Month: December 2019

poetry appreciation

‘… passions that are not my own’

Dec 26, 2019 by Lucy Crispin

Someone read excerpts from Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ at a group I was facilitating earlier this month, and one phrase really jumped out at me—the bit where the speaker is talking about how ‘the gentle agency / of natural objects led me on to feel/ for passions that were not my own’. It is, of course, All Very Wordsworth to emphasise how being in relationship with nature can help you access empathy, compassion and understanding of what is otherwise unknown to you; but I was struck, once again, by the fact that that’s what exactly poetry can do, too. And since then I’ve found myself thinking about Don Paterson’s ‘Waking with Russell‘, which speaks of a relationship I will never get to understand from lived experience. In so doing, so vividly, this poem allows me a bittersweet insight into ‘passions that [are] not my own’.

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news

the stickleback has landed

Dec 21, 2019 #Hedgehog Press, #love poetry, #poem, #poems, #poetry, #Sticklebacks, #wish you were here by Lucy Crispin

What on earth is she talking about? you may be wondering.
The Stickleback series is the collection of micro-pamphlets published by Hedgehog Press. Mine, wish you were here, has arrived from the publishers.
Much excitement. First edition, hot off the press and all that.

If you’d like a copy, get in touch via the contact form, and I’ll get back to you.

poetry appreciation, reflection

what did I know, what did I know…?

Dec 19, 2019 #child, #children, #Christmas, #families, #family, #father, #kind, #kindness, #love, #mother, #poem, #poetry, #Robert Hayden, #Those Winter Sundays by Lucy Crispin

It’s a time of year when, in the West at least, we’re surrounded by images of families: usually shiny-haired and smiling ones, deployed in warm-jumpered rows on bouncy new sofas (“delivered in time for Christmas”) and sharing some ecstatic experience of shopping, gaming or no ordinary food. But it’s a poem about the ordinary extraordinariness of love which has been very much in my mind, in the last week or so, and not just because it’s cold. Here it is: Robert Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays‘. (You can hear the poet himself read it here.)

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poetry appreciation, reflection

‘the centre cannot hold…’

Dec 12, 2019 #apocalypse, #dread, #election, #fear, #George Eliot, #helpless, #hope, #hopeless, #Middlemarch, #nightmare, #poem, #poetry, #politicians, #politics, #terror, #The Second Coming, #unease, #Yeats by Lucy Crispin

For me, it’s got to be ‘The Second Coming‘ as poem of the day today (hear Dominic West read it here). Election day in the UK, and a sense of no good news ahead, whether nationally or globally… The poem’s cascade of nightmarish images strikes fear into me; or rather, makes visible the fear that is already there. Bits of the poem have echoed round my mind often over these last few years, offering a sort of grimly reassuring sense that dread is, if nothing else, a shared experience. Doom has impended before; feels impending now; and seems likely to continue to impend until it breaks, or cracks, or whatever it is that doom does when it’s no longer future but present tense.

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poetry appreciation, reflection

‘we read to know we are not alone’

Dec 5, 2019 #4am, #5am, #anxiety, #Fleur Adcock, #grief, #insomnia, #poem, #poems, #poetry, #Things by Lucy Crispin

As anyone knows who’s been to a workshop or event I’ve facilitated (or follows what the afternoon knows), this is something I bang on about a lot. I’m unapologetic about it, though, because it’s such an important dimension of reading (and indeed experiencing any kind of art). Surely anything that pierces our loneliness—whether from each other or from (parts of) ourselves—is worth celebrating? So today I want to think about how reading helps us know we are not alone, and do so in relation to the understated but marvellous poem ‘Things’ by Fleur Adcock.

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