Fragments update

Fragments of Red is less than 2 weeks away.

The final details of the performance schedule are being ironed out. Today I sat on the grass at Melrose Abbey - a surprise in itself - with artist Jane Gaze, Gordon Turnbull of The Flow and Tim Fitzpatrick of The Red Field. The poetry that the writing Fragments team have worked on will form part of the event once we get to Melrose Parish Church. And we have been thinking of ways to do this. Maybe with me reading over music. It will be an interesting challenge and I want to use the poems in a slightly non-conventional way.

The audience will also be able to experience the Hawick Missal itself presented alongside our responses in poetry and art. And then into the night.

Today however thoughts were also on the will it/will it not be here question of the scaffolding.

A beautiful day today in the Borders. This project has been a real pleasure to work on and I can't wait until the performance itself now. More here http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/index/places/events/event_detail.htm?eventid=42074#.UzCRhvl_vtI.

...enjoy an evening of song and a procession of music, text and imagery along a path of shimmering red light.

Poetry robot app

This is free from Scrumble Studios. It doesn't do much. It presents you with a poem that you can share by email or Facebook. The lines repeat in random stanza lengths and order. So quite arbitrary. It is from a while back too.

However the image of the colourful goats will live on...and this could be quite fun if it had a few more lines to scramble. Here is the poem is a more readable format.

Powerful and peaceful versus the summer
I command colorful goats behind the spring
Be transparent. The evil gets weird
Dark and drab regarding the trees
You conjure zealous inspirations up the fog
Crazy! The demon will come again
All scary off the fog
I examine drab illusions despite the mud
Oh God! The Queen is over

(Generated by the Robot Poetry Windows 7 Phone App)
You can find at your relevant app store.

And let us know if you have poetry apps you want us to review...preferably better than this one.

News from our competition winner

Nice to see that we have made it into Joan McNerney's bio details - you may recollect Joan was our competition winner of 2013 -

Details of this year's competition and its judge will be coming soon...but in the meantime you can read some of Joan McNerney's recent work in the splendid Oregon-based Blue Hour Magazine here http://thebluehourmagazine.com/2014/03/09/wintry-bouquet-by-joan-mcnerney/

Last call for poetry poetandgeek.com issue 8

We need your stuff and we need it now. Deadline for copy for Issue 8 is March 30th 2014. Thanks to all who have already sent work in and we will be getting in touch with you soon.

More details and a chance to catch up with previous editions here http://www.poetandgeek.com/

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: percentage values

Let's take a look at Prufrock's themes on a graph:

If you still need to, you can read T.S Eliot's whole poem here http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

Angels in trees

I have always been much interested in William Blake's visions especially the angels which I imagine that he saw in trees when staying in Sussex from 1800 until 1803.

Thinking about this while I am planning a workshop inspired by Blake's poem Auguries of Innocence (not to be mixed up with the Songs of Innocence) and especially the opening lines:

To see the world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour...

The poem itself is much longer than this extract suggests and worth reading. But I am interested in these zen-like instructions for now as the start of a writing exercise. At its dullest you might call it from the specific to the general! At best poetic contemplation, once learned, allows visions.

Blake would argue the poet as a conduit between god and man. Or maybe a force of nature.

I wrote a poem about this myself but my angels were rather more like Wim Wenders'.

You can find out more about William Blake here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake and you can read the full poem here http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172906

Lapwings

And this is what it was like driving up and over Soutra this morning. This is a poem about the birds going but the movements of arrival and leaving are sometimes not so different after all...

Lapwings

LEAVES, summer's coinage spent, golden are all together whirled,
sent spinning, dipping, slipping, shuffled by heavy handed wind,
shifted sideways, sifted, lifted, and in swarms made to fly,
spent sunflies, gorgeous tatters, airdrift, pinions of trees.

Pennons of the autumn wind, flying the same loose flag,
minions of the rush of air, companions of draggled cloud,
tattered, scattered pell mell, diving, with side-slip suddenly wailing
as they scale the uneasy sky flapping the lapwing fly.

Plover, with under the tail pine-red, dead leafwealth in down displayed,
crested with glancing crests, sheeny with seagreen, mirror of movement
of the deep sea horses plunging, restless, fretted by the whip of wind
tugging green tons, wet waste, lugging a mass to Labrador.

See them fall wailing over high hill tops with hue and cry,
like uneasy ghosts slipping in the dishevelled air,
with ever so much of forlorn ocean and wastes of wind
in their elbowing of the air and in their lamentable call.

This poem is by Rex Warner (1906 - 1986) who is now probably known best as an English novelist and you can find more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Warner.