Download a Kumquat for John Keats, Tony Harrison, Bloodaxe
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A Kumquat for John Keats, Tony Harrison, Bloodaxe Books, 1981, 0906427312, 9780906427316, 12 pages. This single poem (included in his Selected Poetry) is attractively printed in a six page phamplet and illustrated with five graceful line drawings of kumquats. The drawings are executed in a pastel color to match the cover, and kumquats.. DOWNLOAD HERE Birth of the Cool Birth of Cool, Barkley L. Hendricks, 2008, , 140 pages. "Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool" accompanies the first career retrospective of the renowned American artist Barkley L. Hendricks, on view at the Nasher Museum of Art .... The gentleness of the very tall , Linda France, 1994, Literary Criticism, 64 pages. Linda France's poetry is both sensuous and sensitive, peeling back layers of language and meaning in pursuit of honesty. Carol Rumens has called her 'a clever, accessible new .... Poems , Walt Whitman, Oct 18, 1994, , 256 pages. Presents a selection of poems by the nineteenth-century American poet. 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Since Corinna Wagner gave her recent public lecture on ‘John Keats in Teignmouth’ and, being ‘the new poet in town’ myself, I’ve found myself reimagining those eight weeks that Keats spent here some 200 years ago, nursing his dying brother. It’s a delightful seaside town but it was, without doubt, a melancholy time for Keats. And as questions of ‘Melancholy and Delight’ are surely never far away from any poet’s mind, it was that I found myself reaching for a particular poem in a PhD tutorial I was holding yesterday. My PhD poet Jacky Tarleton had written a poem with a tangerine in it (she was thinking of Louis MacNeice peeling and portioning his own tangerine, in his poem ‘Snow’ and feeling ‘the drunkenness of things being various’.) Harrison extends his metaphor to ask where night and day end and begin, exploring how, just as ‘days have darkness round them like a rind’, so ‘life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.’ In all this existentialism, what Harrison really wants is Keats' verdict on the kumquat and, though he can never have that, (‘dead men don't eat kumquats, or drink wine’ – one of my favourite all-time lines), what he does have is poetry. Poetry to bring things together: grapes, wine, melancholy, delight; Keats’ allusions; his beloved Fanny Brawne and Harrison’s own wife; his daughter’s illness, his mother’s death; both poets’ meditations on life, death and the delight that should fill the space between those two markers... are all brought together in the simple act of picking a kumquat and popping it in the mouth; bursting its bittersweet joys against the palate; and turning to poetry. I'm a couple of years older than Harrison was when he wrote this and, although days are undoubtedly kumquats sometimes, we DO have poetry. I find myself turning to a writer who can say it better than I can - Thomas Lynch. In his engaging short essay about the processes of one of his own poems "Notes on 'A Note on the Rapture to His True Love'", Lynch writes: What Lynch and I are getting at in all of this is the way that Poetry brings things together – Keats, Harrison, melancholy, delight, citrus fruit, drunkenness, Teignmouth, Florida – and makes a shape for it. Poetry is the making of all this – Poesis Greek from poiein to make; Makar, Middle English, a maker, a poet. It’s what Wallace Stevens means in his own great Florida poem (my all time favourite in fact) ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’: ‘For she was the maker’. Some older prose poems of mine, and a couple of newer ones, were recently published in the anthology This Line is Not For Turning (Cinnamon Press, 2011), edited by Jane Monson, herself a fine prose poet. There have been several launches for the anthology around the UK, including a recent launch in Exeter at the October Exeter Poetry Festival, with readings from Luke Kennard, Jane Monson, Anthony Caleshu and myself. I'm told the anthology has pretty much sold out its first print run, which is a remarkable achievement for the first ever anthology of British prose poets. It's a very interesting book with lots of fine examples of what poets are doing with prose poetry in Britain today. A few of my newer prose poems are published on the Shadowtrain Magazine website. Shadowtrain is, according to its editor Ian Seed, "a bi-monthly gathering of poems, translations, articles and other writings, from the lyrical to the innovative, whatever makes the editor spill his coffee." You can read my new coffee-soaked prose poems at http://www.shadowtrain.com/ There are 4 prose poems here. 'The Bone Folder' came from a course I taught at Arvon with the wonderful book binder Rachel Hazell. The poem plays with the mathematical idea that you cannot fold a piece of paper more than seven times, imagining that, when someone does, the eighth fold slips them through the gates of this logical world of geometry into a new dimension in which the language and tools of paper folding define everything. Check out Rachel's richly imaginative world at http://www.hazelldesignsbooks.co.uk/ 'Mushrooms' was an idea borrowed from Milan Kundera, about a man who talks about mushrooms instead of love. With the prose poem's ability to mop up surreal scenarios, the poem simply explores the transposition of the word 'mushrooms' to where love should be. It's a fitting poem for me, being as I am both 'into' mushrooms (I picked a bag of Horse Mushrooms with my kids at the weekend from a siding on the River Exe), and being 'in mushrooms' myself. The prose poem 'On Beauty' extends my fascination for wordplay, mixing it with nature again. Borrowing a phrase from J.A Baker's extraordinary book The Peregrine (this is a 'must read' for everyone), I subject the lyrical impulse of his beautiful line "The greater the beauty, the more terrible the death", to OuLiPo style word replacements, simply counting on in the dictionary to find new nouns and adjectives for 'beauty' and 'death'. Again the prose poem's ability to capture the apparently absurd and transpose it into a new kind of logic, provides a series of happy accidents and new ideas here. 'The Rock' is me being a realist. A Critical Realist actually. In everything I write I'm interested in how our mind-dependent descriptions of the world, relate to the mind-independent world itself, without simply slipping into the endlessly self-reflexive world of the postmodern linguistic turn. The American philosopher John Searle perhaps best embodies this Critical Realist approach for me in his 1995 book The Construction of Social Reality, examining how we move from the 'brute facts' of the real world (like rocks and mountains), to the 'institutional facts' of the social world (like money and language). The British philosopher Roy Bhaskar combines a similar philosophy of science (my academic background) with a philosophy of social reality (for me, poetry), looking at the interface between the natural and social worlds. However we may describe it, and fight over our hotly contested, differing descriptions of the world, what we are describing is the world. The real world. So this poem works through those ideas, by writing about one of my favourite places - the Logan Rock, at Treen in Cornwall. In Woody Alliances Laundered Andy Brown and William Wordsworth collaborate on 16 reinterpretations and variations of the most popular of English Romantic poems "I wandered lonely as a cloud". Among other questions, these witty and insightful new poems ask what if Dorothy Wordsworth were the original source of the poem; what if William vanished from the picture altogether; what does commerce and recession have to do with daffodils; and why is the Reverend Spooner out walking in Grasmere, conversing with rhyming Cockneys, Zen poet-monks, and archaeologists who have just uncovered the Rosetta Stone for Wordsworth’s original poem? I am a Poet and currently Director of the Exeter University Writing Programme. My most recent book of poems is THE FOOL AND THE PHYSICIAN (Salt, 2012). Other recent books are: GOOSE MUSIC, with John Burnside (Salt Publishing); THE STORM BERM (tall-lighthouse), and FALL OF THE REBEL ANGELS (Salt Publishing). Tony Harrison (born 30 April 1937) is an English poet, translator and playwright. He was born in Leeds and he received his education in the classics from Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University.[2] He is one of Britain's foremost verse writers and many of his works have been performed at the Royal National Theatre.[2] He is noted for controversial works such as the poem V, as well as his versions of dramatic works: from