Cracking the whip on a cruel horse racing practice | Brief letters

March 3, 2020, 10:33 am

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Finally a piece of good news from horse racing (Whips to be banned in £1.8m Racing League summer series, Sport, 3 March). Jeremy Wray of the Racing League says “what we’re doing is probably in line with future thinking”. Indeed. And the sooner the better. Horse racing exists solely for the benefit of the gambling industry – cruelty should play no part in it.
Richard Exworthy
Cardiff

• Matthew Cobb’s long read “Why your brain is not a computer” (Journal, 27 February) should be entitled “Why your brain is not a laptop”. The brain performs computations on information and is, by definition, a computer. But it clearly does not work in the same way as any laptop or desktop PC.
Matthew Buchan
Neuroscientist, University of Oxford

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A Tartt snack better than jam and cream | Brief letters

March 4, 2020, 10:19 am

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Cream cheese and marmalade | Miriam Margolyes | Proportional representation | Poetry HQ | World Book Day

I tried David and Bryony Graham’s marmite and marmalade (Letters, 21 February), but it was not for me. However, profound thanks to Donna Tartt and her novel The Secret History for the revelation that is cream cheese and marmalade: better even than clotted cream and jam. My earliest memory is of a fragrant, steamy kitchen that had everything to do with “granny’s marmalade pan”– a very wide and shallow, two-handled steel pan, bright from use and scrubbing. That was 70 years ago.
Gill Rowley
Yatton, Somerset

• Miriam Margolyes is 78 years old, came out to her parents at 27 and has been in a relationship with a woman for over 50 years (‘I like men – I just don’t feel any groin excitement’, G2, 3 March 2020). She has travelled the world, worked with hundreds of men and women on radio, TV and film, is politically active, and yet you still suggest that “Maybe she’s just meeting the wrong men”. Seriously?
Ruth Eversley
Paulton, Somerset

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Transphobia row leaves Scottish poetry scene in turmoil

March 5, 2020, 2:50 am

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After the Scottish Poetry Library aired concerns over ‘escalating disharmony’, campaigners have questioned its respect for trans writers

A bitter conflict is escalating in the Scottish literary scene with the Scottish Poetry Library (SPL) standing accused of “institutional transphobia” after it said that it would not support “bullying and calls for no-platforming of writers”.

The organisation – an influential part of Scotland’s thriving poetry scene – released its statement in February after what it described as an “escalation, particularly on social media, of disharmony” and an increase in writers being no-platformed at literary events. It stressed that the statement was to encourage freedom of expression and was not tied to a specific incident, but, speaking to the National, SPL director Asif Khan said that these issues had affected the mental health of some unnamed poets, claiming some had become suicidal.

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Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke obituary

March 5, 2020, 9:26 am

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My friend Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, who has died aged 80, was a poet whose work was widely admired not only in her homeland of Greece but across Europe and the US. She was also a translator of many works from English into Greek, including the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath, and was particularly proud of her translation of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.

Katerina was born in Athens, the daughter of Yannis Anghelakis, a lawyer, and his wife, Eleni (nee Stamati). She had her first poem published in the New Era magazine in Greece in 1956, when she was 17, having been urged to submit it by the writer Nikos Kazantzakis, her godfather and a friend of the family. After schooling in Athens she studied languages at universities in Nice and Geneva.

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Ernesto Cardenal obituary

March 6, 2020, 9:42 am

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Poet and priest who mixed religion and politics in his commitment to social justice in Nicaragua

In 1983 ministers of the revolutionary Sandinista government lined up on the tarmac to welcome Pope John Paul II on his first visit to Nicaragua. Moments later, TV cameras showed the pontiff wagging a finger at the kneeling Ernesto Cardenal, priest and minister of culture, admonishing him for mixing religion and politics.

But for Cardenal, who has died aged 95, there was no distinction between the two. His beliefs as a Roman Catholic growing up in Central America in the 1940s and 50s led him to seek social justice in a country that had for many years suffered under the dynastic rule of the Somoza family. His faith also meant he could not avoid political responsibility if it was thrust upon him.

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Bard labour: boost workplace productivity 'by reading a poem'

March 6, 2020, 10:36 am

≫ Next: Poem of the month: Nightingale by Deryn Rees-Jones

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Poetry world thrilled at news the New York Times’ morning meeting begins with Wordsworth or Simic

Those seeking to have more productive morning meetings are often advised to hold them standing up, keep them as short as possible and – in desperate times – to serve coffee and pastries. A US newspaper executive had a different idea: read a poem.

