Ira Lightman

Including THE Robert Kelly.

Bit of a sausage fest though.

Time’s long rubber band
Stretching through millennia;
Hope it never snaps.

He absolutely is. And fascinated by form.

Louis Armstrong, Paris, c. 1934

This is superb.

Yes, it has a "best line", but I'm not going to quote it because it's part of the garden and shouldn't be plucked.

Short-ish, a section of Draft X: Letters, from The Complete Drafts by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Always happy to temporarily mystify

Got to wonder who is behind this book and what their agenda is.

SELF PORTRAIT IN AN OLD FOREST

leaf
me
alone

me
alone
leaf

leaf
alone
me

alone
leaf
me

I met him years ago, and I confess he didn't thump me

Lovely poem

What I like is that it has an unusual rhythm. To keep going in that rhythm, maybe with other eye rhymes, might be really good

Tommy, it reminded me of Michael Haslam, as it works with "eye rhyme" – words that you'd think sounded the same because they're spelled the same. What you're doing here, to me, is making a narrative that sort of twists, and resists. And that has a rhythm of its own, a bit like the course of a river.

6th February 2023
London Planes claw at the fog on Jesus Green.
Picture from my new book 'Cambridge - Light & Shade'. Available at www.cambridgebooks.co.uk/cambridge-li... and all bookshops.

Mandelson’s Fifth Column The British government’s business department exists to undermine democracy.

1. In 2009 I wrote this. I argued that Peter Mandelson's department “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest.”
This thread explains what I saw, and reaches a startling conclusion.🧵
www.monbiot.com/2009/05/04/m...

You do know there's a typo there? Poor JN-T.

I'll be coming, btw

Spider lumbers down the web
and the city stretches with the weight of his walking.
By night we cannot see the flies’ faces
and the spider, rocking

(I'd never heard of Horan until coming across this in Auden's A Certain World "commonplace book".)

By evening the web is heavy with monsters,
bright constellation of wasps and bees,
breathless, surrendered.
Bronze skeletons dangle on the wires
and a thin wing flutters.
The medieval city hangs in the stars.