in The Guardian

Click here to read a review of Shine, Darling by Ella Frears from her publisher

Click here to read a short review of RENDANG by Will Harris from The Guardian

Click here to read a review of Love Minus Love by Wayne Holloway-Smith from Bloodaxe

Click here to read a short review of The Martian’s Regress by JO Morgan in The Guardian

Booker Prize shortlist 2020

The judges for the Booker Prize 2020

Margaret Bushby (Chair), Lee Child, Lemn Sissay, Sameer Rahim, Emily Wilson

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber)

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books)

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)

Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)  

The Finalists

Diane Cook

                                                                    Douglas Stuart

Avni Doshi

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Maaza Mengiste

Brandon Taylor

Sleep by Max Richter

Sleep by Max Richter has been posted to YouTube. The performance is 8 hours and 24 minutes long. Rather distressingly I discovered it's broken up with advertisements. However, I've also just discovered the whole work is also on Spotify. 

I have an account. 

Max Richter

Click here for a link to hear the whole work on YouTube

Below are a few phrases that came to me in the opening minutes

Autumn falls

scattering yellow leaves.

Afternoon light

stretched thin over the day

I open the front door

and let the cold air in.

The shrivelled day.

The window blinds are closed in the house opposite. 

Empty scaffolding 

Louise Gluck wins the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature

The Swedish Academy has chosen the American poet, citing her ‘unmistakable poetic voice’

An 'unmistakable poetic voice'

by Alison Flood

Click here to read the article in The Guardian

The poet Louise Glück has become the first American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature in 27 years, cited for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

Glück is the 16th woman to win the Nobel, and the first American woman since Toni Morrison took the prize in 1993. The American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was a surprise winner in 2016.

One of America’s leading poets, the 77-year-old writer has won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award, tackling themes including childhood and family life, often reworking Greek and Roman myths.

The chair of the Nobel prize committee, Anders Olsson hailed Glück’s “candid and uncompromising” voice, which is “full of humour and biting wit”. Her 12 collections of poetry, including her most recent Faithful and Virtuous Night, the Pulitzer-winning The Wild Iris, and the “masterly” Averno, are “characterised by a striving for clarity”, he added, comparing her to Emily Dickinson with her “severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith”.

“In her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self,” Olsson said. “But even if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet.”

In a short interview conducted in the early hours of Thursday morning, Glück told the Nobel prize: “My first thought was, I won’t have any friends because most of my friends are writers. But then I thought, that won’t happen. It is too new, you know? I don’t know what it means. It is a great honour. There are recipients I don’t admire. But I think of the ones I do.”

She said the winnings – 10m Swedish kronor (£870,000) – would help her buy a home in Vermont. “But mostly, I am concerned for the preservation of daily life, with people I love … it is disruptive. The phone is ringing now, squeaking into my ear.”

When asked where new readers should start, Gluck said, “I would suggest they don’t read my first book unless they want to feel contempt. But everything after that might be of interest. I like my recent work. Averno would be a place to start, or my last book Faithful and Virtuous Night.”

The news was welcomed by her fellow poets. Claudia Rankine told the Guardian that she was “so pleased”.

“Something good had to happen!” Rankine said. “She is a tremendous poet, a great mentor, and a wonderful friend. I couldn’t be happier. We are in a bleak moment in this country, and as we poets continue to imagine our way forward, Louise has spent a lifetime showing us how to make language both mean something and hold everything.”

Praising Glück’s poem The Wild Iris, Imtiaz Dharker said: “There is no easy comfort in it (or in any of her work, when I went to find more of it). What she offers instead is uncompromising clarity, especially about the slide of all living things towards death. Yet she often turns that awareness on a pin and tilts the poem to catch a different light.”

Kate Clanchy said it was “great to have a woman poet win the Nobel”.

“She is a very quotable poet – you can look her up on Instagram,” Clanchy said. “But it’s worth noting that her resonant aphorisms are always spoken by ironised voices – a wild iris, for example. Her poems are austere, difficult, very much alive. I’ve always admired her.”

