There’s a scene, perhaps one of the greatest in cinema history, in Tarkovsky’s André Rublev in which molten metal pours down the hillside in rivulets towards the mould of a giant bell buried beneath the ground. The blood and sweat of the foundry workers is rewarded when the residue is chipped away to reveal an […]
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. George Orwell It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. Voltaire Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play. Joseph Goebbels Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained. Mahatma […]
It’s been an astonishing week. I’m a (self funding – only because I got a free education, paid my taxes etc…) doctoral researcher at St Andrews and my subject is the impact of technologies on the art we produce, specifically on poetic voice and music. A sub heading might be ‘why kids like hiphop/dubstep etc… […]
I think I have lost faith in words. They are so literal.
They will tell me that my poem needs an image, a lamp-lit puddle or the shadow play of our lovemaking on the bedroom wall; that reading it’s like eating raw onions – not the sweet, white, Spanish kind but the homegrown, green-headed kind that make you cry without emotion. If I must conform, then here; […]
With the invention of recorded sound in the late 19th Century new demands on the processes of human consciousness transfigured the way we perceive the world. In this new mirror all perceivable sounds were reflected back to us, and into us, and for the first time since the invention of alphabetic script, the hegemony of […]
Poetry has concerned itself too much with words. Language and oral communication are now highly mediated by the technologies we have created. Yet the potency of allegory; narrative; repetition; methods for patterning sound and meter; are still capable of transcendence. Poets should apply their understanding of these powerful, mnemonic techniques not just to the written […]
Here are some cherries.