In a recent column, the New York Times’ Marc Lacey wrote that – as well as discussing how best to cover natural disasters, mass shootings and political scandals – the paper’s otherwise grim morning news meeting had acquired the new feature to “inspire us and boost our creativity”.

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Poem of the month: Nightingale by Deryn Rees-Jones

March 7, 2020, 3:58 am

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Dear bird of the early hours, little sharp-beaked,
brown bird, throat open, wise bird, jazz riff, cello start,
sad techno, harder heart, self broken / broken part, half
noun, verb start, bird till-death-and-dearest-part,
quickening and shard part, splintering
and feather voice, box lung, thrust voice
high strutter, sky grazer, floor grazer, leaf layer,
gallant player, lust sung, here we are alone together.
You’re opening my body to the night –
holding me together, throwing me apart.

• From the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association’s Odes for John Keats, an anthology to mark the bicentenary of Keats’s great odes. Details at keats-shelley-house.org.

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The best recent poetry – review roundup

March 7, 2020, 3:58 am

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Zonal by Don Paterson; The Martian’s Regress by JO Morgan; Come Down by Fiona Sampson; and Loss by David Harsent

Fans of Don Paterson’s lyric poetry will find his latest volume, Zonal (Faber, £14.99), something of a surprise. Often given to self-reinvention, Paterson has always kept musical panache at the forefront of his multi-award-winning verse, be it in the laddish smarts of Nil Nil, the paternal meditations of Landing Light, or the metaphysical reach of Rain. This new book is not only his most seemingly confessional, but also a stylistic departure. Taking its cues from the first season of the TV classic The Twilight Zone, its often surreal, long-lined narratives jump from funny to sad to profound with a suppleness somewhere between Frank O’Hara and CK Williams. “I am trying hard not to be that guy,” sighs the speaker in one poem, “and while I can fall prey to bitterness, I refuse to sound like some middle-aged incel addicted to Jordan Peterson videos.” The poet’s cutting wit and acute awareness aside, the best poems here are the reimagined character portraits that bookend the collection: “Lazarus”, in which self-improvement meets the Orphic contemplation of the void; and “Death”, in which a self-deceiving salesman tries to buy off the grim reaper.

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Magnetic fields: Simon Armitage on the pull of Marsden

March 7, 2020, 6:01 am

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The poet laureate rarely read as a child – it was the view from his house at the edge of the moors that shaped his poetic vision

Marsden is the last village in the Colne Valley as it climbs westward from the former textile town of Huddersfield into the West Yorkshire Pennines. My parents lived in a terrace house on the south-facing side (an end terrace, in fact, which we could claim as “semi-detached” in more aspirant moments), up a steep, narrow road that was rumoured to be Roman in origin and still carries the contours of stone steps in the middle of the carriageway, beneath several layers of asphalt. My bedroom, made from a partitioned section of my parents’ bedroom, looked straight down into the bowl of the village, the house occupying an enviable grandstand location for such a modest property.

The only other terrace or “block” with the same aspect consisted of 20 houses and was known colloquially as Titanic Row, either because of its impressive length, or because it was built in 1912, or because it was sinking slowly into the clay foundations. I watched a lot of TV as a kid and didn’t read much other than comics, so I associate my first poetic experiences with the view from that bedroom window, especially the view at night, dreaming with my eyes wide open when I should have been asleep. I’d watch the streetlamps blink into action, the shutters and blinds go down in the shops at the top of Fall Lane, and headlamps illuminate distant lanes and gable ends. I’d watch people whose shapes and outlines I recognised going into the New Inn or coming out of the Old New Inn, and curtains being drawn in the houses of neighbours and family friends.

'I once said in an interview that I grew up with one foot on the pavement and the other in the pigsty'

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Laurie Morgan obituary

March 8, 2020, 10:47 am

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Influential British jazz experimenter of the 1940s and 50s

Laurie Morgan, who has died aged 93, was an influential member of the coterie of British jazz experimenters of the 1940s and 50s that most famously included the saxophonists Ronnie Scott and John Dankworth. A drummer, bandleader, theatre musician and teacher, Morgan was a smart, creative and idealistic man who contributed significantly to British jazz’s emancipation from dutiful mimicry of its US models.

