Project including monologues will be shown on Zoom to help expose ‘hidden problem’ in UK

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A series of plays and monologues will highlight the racism that east and south-east Asian communities in the UK are undergoing during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the producers hoping it will help expose the “hidden problem”.

WeRNotVirus will be broadcast on Zoom and the project’s producers, Jennifer Lim and Daniel York Loh, said they felt a “real urgency to respond to the racism” after a 21% rise in reported hate crimes against east and south-east Asian communities since the pandemic began.

Related: 'We can't be silent' – how fashion is speaking up about Covid racism

For The Erratics author Vicki Laveau-Harvie, James’s slim but dazzling collection shows that poetry can be the antidote to the numbness many of us feel

Walking home recently under grey skies, I stopped to watch the afternoon light fail. I could have looked at my phone for comfort, but I found myself instead listening to Shakespeare spooling through my mind, words not remembered since school but intact, beautiful, despairing:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time.

Related: The Australian book you've finally got time for: On the Beach by Nevil Shute

Related: The Unmissables: The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie – a memoir of entirely its own genre

No-one grits
Like Sly: it looks like a piano sneering.

When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

Snow into April. Frost night after night.
Out on the Welsh farms the lambs die unborn.

[…]

Lachlan Mackinnon evokes the power of music to strengthen faith, in the last of Carol Ann Duffy’s comforting picks from her poetry bookshelves

The poet Lachlan Mackinnon lives in Ely, and is also a distinguished critic and former teacher. Music, of all kinds, has always been important to his poetry, alongside a healing journeying towards faith. A psalmist (notably David in the Old Testament) is a composer of sacred lyrics, and sometimes poems can share this territory. The writer’s epiphany in this poem answers our own need for such moments of consolation.

Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country is arguably the best-known poem in Australian history. But mines are threatening the homestead that informed it

You may not know where it comes from, but there is one line of poetry that many Australians know by heart: “I love a sunburnt country.”

The phrase is from Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country, arguably the best-known poem in Australian history. It has been mentioned more than any other in contemporary Australian political discourse – and yet its origins have been almost forgotten.

Related: Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine

I am furious that we are prepared to risk another chapter of our cultural history to the interests of mining

Written 100 years ago, Yeats’s poem has been absorbed into the cultural bloodstream from Chinua Achebe to The Sopranos, Joan Didion to Gordon Gecko. Why is it such a touchstone in times of chaos?

In April 1936, three years before his death, WB Yeats received a letter from the writer and activist Ethel Mannin. The 70-year-old Yeats was a Nobel prize-winning poet of immense stature and influence, not to mention Mannin’s former lover, and she asked him to join a campaign to free a German pacifist incarcerated by the Nazis. Yeats responded instead with a reading recommendation: “If you have my poems by you, look up a poem called ‘The Second Coming’,” he wrote. “It was written some sixteen or seventeen years ago & foretold what is happening. I have written of the same thing again & again since. This will seem little to you with your strong practical sense for it takes fifty years for a poet’s weapons to influence the issue.”

Yeats was justified in taking the long view. Written in 1919 and published in 1920, “The Second Coming” has become perhaps the most plundered poem in the English language. At 164 words, it is short and memorable enough to be famous in toto but it has also been disassembled into its constituent parts by books, albums, movies, TV shows, comic books, computer games, political speeches and newspaper editorials. While many poems in Yeats’s corpus have contributed indelible lines to the storehouse of the cultural imagination (“no country for old men”; “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”), “The Second Coming” consists of almost nothing but such lines. Someone reading it for the first time in 2020 might resemble the apocryphal theatregoer who complained that Hamlet was nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together. Whether or not it is Yeats’s greatest poem, it is by far his most useful. As Auden wrote in “In Memory of WB Yeats” (1939), “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Related: The life and poetry of William Butler Yeats – quiz

For centuries, critics have tried to disguise mistakes in verse as intentional literary licence. An Oxford academic begs to differ

Readers of the world’s finest poetry have often skated over inconsistencies, preferring not to believe the poet was capable of a mistake. Now an Oxford academic has identified a host of poetic errors and compiled them in a book.

Erica McAlpine, associate professor of English, told the Observer that, in researching the work of around 30 poets, she came across hundreds of factual gaffes, mis-spellings and grammatical incongruities.

Collection published written by and dedicated to those who have kept system going

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I need to get a bookcase for the background of my Zoom

I need to get a bookcase for an intellectual room

A simply spoken meditation on the presence of death throughout a life is told with unpretentious wit

Poem

My last of days was there to contemplate
when words absconded from me
as long ago as Nineteen-forty-one.
I must have heard the nurses talk of death.