Born in New York City in 1943, Glück grew up on Long Island and attended Columbia University. She has taught poetry in many universities, and is currently an adjunct professor of English at Yale. In an interview with Poets and Writers magazine, she spoke about the balance between her life and work, arguing “you have to live your life if you’re going to do original work”, because “your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you’re making a terrible mistake”.

“When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art,” Glück said. “I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly – the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn’t given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don’t teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching – the minute I had obligations in the world – I started to write again.”

President Barack Obama presents poet Louise Glück with the National Humanities Medal in 2016. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The award will mark a change for a writer who has often avoided the spotlight. When Glück was appointed as US poet laureate in 2003, she said she had “no concern with widening audience”, and that she preferred her audience “small, intense, passionate”.

At Glück’s UK publisher Carcanet, which has published the poet for more than two decades, Michael Schmidt said staff were “completely surprised” at the news but also “astonished at the justice of the win”.

“What the Academy seems to have done is they’ve gone for a poet who is, in a sense, aesthetically, imaginatively, at odds with the age,” Schmidt said. “She’s not a cheerleader. She’s in no way a voice for any cause – she is a human being engaged in the language and in the world. And I think there’s this wonderful sense that she is not polemical, and maybe this is what’s being celebrated. She’s not a person trying to persuade us of anything, but helping us to explore to explore the world we’re living in. She’s a clarifying poet. There doesn’t seem to be much political engagement in her poems. They’re really about the individual human being alive in the world, and in the language.”

The prize is awarded by the 18-strong Swedish Academy to the writer they deem has fulfilled the condition laid out in the somewhat murky words of Alfred Nobel’s will: to “have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.

After enduring almost three years of scandal, observers had predicted the Swedish Academy would go for a safe choice this year, with Canadian poet Anne Carson, Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, Chinese novelist Yan Lianke, Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami and perennial contender Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright, named as possible winners.

The august and secretive voting body was rocked by allegations of sexual abuse and financial misconduct in 2017, culminating in the conviction of Jean-Claude Arnault, husband of academy member Katarina Frostenson, for rape in 2018. Frostenson subsequently left the Academy after she was discovered to have leaked the names of previous winners, and a string of resignations from Academy members followed, with the 2018 award postponed.

Announcing the 2018 and 2019 winners last year, the Academy was hoping for an end to criticism, with Olsson promising that the prize was moving away from a Eurocentric, male-oriented focus. Instead, they chose two European writers, the widely-acclaimed Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, and the Austrian writer Peter Handke, a choice which was widely criticised over Handke’s denial of Serb atrocities during the war in the former Yugoslavia.

Click here to read The Guardian article Louise Gluck: Where to start with an extraordinary Nobel winner by Fiona Sampson 

Obituary from The Guardian: Derek Mahon, Belfast-born giant of Irish poetry, dies aged 78 by Sian Cain

Derek Mahon, Belfast-born giant of Irish poetry, dies aged 78

Poet famed for A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford and Everything Is Going to be All Right, read on national TV as the pandemic hit, has died after a short illness

by Sian Cain

Derek Mahon. ‘Pure artist’ … poet Derek Mahon. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

Derek Mahon, the Belfast-born poet who became an immense figure in Irish poetry with poems such as A Disused Shed in Co Wexford and Courtyards in Delft, has died at the age of 78 after a short illness.

Mahon, whose poetry career spanned a half-century, was most often compared to WH Auden, Louis MacNeice and Samuel Beckett, with the critic Brendan Kennelly calling him “a Belfast Keats with a Popean sting”. Several of his poems became staples of school curricula, and, as Ireland locked down in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, RTÉ ended its evening news bulletin with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to be All Right, which includes the lines: “There will be dying, there will be dying, / but there is no need to go into that.”

His final collection, Washing Up, is due to be published later this month.

Announcing his death on Friday, Mahon’s publisher Gallery Press called him a “master poet” and a “pure artist”.

Fellow Belfast-born poet Michael Longley said: “Derek Mahon was my oldest friend in poetry. We went to the same Belfast school, and we served our poetic apprenticeships together at Trinity College Dublin. Even then, I knew that he would be one of the great lyric poets of the past century. He was always entirely focused on writing poems, never distracted by the business of ‘the poetry world’. He was a supreme craftsman. There is much darkness in his poetry, but it is set against the beauty of the world, and the formal beauty of his work. I believe that Derek’s poetry will last as long as the English language lasts.”