As a co-founder of the Club Eleven collective that lit the way toward the establishment of Scott’s London club in 1959, he devoted much of his life to finding an authentically homegrown sound, collaborating with British composers such as the pianist Stan Tracey and the saxophonist Bobby Wellins– as well as the British beat poets Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown as part of the 60s poetry-and-jazz movement.

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Poem of the week: The Idler by Alice Dunbar Nelson

March 9, 2020, 4:00 am

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This study of a man who stands back from worldly haste and ambition gives the busy reader pause

The Idler

An idle lingerer on the wayside’s road,
He gathers up his work and yawns away;
A little longer, ere the tiresome load
Shall be reduced to ashes or to clay.

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Bard idea? The rise of workplace poetry | Letters

March 9, 2020, 11:29 am

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Readers respond to the news that the New York Times’ morning meetings now include poems, and praise a tree-planting group that has helped to inspire a poet

I’ve actually bought, read and enjoyed several volumes of Don Paterson’s poetry, but his snooty comment about introducing poetry into the workplace sums up a lot that is wrong with modern poetry: “If it’s not a good poem, then it’s a meaningless activity” (Better or verse? Poetry used to inspire workers, 7 March). He misses the point. The workplace morning meeting is not a university tutorial analysing whether a poem is good. It is a way of getting people to widen their horizons, and “jolt the mind” as a New York Times picture editor is quoted as saying. Paterson’s comment shows why my shelves of modern poetry will be a rarity.
Andrew Napier
Southampton

• Don Paterson says that only good poems are worth reading to boost workplace productivity because they “remind you that the most powerful use of language is an original combination of words”. I would argue that some of the spoken-word poets Paterson has championed in his role as poetry editor at Picador don’t do much of this. In fact, they do quite a bit of what he accuses some of our conversations, and journalism, of doing: “using entire phrases as if they were one word”.
Tristan Moss
York

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Poet’s corners: a car-free tour of inspiring Wordsworth sites

March 10, 2020, 11:30 pm

≫ Next: Titian: Love, Desire, Death review – whims of the gods made flesh

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To celebrate 250 years since his birth, we take 10 train and bus trips to houses, gardens, lakes – vales and hills, too – that were important to this early environmentalist

William Wordsworth was born in Cumbria 250 years ago, on 7 April 1770. Inspired by nature and a sense of place, he was an environmentalist as well as a poet, so it’s fitting to visit the places he celebrated in as eco-friendly a way as possible. Here are car-free pilgrimages in his well-worn footsteps.

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Titian: Love, Desire, Death review – whims of the gods made flesh

March 11, 2020, 11:21 am

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National Gallery, London
The artist’s epic series of paintings drawn from the poet Ovid hang together for the first time in three centuries, and tell a tale of sex, power and subversion

The women are the stars in Titian. Men barely get a look-in – and that look-in can be fatal. In his painting Diana and Actaeon, a young man out hunting has chanced on the goddess Diana and her court bathing naked in a woodland hideaway. As he pushes aside a soft pink hanging, he sees inside this female realm. His punishment is shown in another painting here: he will be turned into a stag and torn apart by his hounds. In Diana and Actaeon we see what he sees: women kneel and crouch, turn in horror and rush to cover. Titian’s brush shapes their flesh in ethereal yet weighty flicks of colour that capture form while being smokily suggestive. He called these paintings “poesie”, poetic pictures, with good reason, for they hover in a cloud of carnality and dreams.

This theatre of human flesh hasn’t been experienced in the way you can in this show for more than 300 years. It is Titian’s answer to the Sistine Chapel. In the mid 16th century he started a series of big oil paintings on canvas for King Philip II of Spain, ruler of a global empire that stretched from Flanders to Peru. They were to illustrate the Greco-Roman myths as told by the ancient Latin poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses: Perseus rescuing Andromeda from a sea monster; Venus pleading with her lover Adonis not to leave her. Titian paints these stories as very adult fairytales.

King Philip II can have had no inkling Titian was sending him portaits of sex workers under a mythical guise

Titian: Love, Desire, Death is at the National Gallery, London, 16 March-14 June.

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The Turkish poet imprisoned for 26 years for a crime he did not commit

March 12, 2020, 1:00 am

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Memories of freedom, love and companionship fill the poems of İlhan Çomak, who was arrested at the age of 22

The good news is that last year the Turkish poet İlhan Çomak won a major award, the Sennur Sezer poetry prize, for his eighth and most recent book of poems, Geldim Sana (I Came to You). The bad news is that he is in prison and has been in prison for 26 years, since his arrest as a geography student at the age of 22. All his books have been written in prison.

