'Stephen Lawrence' by Carol Ann Duffy
Cold pavement indeed
the night you died,
murdered;
but the airborne drop of blood
from your wound
was a seed
your mother sewed
into hard ground –
your life's length doubled,
unlived, stilled,
till one flower, thorned,
bloomed
in her hand,
love's just blade.
Written by the poet laureate after the conviction of two men for the teenager's murder in 1993
Monday, 9 January 2012
Saturday, 7 January 2012
New Year, New Start!
Having finally accepted that being a political activist of any sort is a rather futile past-time,(it's only taken me forty five years!) I thought I'd record what happens for me culturally during 2012. This will be for my own benefit although if anyone happens on this blog and sees a post that they find interesting, they are welcome to post a comment.
January 2012 finds me halfway through a couple of Open University modules: A177 Introduction to Shakespeare and A150 Voices and Texts. In the Shakespeare I've completed one assignment on The Taming of the Shrew and am about to start a longer one on Romeo and Juliet. In Voices and Texts I've been struggling with doing 'group work' on-line. Not an easy task and one which I have found immensely frustrating. The subject matter - John Donne's Holy Sonnet VII and Book 22 of Homer's The Iliad have been terrific, trying to create a 'wiki-page' to which seven people contribute over the Christmas period has been a trial.
I managed to ready 50+ books of various sorts last year and hope to up this to 60 this year. Currently, I'm well into Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin as my non-fiction work and The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuiness as bedtime reading, and I'm thoroughly enjoying both.
My long-term project for the years is a poem a week in accordance with the recommendations of Ruth Padel in her terrific little book 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem. Week 1 is Jo Shapcott's Mrs Noah: Taken After The Flood and Ruth Padel gives a feminist interpretation which had simply not occurred to me stemming from a particular meaning of the word 'taken' in the title. Apparently. the poem has more to do with sex than with animals. Clearly, I have a lot to learn about modern and post-modern poetry.
A couple of days ago, as a member of the Poetry Society, I nominated a collection of poems for the Ted Hughes Award, presumptuous of me I know, but this collection entitled Catulla et al by Tiffany Atkinson has had me laughing ever since I bought it a couple of months ago. A wonderfully exuberant and quirky collection guaranteed to brighten anyone's day.
2012 looks like being a bumper year in culture with the Cultural Olympiad, the World Shakespeare Festival, the Charles Dickens bi-centenary and the centenary of the birth of Lawrence Durrell, not forgetting Hay25 - so much to look forward to.
January 2012 finds me halfway through a couple of Open University modules: A177 Introduction to Shakespeare and A150 Voices and Texts. In the Shakespeare I've completed one assignment on The Taming of the Shrew and am about to start a longer one on Romeo and Juliet. In Voices and Texts I've been struggling with doing 'group work' on-line. Not an easy task and one which I have found immensely frustrating. The subject matter - John Donne's Holy Sonnet VII and Book 22 of Homer's The Iliad have been terrific, trying to create a 'wiki-page' to which seven people contribute over the Christmas period has been a trial.
I managed to ready 50+ books of various sorts last year and hope to up this to 60 this year. Currently, I'm well into Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin as my non-fiction work and The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuiness as bedtime reading, and I'm thoroughly enjoying both.
My long-term project for the years is a poem a week in accordance with the recommendations of Ruth Padel in her terrific little book 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem. Week 1 is Jo Shapcott's Mrs Noah: Taken After The Flood and Ruth Padel gives a feminist interpretation which had simply not occurred to me stemming from a particular meaning of the word 'taken' in the title. Apparently. the poem has more to do with sex than with animals. Clearly, I have a lot to learn about modern and post-modern poetry.
A couple of days ago, as a member of the Poetry Society, I nominated a collection of poems for the Ted Hughes Award, presumptuous of me I know, but this collection entitled Catulla et al by Tiffany Atkinson has had me laughing ever since I bought it a couple of months ago. A wonderfully exuberant and quirky collection guaranteed to brighten anyone's day.
2012 looks like being a bumper year in culture with the Cultural Olympiad, the World Shakespeare Festival, the Charles Dickens bi-centenary and the centenary of the birth of Lawrence Durrell, not forgetting Hay25 - so much to look forward to.
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