Poet Paul Muldoon told the Guardian: “Derek Mahon was one of the great poets in English, one of the few whose technical brilliance was somehow adequate to the successive terrors of our age.”

Critic and poet David Wheatley, meanwhile, paid tribute to “his endlessly inventive, witty and humane poems.

“His work emerged just as Northern Ireland was collapsing into civil strife, and in his classic early books – Night-Crossing, Lives, The Snow Party – Mahon alternates thrillingly between dandyish detachment and a reckoning with visceral forces with the power to overwhelm all art. There are many Mahons – he is a latter-day metaphysical poet, a belated French symbolist, a poet-philosopher of the overlooked and undervalued carving a refuge from a hostile world in the green shade of his Kinsale home,” he said.

Born in 1941 and raised in the Protestant inner suburbs of Belfast, Mahon attended Royal Belfast Academical Institution. He then went to Trinity College Dublin, where he befriended Longley, who would later describe them inhaling with their “untipped Sweet Afton cigarettes MacNeice, Crane, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Larkin, Lawrence, Graves, Ted Hughes, Stevens, Cummings, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, as well as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Brecht, Rilke”. While tales of “The Group” – young Irish poets including Seamus Heaney, Mahon and Longley who gathered at the Belfast home of Queen’s University lecturer Philip Hobsbaum – would be repeated in stories about their professional ascent, Mahon disputed the period’s significance: “The way that story is told, we were terrified provincial ignoramuses who needed someone from Cambridge to get us going.”

Mahon published the book Twelve Poems in 1965 and gained critical acclaim three years later for Night-Crossing, published while he was working as an English teacher in a Belfast high school. Mahon later described the collection as his “horrible, scatterbrained first book”, though it contained many of the themes he would touch on for the rest of his career: alienation, outcasts and the nature of art. He frequently revised his own work, with one critic quipping that Mahon showed “scant respect for the artist as a young Mahon”.

“Mahon was fond of Heraclitus’s dictum that we can never step twice into the same river, and thanks to his endless self-revisions it often feels like we can never step twice into the same Mahon poem either,” Wheatley said. “A deeper explanation for this, however, is the abiding joyous freshness and surprise of his classic poems, which will endure and inspire.”

He followed Night-Crossing with Lives (1972), The Snow Party (1975), Courtyards in Delft (1981) and Antarctica (1985). The Snow Party features his most celebrated poem, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, which examines a cluster of mushrooms locked in an abandoned country hotel shed.

Mahon also worked as a journalist – for the BBC, New Statesman and even briefly for Vogue magazine – a translator and a screenwriter for television, adapting novels by Elizabeth Bowen and Jennifer Johnston.

A burst of productivity in the 2000s saw him publish four award-winning collections in five years: Harbour Lights, Somewhere the Wave, Life on Earth and An Autumn Wind; a body of work the Guardian called “one of the most significant developments in poetry this century”.

After living in France, England and New York, he settled in Kinsale, County Cork, where he lived for decades. He remained carefully neutral on Irish and Northern Irish politics, telling the Guardian in 2015: “I never put a name to my own position and I still can’t, which suits me fine.”

“When growing up, my bunch of friends would have thought of ourselves as anti-unionist because we were anti-establishment. We would have been vaguely all-Ireland republican socialists. But then, when theory turned into practice, we had to decide where we stood and I never did resolve it for myself … from time to time you get a kick from some critic for not being sufficiently political, or for being a closet unionist or a closet republican. There was a time when people – much more English people than Irish – would ask, ‘Why don’t these Ulster poets come out more explicitly and say what they are for?’ But there is all this ambiguity. That is poetry. It is the other thing that is the other thing.”

Click here to read this obituary in The Guardian

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford by Derek Mahon

Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels
Seferis — 'Mythistorema'
For J.G. Farrell

Even now there are places where a thought might grow —
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped forever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something —
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door growing strong —
'Elbow room! Elbow room!'
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half-century, without visitors, in the dark —
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flashbulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
'Save us, save us,' they seem to say,
'Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!'

