Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
People say that Wordsworth wrote in praise of the early morning in London, saying that ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’. That was in 1802, half a century before before the The Great Stink changed the way London used the River Thames for waste management.
The Road Not Taken I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. ROBERT FROST[Read more…] about Uncertainties, Alright Jack?
It seems that the easiest way to add twists to your tale is to have other people retell it. This was my learning from what Manchán Magan has written up of an ongoing experiment by artist Alannah Robins in the Irish Times Magazine today.
Do you prefer masculine or feminine poetry?
♂
‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night.’
♀
‘Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land.’
We once came across a Bourgeois spider, lurking in the old turbine hall of the then new Tate Modern. Maman fascinated and appalled me in equal measure. My scientific self enjoyed the majesty of the vision that re-created her, triumphantly huge in steel. My male, meritocratic self had visions of limited purposes, sacrifice and cannibalism. And yet Maman spoke to me of the fight for life and a guarantee of a future borne in her egg sac, much as when Yeats wrote of rebellion and nationhood in Easter 1916, ‘A terrible beauty is born.’
[Read more…] about Finite EternityMost nights, Mum will read to her six year old at bedtime. Perhaps a story, perhaps a poem about things that are hard to explain:
‘No one can tell me,