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Showing posts from November, 2016

Remembrance Sunday

My grandad fought at the Battle of Kohima (Burma) in 1944. I've written this as a memorial to him (Ted Hoban). Kohima What a marvel is ancient man!   tangled propagation delayed to the end the divine sepulchre of life, tennis court overrun, bayoneted and shot extreme separation anxiety in dying or isolated from the body when pernicious lists are dry springes – when prefixed mourning   counting toward gestures of weird bread/wine ignore the recognition of absence, the suffering of absence. A petrified destination so dark it’s not like sleep, Austere black as anaesthetic, but One null device unannealed ignobly saturated in foreign rain will be no more string, strategically and in the light miss you to would miss you

The Mathis der Maler Question

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One of the great pleasures and stimulations of working with artists who connect to the cultural moment that is Bury has been the development of the personal creative dialogues that have blossomed over the years. Lots of collaborations have grown out of the confluence of artists meeting through Bury. Some of them have even involved me, as an artist rather than curator. The most recent is the new 'Place' project with Jayne Dyer which has dragged me back into writing poems. One of my last before my 'poetry retirement' in 2010 was my poetic response to a question that Riiko Sakkinen posted back in 2009(ish) - the eternal question for artists - how does the artist engage with the revolutionary struggle (or words to that effect)? This resonated with me because (not a lot of people know [or care probably] that) my favourite composer is Paul Hindemith and my favourite piece of music (since 1982 when I first heard it) is his Mathis der Maler Symphony.  The Symphony is the o