Click here for a reading of the poem by Stephen Rea

 

Record Review from The Guardian: Emma Swift: Blonde on the Tracks review- illuminating, intimate Bob Dylan covers

Emma Swift: Blonde on the Tracks review – illuminating, intimate Bob Dylan covers
4 / 5 stars4 out of 5 stars.

Nobody has ever sung Dylan quite like this Nashville-based Australian singer-songwriter, nor with such a rare interpretive gift

by Andrew Stafford of The Guardian

Click here to read this article from The Guardian






Perhaps it’s easy to forget, nearly 60 years into his career, that the songs of Bob Dylan were made famous by other artists with sweeter, more radio-friendly voices than the one David Bowie later described as a mix of sand and glue. Between 1963 and 1965, Joan Baez, the Byrds, Peter, Paul and Mary and many others all helped turn Dylan into the voice of his generation for people who couldn’t stand his voice.

Eventually, his label, CBS, started marketing him with the phrase that “Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan”. Which is still true, even as that untutored yowl – through age, experience and more age – turned into a croon and, finally, a croak. Now, however, he may have a rival to his own title: nobody has ever sung Dylan quite like Nashville-based Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift. And maybe nobody (other than Dylan) has ever sung him better, either.

Swift’s splendidly titled album Blonde on the Tracks is a collection of eight Dylan songs that she began recording in 2017 and completed earlier this year, when she became the first artist out of the gate to cover I Contain Multitudes, from Dylan’s new album Rough and Rowdy Ways. She sings with clarity and vulnerability, with just a hint of vibrato, but the key to these performances is her firm grasp of Dylan’s phrasing and timing.

Blonde on the Tracks: comparable to Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball in its intent, execution and intimacy. Photograph: Tiny Ghost/Thrillist

That doesn’t mean that Swift doesn’t put her own spin on such well-worn songs as You’re a Big Girl Now. The way she lets her voice drag just a little longer as she sings “I can change, I swear” will drive a corkscrew through your heart. And where Dylan’s band helps him elaborate the gorgeous melody he can now only hint at in I Contain Multitudes, Swift needs no such assistance in a version that preserves the song’s wryness and subtlety.

It helps that Swift’s partner is Robyn Hitchcock, the prolific solo artist who, in the early 1980s, led the English psychedelic punk band the Soft Boys. Hitchcock is a brilliant guitarist who has long drawn on the legacies of both the Byrds and Dylan; his work on Queen Jane Approximately steers the arrangement closer to the folk-rock style of the former than Dylan’s original from Highway 61 Revisited, and eventually opens out into a ringing electric solo.

But the focus always remains on Swift’s voice. For Queen Jane Approximately, drummer Jon Radford sits back on rimshots, never overwhelming the song with his kit. On the verses of One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later), Swift is so hushed, accompanied by just the barest traces of pedal steel and piano, that it sounds like she’s singing in church – an effect only enhanced when the song’s main refrain swells into a heavenly chorale.

There are a couple of less obvious selections – Going, Going, Gone is from Planet Waves, while The Man in Me is from New Morning, two of Dylan’s relatively neglected early 70s albums, and Swift illuminates both. The bravest is the 12-minute run-through Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, the immense closing track from Blonde on Blonde; on Blonde on the Tracks, it’s dead in the album’s centre and never flags, sung with patience and grace.

Swift has had a stop-start career to date, releasing very little music since coming to notice with an acclaimed self-titled EP in 2014. According to Swift, the idea for Blonde on the Tracks was born from a protracted period of depression and writer’s block. And yet it may be the making of her. It’s a beautiful piece of work by a singer with a rare interpretive gift, comparable to Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball in its intent, execution and intimacy.

Brimham Rocks

We visited the Yorkshire dales last week and came across Brimham Rocks.

Just spectacular.

Here's a link to the National Trust Brimham Rocks website

Here's a link if you're  at all interested in the geological stuff.

Book Review: Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb. Reviewed by Peter Frankopan in the Observer

I read somewhere that Christina Lamb had a new book out. I'd come across Lamb's work when I was teaching at Richmond upon Thames College. One of her articles was anthologised in Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs - a book celebrating 100 years of the best of women's journalism.