How did he come to be there? One factor, most likely the main factor, is that he is Kurdish. That is not a crime in itself, but belonging to, or even associating with a Kurdish political organisation is. There is also the specific matter of starting a forest fire, but no serious evidence has ever been brought to prove that. The only “proof” was his confession under torture and this has been highlighted in any appeals to free him.

I am between the moon and the tide.
Between the whisper and the scream.
As a child I still had the script of a child, I was hostage to my mother’s pomegranate smile.
When I looked from the window to the full light of the garden
Watching the philosophy of hands plucking the fruit tree,
In those times when we still heard the sounds of frogs,
When women passed through my life, the lake was blue
And I knew the value of blue. I understand pain too, on the steps of life.

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Lawrence Upton obituary

March 12, 2020, 5:10 am

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My friend Lawrence Upton, who has died aged 70, was a leading figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s and 70s, as a poet, publisher, sound artist, graphic artist and performer. In the 70s he was involved in Poets Conference, the Association of Little Presses, Writers Forum and the Poetry Society (serving as the society’s deputy chair from 1974 to 1978).

Lawrence was born in London, studied English literature and history at Kingston Polytechnic, and completed a master’s in English and American literature at King’s College London. He supported himself through teaching jobs (and by 1992 was head of academic computing at Carshalton College), but simultaneously, during the 70s, established himself as a sound poet. Between 1976 and 1979 he performed with PC Fencott and cris cheek in the sound poetry performance group jgjgjg across Europe and then, after 1979, as a solo performer in the US and Canada.

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One year after Christchurch we seek solace in community and being unapologetically Muslim | Sara Mansour

March 12, 2020, 6:51 pm

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In many ways, life has not changed for many of my Muslim friends and me because the world has not changed. However, hope exists

A body on the floor of a place of worship is still a body
The fall, and the thump, and the snap
There is nothing beautiful about the way the blood sprays the sacred walls
The way it hangs itself a tapestry of death and despair
…
And we dig deep
We try to find the beauty in tragedy

Iman Etri, Bankstown Poetry Slam, March 2019

The scars of the Christchurch massacre linger. Time has carpeted the pain. Slowly but surely, the shock recedes until all we feel is the echo of the tragedy. One year on after HajiDaoud Nabi walked out of the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch and uttered the words “Welcome, brother” only to be met with bullets in response.

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Unique Pablo Neruda archive – and slice of history – up for auction

March 13, 2020, 12:00 am

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Chilean poet’s letters, photos, rare books, postcards and artefacts represent ‘a huge part of the 20th century’

A little over two years into the Spanish civil war, one of Spain’s greatest poets wrote to a Chilean friend to tell him how desperately he and a couple of their mutual acquaintances longed to escape the conflict and travel to South America.

“We’ll come to your sad and beautiful land,” wrote Miguel Hernández in September 1938. “We have to leave, and we’ll rest from this fight, and we’ll breathe the air we lack.”

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Making a note of a treasonable offence | Brief letters

March 13, 2020, 9:42 am

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The Divan of Hafez | The Queen | Max von Sydow | Marmalade | Defining a gentleman

It was with great interest that I read about the recovery of a copy of the Divan of Hafez (Report, 11 March). My great-grandfather, Lt Col Henry Wilberforce Clarke, a scholar in Persian, wrote an English translation of the Divan while stationed in India, this being the first in any language. It was published in Calcutta in 1891.
Rosina Kirkwood
Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex

• As a boy I remember being told that defacing the head of the Queen on a banknote was a treasonable offence. As your front-page graphic (Report, 12 March) only obscures half her face you’ll probably get off with a fine.
John Huntley
Manchester

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On my radar: Winsome Pinnock’s cultural highlights

March 15, 2020, 3:00 am

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The British playwright on the power of Ballet Black, the soulful sound of Ayanna Witter-Johnson and an unmissable vegan cafe

Winsome Pinnock is an award‑winning British playwright. Born in Islington in 1961 to Jamaican parents, she studied English and drama at Goldsmiths followed by an MA in modern literature at Birkbeck. Dubbed the “godmother of black British playwrights”, she was the first black woman to have a play staged at the National Theatre. Her new play, Rockets and Blue Lights, examines the legacy of Britain’s part in the transatlantic slave trade, and is playing at the Royal Exchange in Manchester until 4 April.

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