My memory lock’d

Belle Vue Community Arts Festival

“Tis in my memory lock’d,

And you yourself shall keep the key of it.”

Did you get to massacre Hamlet at your school? If, like me, you did then you may well remember Laertes’ parting advice to his sister Ophelia and her dutiful response, quoted above. It is not so much the assurance that strikes me but the sparse visual imagery that allows us to see Ophelia’s memory as some kind of strongbox where items can be stored, secured and subsequently retrieved undamaged. This idea of memory being filed away and permanently fixed is incredibly enduring and pervasive. In reality, memory is more malleable and porous than we would like to acknowledge. Even our supercomputer hard drives get corrupted over time.

I first became aware of the tricks of memory through my Dad’s work. He was a policeman and reckoned that when all the witnesses agreed (especially on matters of…

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Excalibur Lost by Ron Savory

Three Drops from a Cauldron

Excalibur Lost

Lust breaks free and sheathes the fear
That mortals cast as mothers love
Forever trusting, in dust filled ruin
An angel fills the font with tears
Whispers, gather gloom and colour
Unseen hands caress the hills
Faith and hope betrayal laden
Discover, truth embracing loss

Reflecting his eclectic passion for people watching and the beauty that surrounds them, Cross Hands “Tin Plate Poet” songwriter /poet Ron Savory spends his days fishing. Perched upon Bica’s Tooth, amid the silent battle weary cliffs of Llangrannog, he hooks inspiration from the crane skin bag of Manannan. Weaving the glint of universal truths into songs and poems (in time honoured Celtic folk / acoustic blues tradition) he journeys wherever the wind takes him.

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Interesting Facts about the Sonnet

Interesting Literature

A short history of the sonnet form, with some fun facts about its development

Writing an introduction to the sonnet throws out a number of questions, so in this post we will ask what might be considered the essential questions about the sonnet form, and provide some answers. Who invented the sonnet? What form does the sonnet take? These sorts of questions. They actually throw out some surprising answers…

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Unfamiliar by Sarah Doyle

Three Drops from a Cauldron

First Witch:                                     I come, Greymalkin.
Second Witch:                                           Paddock calls. *
Macbeth, Act I, scene iii

Unfamiliar

With scale and claw, with claw and scale;
with tail and fur, with fur and tail.
Most ghastly, cherished animals:
I come, Greymalkin. Paddock calls.

Our ancient spirit chaperones,
ungodly to their very bones:
enchanted, feral sentinels.
I come, Greymalkin. Paddock calls.

We may traverse through many plains –
each mistress and her beast remains
conjoined by subtle manacles.
I come, Greymalkin. Paddock calls.

We sense them on the blasted heath,
companions from the realms beneath.
The summoning that so appals:
I come, Greymalkin. Paddock calls.

Macbeth is caught: our mischief, done.
The web of…

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Words & Music

Dawn Mander

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Julia Webb Featured Poet

Abegail Morley

Garden

Trying to make a garden
out of bird branches, nettles, dry grasses,
a wooden shed with slatted sides,
falling down and into itself.

Trying to alive a garden
out of weeds and light through leaves,
to grow a garden, to mound a garden
out of sycamore keys and thistle-prickle.

Trying to Christmas a garden, to Easter a garden
to flap a wing of a garden through
the stiff soldier arms of the trees,
to tangle a garden out of roots and worms,

to fox and owl a garden,
to slither a garden out of shadow,
to meow it, to cats-eye it out of night,
to hold a garden in a palm of light.

Trying to uncover a garden.
to mountain a garden out of goose grass, meadow-shine,
to weave a garden from stalk and stem,
from crows’ wings and cloudlight.
A Bird Inside

I wear a bird inside me:

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2015/1984

Well put, Clare, but if we sit passively by, the Right or the Left or the AiGs (Arseholes in General) will always win.
As well as geting angry GET ACTIVE !

clarepollard

So. A Tory majority which is actually trying to scrap the actual human rights act.

And today the BBC reports that Cameron is to say: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'”

Just let that sink in. Yes, for too long, law-abiding people have apparently been allowed to get on with their lives. But David Cameron, having decided Orwell’s 1984 to be a handbook for good governance, is about to put an end to Thoughtcrime.

For me, the worst thing about the election result is that it happened because of a failure of language. I can feel political discourse untethering from reality, becoming more and more unreal. There were so many empty pledges and meaningless promises on all sides. There was so much blather about hard-working families and strong economies and…

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Friday Poem – Street Scene

Love the close observation and intensity of this.

Seren Books Blog

Today’s poem is from Anne-Marie Fyfe’s latest collection, House of Small Absences, due for release this month.

Anne-Marie Fyfe’s poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces—a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage—the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life’s exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go…

Street Scene

‘Nowhere’ is a setting, a situation and a state of mind.
It’s not on any map, but you know it when you’re there.
– Don George, Tales from Nowhere

When you turn your back on the street
and walk away one block, then two,
the over-familiar street-view’s exposed
as propped-up storefronts and verandahs,
sceneries of wings…

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