Paul Connolly

A final thought. Clare’s work is full of rage at the crime of enclosures, when a limited commonality was supplanted by ever more aggressive property ‘rights’. As public spaces are increasingly privately managed, as power & ownership become obscenely concentrated, Clare’s indignation remains relevant

Here’s an extract from John Clare’s Child Harold, a loose collection of poems & songs, which he began in the Epping Forest asylum & continued after his escape. The title recalls Byron’s Chlide Harold’s Pilgrimage. But Clare’s tour is of mental states, vivid, celebratory, imagined, decaying, desolate

Seriously while many on here will have read this, if you haven’t then do. The illusion that the late Queen exemplified a special kind of institution in which heredity was justified by elevating duty & doing the right thing above mere family considerations is utterly smashed in this stunning takedown

It’s brilliant. A relentless pileup of incriminating detail, the sort of things that often slip the revisionism and fashion-driven attention-span of the mainstream media.

What is also striking is the degree to which it takes unflinching aim at the judgement of the late Queen…

Andrew O’Hagan · Stay Classy: Mummy’s Favourite The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the...

Superb

Quite. He has his moments, though in the 2nd Dune film, where he was outclassed for presence & weirdness by all the great women in the cast, he looked less like someone who’s about to lead a galaxy-wide holy war resulting in the death of billions & more like the sort of person who dates Kylie Jenner

Yes, it’s brilliant.

Maybe Chalamet will get cast as Nijinsky and have to play the part…

Absolutely

Stravinsky almost invented cartoon music in Petroushka, reducing leitmotif & tone-painting to a shorthand for pratfalls & other comic effects

(As for the other masterpiece, try not to riot…)

Picasso could take junk & make sculpture. Stravinsky takes tonal fragments & makes masterpieces. Greatness.

Probably. We all have a first love. And it’s often unrequited. Whether we then virtually canonise that love, even though we barely met the person in life, and place them among the angelic ranks, or, in Clare’s case, insist they were our first wife, when they really weren’t, is another matter…

An extract from Child Harold by John Clare. My mind is dark & fathomless & wears The hues of hopeless agony & hell No plummet ever sounds the souls affairs There death eternal never sounds the knell There love imprisoned sounds the long farewell & still may sigh in thoughts no heart hath penned Alone in loneliness where sorrows dwell & hopeless hope hopes on & meets no end Wastes without springs & homes without a friend

Here’s the text of the Child Harold extract. I’m struck reading John Clare by something linking him to poets like Stevie Smith. A fluent craftsmanship in traditional even deceptively simple lyric forms collides creatively with volatile mental states & dark subjects to produce centrifugal originality

Congratulations Julie!

‘hopeless hope hopes on’.👏👏👏

Clare’s dreamed love, his fixation, symbioses with nature, consoling then not, as memory’s clarity ebbs & flows. Even rural lyrics, recalling the German Romantics in seemingly childlike naivety, suggest, like Blake, that innocence is beleaguered & in the end impossible

Here’s an extract from John Clare’s Child Harold, a loose collection of poems & songs, which he began in the Epping Forest asylum & continued after his escape. The title recalls Byron’s Chlide Harold’s Pilgrimage. But Clare’s tour is of mental states, vivid, celebratory, imagined, decaying, desolate

Nature’s balm succours him, an adept of solitude, in isolation, even (at times) in his asylum imprisonment, as his distinction between experienced & imagined past loosens. Mental desolation gives new force to his poetry. Rhymed couplets & song forms are filled with dark, often modern-sounding matter

Fascinating to dive back into John Clare’s poetry: floral compendium, rich vocab (rauk = fog!), memories (vivid, falsified) attacks on enclosure, cant, a celebration of nature’s power, linked like Wordsworth’s to youth but also to erotic love, particularly his fixation with Mary, his rural Beatrice

Another date for your diaries from the wonderful - and absolutely indefatigable - Paul Short

Peoples, this anthology is going to be absolutely AMAZING! I am very proud to be one of the many contributors. @paulwritespoems.bsky.social has put together something special here 👏👏👏

Another date for your diaries from the wonderful - and absolutely indefatigable - Paul Short

Such incredible company to be in, this is going to be a collection to savour. Thank you Paul.

Making strong progress with the Unwhispered Legacy PDF Anthology

Release date: 31st March

Please keep your diary free for Friday 1st May for the Online launch.

Thank you to all the contributors and for everyone who has helped me get to this stage 🙏

I think it also shows a refreshing willingness, often missing in his BPO predecessor, to rethink musical assumptions in the light of new evidence and approaches, and then apply them to enrich the orchestra’s range and palette, retaining its virtues through reinvigoration

I think the earlier cycle’s style is hugely bettered by other proponents of the approach, who engage with the material more deeply (Furtwängler, Klemperer) or with a driven immediacy (Solti, Bernstein). Abbado’s revisionist BPO set has the virtue of new insights, & balances the scholarly & mercurial

Either that or Wernher Von Braun’s Project Mars…

This demands you give them Gravity’s Rainbow. About rocket science, QUITE LITERALLY!!!

Who knows, maybe our music will help keep the ship afloat…

Tickets go on sale this coming week. Limited readers, limited audience tickets. An intimate, supportive and welcoming experience.

Thanks Carmella. I was struck by how oddly humane it is, in these terrible times, for a group of people, remote from each other, to share their mourning and fun, their joy and awe, in this way. A communion. Breaking of bread

Congratulations Kit!

Great Book Bag open mic hosted by @paulwritespoems.bsky.social A strange, affecting communion for difficult times. People from different backgrounds, located in different places, sit together to share & listen to how they’ve organised words in search of poignancy, comedy & what’s otherwise unsayable