From visions of a shadowy spirit to memories of love and loss … a contemporary US poet pays tribute to the persistent presence of Whitman

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself”: Walt Whitman lived by the unforgettable opening lines of his collection of poems, Leaves of Grass. When the book was first published in 1855, many of the anonymous reviews were later found to have been written by Whitman himself. “An American bard at last!” one of them declared.

The confidence was remarkable, coming from a Brooklyn boy who had gone to school only until the age of 11, and had, in the years before publication, worked through a series of unstable jobs as a schoolteacher, a typesetter, a carpenter and a journalist. But the 12 poems in the first edition of Leaves of Grass lived up to their hype. They seemed to have emerged from a sensibility steeped in “long dumb” and forbidden voices, breaking free, with their plainspeak, their cascading clauses and subclauses, from the older constraints of diction, metre and rhyme. Whitman perceived US democracy itself as a literary undertaking, capable of absorbing anything and everything, projecting its “barbaric yawp to the rooftops of the world”.

Related: The best recent poetry collections – review

The Pulitzer prize winner’s anguished response to the routine threat presented to black men by the US police has been widely shared since George Floyd’s death

• Jericho Brown: ‘To win justice for George Floyd, we need the rage that abolished slavery’

I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trashbag, and if I do, 
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
But I promise you, I trust the maggots
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will
Do it the same way most Americans do, 
I promise you: cigarette smoke
Or a piece of meat on which I choke
Or so broke I freeze 
In one of these winters we keep
Calling worst. I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took 
Me from us and left my body, which is, 
No matter what we’ve been taught, 
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.

Related: Jericho Brown on poetry, religion and race in the US – books podcast

The Tradition by Jericho Brown is published by Pan Macmillan in the UK. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.

Too late, but not too late for me to hide
these sorry features further in the shade,
as huge projected faces loom and slide

away into their screen; I want to go
where images and ghosts stagger and slow,
past time that passes over or below

my heart shunting its blood too late; and as
the screenlight glances from her now, she is
beautiful like a star in the silent pictures,

all eyes, all eyes, and twice her lifesize tall,
falling away from me, into nightfall.
A shadow leaves its shadow on the wall.

• From The Gifts of Fortune by Peter McDonald, published by Carcanet (£11.99).

Touched by Alan Buckley; Passport to Here and There by Grace Nichols; Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt; Later Emperors Evan Jones

“I bring you no fireworks”, claims Alan Buckley’s poem “Flame”, musing on a matchbox’s instruction to “use sparingly”. Touched (Happenstance, £10) is a debut collection that understands the value of subtlety and restraint, exploring personal trauma and the “fragile, desperate weight” of our lives through poems that speak elegantly of hard-won insight. “You shouldn’t ask how we’re doing this, but why”, proffers a fire eater in “Psychotherapy”. Taking as its subject a trip to the dentist, “Clinical” wonders “when the numbness will go”. Wisdom, like rhyme, is an optional ingredient in poetry, but when it is authentic, its effect can be both memorable and moving. Buckley has the confidence and skill to speak to us directly, even while his poems chart themes of uncertainty, memory and loss.

One of the Malawian author’s many prison poems, this defiant work builds into a forceful cry of rage

Skipping Without Ropes

I will, I will skip without your rope
Since you say I should not, I cannot
Borrow your son’s skipping rope to
Exercise my limbs; I will skip without

Your rope as you say, even the lace
I want will hang my neck until I die;
I will create my own rope, my own
Hope and skip without your rope as

You insist I do not require to stretch
My limbs fixed by these fevers of your
Reeking sweat and your prison walls;
I will, will skip with my forged hope;

Watch, watch me skip without your
Rope; watch me skip with my hope –
A-one, a-two, a-three, a-four, a-five
I will, a-seven, I do, will skip, a-ten,

Eleven, I will skip without, will skip
Within and skip I do without your
Rope but with my hope; and I will,
Will always skip you dull, will skip

Your silly rules, skip your filthy walls,
You weevil pigeon peas, skip your
Scorpions, skip your Excellency Life
Glory. I do, you don’t, I can, you can’t,

I will, you won’t, I see, you don’t, I
Sweat, you don’t, I will, will wipe my
Gluey brow then wipe you at a stroke
I will, will wipe your horrid, stinking,

Vulgar prison rules, will wipe you all
Then hop about, hop about my cell, my
Home, the mountains, my globe as your
Sparrow hops about your prison yard

Without your hope, without your rope,
I swear, I will skip without your rope, I
Declare, I will have you take me to your
Showers to bathe me where I can resist

This singing child you want to shape me,
I’ll fight your rope, your rules, your hope
As your sparrow does under your super-
vision! Guards! Take us for a shower!