Her article, "My Double Life: Kalashnikovs and Cupcakes" caught my attention. It described the conflicting priorities of being a foreign war correspondent and a mother of two young daughters. So when I saw she'd written a book I bought it. I didn't pay much attention to the title. If Christina Lamb had written a book I knew it was going to be good. What I hadn't reckoned on was potentially how life-changing that book could be. 

It is probably the most distressing book I've ever read. Sometimes as I read I just burst into tears. Sometimes - after finishing a chapter I decided to stop reading. But I didn't. Despite the difficult material. It is harrowing. It is also incredibly compelling to read.

I could write a short book review but Peter Frankopan's review in the Guardian says it all. I've posted his review below and put a link to the review on the Guardian website.

Yazidi women at a ceremony to commemorate the death of women killed by Islamic State in Iraq, March 2019 . Photograph: Ari Jalal/Reuters

Rape writes Christina Lamb at the start of this deeply traumatic and important book, is “the cheapest weapon known to man”. It is also one of the oldest, with the Book of Deuteronomy giving its blessing to soldiers who find “a beautiful woman” among the captives taken in battle. If “you desire to take her”, it says, “you may”. 

As the American writer, Susan Brownmiller has put it, “man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe”. And yet, despite the ubiquity of rape across time and in all continents and all settings, almost nothing is written about those who have experienced sexual violence.

Lamb writes about her discomfort at seeing statues of military heroes in stations and town squares and the names of those who fought in battle in history books. Yet those who have suffered most have done so in silence – unmentioned, glossed over and ignored.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield provides a corrective that is by turns horrific and profoundly moving. Lamb, the chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times whom I have known and admired for years, is an extraordinary writer. Her compassion for those she talks to and deep understanding of how to tell their stories make this a book that should be required reading for all – even though (and perhaps because) it is not an enjoyable experience. 

We meet Munira, a Rohingya who was raped by five Burmese soldiers in quick succession and was then confronted after her ordeal by finding the body of her eight-year-old son who had been shot in the back as he was running towards her. We come across a five-year-old in the Democratic Republic of Congo who had been raped, who kept repeating that they had been taken “because Mummy didn’t close the door properly”. 

Rape has been used as a tool of fear, but also for soldiers to create grotesque bonds of solidarity We meet Esther Yakubu, whose teenage daughter Dorcas was kidnapped in 2014 by Boko Haram in Nigeria. When Lamb sees her two years after their first meeting, Esther has aged 10 years. “I can’t sleep, I can’t breathe,” she says. False alarms and raised hopes of her daughter’s release have come to nothing. “I go to church every day and pray for her to come back. I hope one day God will answer.” 

We meet Victoire and Serafina, two Tutsi sisters of extraordinary bravery, who talk about their experiences during and after the Rwandan genocide – where 800,000 were murdered in 100 days in 1994 – while George Michael’s Careless Whisper plays over the radio in the background.

Rape has been used as a tool of fear and intimidation, a way of devastating communities but also for soldiers and young men to create grotesque bonds of solidarity, trust and loyalty. While Lamb recognises that sexual violence against men has been and is a problem – noting that some estimates suggest that nearly a quarter of men in conflict-affected territories in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo have experienced sexual violence – the focus here is on women. 

No one is safe, as Lamb shows: under the wrong circumstances, in all corners of the world, communities who used to have drinks together and celebrate one another’s children’s birthdays and achievements turn on their friends and neighbours’ wives, sisters and daughters in an orgy of brutal violence. In many cases, it is not coincidental: rape is perpetrated systematically and deliberately, such as in the war in Bosnia where one European council report stated that it was being used in “particularly sadistic ways to inflict maximum humiliation on victims, their families and on the whole community”. 

It was the same in Bangladesh in 1971 and in Argentina under the military junta in 1976-83. And it is the same in the world around us today. As Lamb takes us through the trauma and suffering of women in the Middle East or in Burma, we are chillingly reminded that despite legislation being passed to classify rape and sexual violence (against women and men) as a war crime, the International Criminal Court has not made a single conviction for war rape; that there have been no prosecutions for the abduction of Yazidi women or of young girls in Nigeria. 

Lamb’s disgust at the way victims continue to be treated shames us all. Some of those responsible for what happened in Rwanda walk the streets of London and Paris freely. Amnesties were given to military officers who committed atrocities in Argentina under the junta. A statue commemorating women forced into sexual slavery in the Philippines was taken down (to be “relocated”) after President Duterte was persuaded it was distasteful. A plaque on the wall of the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh says it all: “There are not many records of this hidden suffering”, referring to the rape of 200,000-400,000 women by soldiers from Pakistan in 1971. 

 

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari poses with released Nigerian schoolchildren who were kidnapped by Boko Haram from their school in Dapchi, in the northeastern state of Yobe 

In the modern world, our new technologies sometimes facilitate the suffering, with Facebook being accused of helping incite racial hatred in Burma. Sometimes there is an outcry, such as in Nigeria where the kidnap of the girls from Chibok led the world news, as Michelle Obama and a host of celebrities championed a campaign to “Bring Our Girls Back”. That soon petered out as attentions turned elsewhere, with activism replaced by paralysis. Eighty of the kidnapped girls were spotted by drones in the Sambisa forest, yet remained there for six weeks. As the British high commissioner tells Lamb, when the question was put to Whitehall and Washington about “what to do about them… answer came there none”. The reaction to the address given by Denis Mukwege when he won the Nobel prize for his work to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict sums it up. “Everyone applauded,” he said, “but nothing happened.” Back in his clinic in West Africa, he tells Lamb that numbers of young children who have been raped is rising. As for rape and sexual violence: “it never stops.” This is a powerful book that not only underlines how women have been written out of history, but how victims of rape have had their suffering enabled, ignored and perpetuated. We cannot understand how the international community and the UN “just stood by and watched us be raped”, Victoire tells the author in Rwanda. And yet, she goes on, “the same things are happening over and over again around the world. We are just simple women, but it’s hard for us to understand.” No one who reads this will finish without reaching the same conclusion. 

Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at the University of Oxford

Click here for a link to the review in the Guardian

The different sizes of objects and structures in the universe

A student shared this video animation with me a little while ago. Thought I'd share it with you.

Don't forget to switch to full screen. I'd mute the video as the soundtrack isn't great.

20 albums in 20 days Deja Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

I've been nominated to post 20 album covers in 20 days to Facebook. The FB posts should be posted without explanation or commentary. But I've been a little distracted lately. So I've failed the deadline. However, this seems a suitable distraction. The 20 album covers represent music that has had a significant impact on my life. No explanations or commentary is expected. However, this blog seems a suitable place to make a few comments and explanations on the album.

I watched Crosby Stills and Nash in concert. It was their 2009 performance at Glastonbury. It was brilliant. Here's the video. Enjoy.

Here's Neil Young's performance also from Glastonbury 2009. Enjoy.

After watching the Crosby, Stills and Nash set yesterday, for the first time, I wondered why Neil Young didn't join them. Well, that was answered today when I watched the Neil Young set. Also for the first time.

His performance was so large there wasn't any room for anyone else. It was wild, shamanic. It was raw and elemental. Just incredible. 

I did enjoy Crosby, Stills and Nash but Young took the whole thing onto another plane. Don't you think?

20 albums in 20 days Sir Yehudi Menuhin conducts Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis and other works

I've been nominated to post 20 album covers in 20 days to Facebook. The FB posts should be posted without explanation or commentary. But I've been a little distracted lately. So I've failed the deadline. However, this seems a suitable distraction. The 20 album covers represent music that has had a significant impact on my life. No explanations or commentary is expected. However, this blog seems a suitable place to make a few comments and explanations on the album.

I can't remember where I first heard this album. Here are two possible sources and one memory - it's possibly faulty but possible.

A friend gave me three albums. This was one of them. She didn't explain why she gave them to me. She thought I'd like them.

Katy's mother had this album on vinal. 

I think I first heard Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis at my cousin's bedroom. It was late. We were ready for bed. I was on the floor on a mattress. Jeff got out of his bed and put on this piece of music. I didn't know what it was called but I remember hearing a sudden rain of violins, followed by a pause, a plucked bass and then gradually drifting into sleep as the strings wove in and out. Lulled me into sleep.