Skipping Without Ropes appears in The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004).

My mother, Deborah Lavin, who has died aged 68 of lung cancer, started out as an actor, moved into teaching English and finished up writing plays, poetry and studying the life of Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx.

Four of her plays were performed in public: Happy Families, a dark comedy first staged at the Man in the Moon theatre in London in 1996 before transferring to Japan; The Body Trade, a domestic comedy that debuted at the Stukke theatre in Berlin in 1997; and two plays performed at the White Bear theatre in London, Murder of Reality (2002) and Dead Sex (2003).

Native American poet Natalie Diaz among contenders for best collection award with Postcolonial Love Poem, alongside Pascale Petit and Caroline Bird

A poetic exploration of the wounds the US has inflicted on its indigenous people, written by one of the few remaining speakers of the Mojave language, has made the shortlist for the prestigious Forward prize for best collection.

As Black Lives Matter protests sweep the world in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Natalie Diaz – a MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient and former professional basketball player – writes in her collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, of police violence against Native Americans. In her poem American Arithmetic, she notes that “Native Americans make up less than / 1 percent of the population of America”, but “Police kill Native Americans more / than any other race”.

The Irishman’s fifth collection shows great sensitivity to language and detail and is at its witty best on domestic matters

John McAuliffe is Irish but many of the poems in his sympathetic fifth collection are set in Manchester, where he teaches at university. One of the most involving of them is City of Trees, set on 22 May 2017– the date gives you a clue to the content. It begins in the tone of a carefree journal, remembering a meeting at the town hall. From there, we briefly accompany the Irishman on a bicycle through Manchester, noting “the Curry Mile’s neon influence–/its last two Irish pubs, the Clarence/and the Whitworth refitted now as a Christian café/and a chrome-and-glass shisha bar.” What is striking about McAuliffe, in this poem and throughout the collection, is that he never over-edits life for the sake of poetry – he would cycle any distance, it seems, to avoid being loftily selective or unreliably sublime.

 But one thing gives way to another and terror arrives without warning, turning up as suddenly in the poem as in life. Seeing the news of the arena bombings on television, he is alert to everything. The council leader is wearing “the same shirt/I’d seen him in twelve hours earlier” and the mayor is promising “‘business as usual’ – a not exactly steely line”. (McAuliffe’s sensitivity to language never goes off duty.) But it is further on that the poem comes into its own as he describes the footage of the bomber:

In Listener’s digest, our writers help you explore the work of great musicians. Next up: the hugely influential poet who brought Baudelaire to punk

Horses (1975)

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My friend and colleague Siôn Eirian, a playwright, scriptwriter and poet, has died aged 66, following a short illness.

Siôn was born in Hirwaun, a village in Cynon Valley, South Wales, to James Eirian Davies, a poet and Methodist minister, and Jennie (nee Howells), a Welsh politician and magazine editor. They later moved to Brynamman, on the south side of the Black Mountain, and then Mold, in Flintshire, where Siôn attended Maes Garmon school before continuing to Aberystwyth University, completing an honours degree in philosophy (1975). He studied as a postgraduate at the Welsh College of Music and Drama, of which he later became a fellow. It was there that he met his future wife, Erica New – they married in 1980.

Beloved author of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt was in intensive care for 47 days, but as his recovery continues he has resumed tweeting

Michael Rosen has returned to Twitter, as the former children’s laureate continues to recover from Covid-19, thanking his family for meeting the “terrible strain” with “love and care 24 hours”.

Rosen, author of much-loved children’s poems including Chocolate Cake and Don’t, and books including We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, went into intensive care at the end of March, when his family let his followers know he was “very poorly”. He left ICU 47 days later, when his wife, Emma-Louise Williams, told well-wishers that after a long and difficult period, his recovery was continuing on the ward. “He has done so well to get through this but please don’t expect him back here yet,” she wrote on Twitter, where Rosen is known for his energetic commentary on politics, education and language.

Questions over the response of the Poetry Foundation and the National Book Critics Circle to BLM protests have sparked a wave of resignations

The US literary establishment is in turmoil after a wave of resignations from the Poetry Foundation and the National Book Critics Circle over their responses to Black Lives Matter protests.

The Poetry Foundation, established in 2003 after a multimillion dollar donation from the philanthropist Ruth Lilly, had been harshly criticised in a letter from almost 2,000 people, including the award-winning poet Ocean Vuong and many other writers, over its brief response to BLM on 3 June. The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine “stand in solidarity with the black community, and denounce injustice and systemic racism”, said the statement, and “as an organisation we recognise that there is much work to be done”.