Saturday Poetry
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Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – “Hope’ ‘is the thing with Feathers’
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is a poem entitled “Hope” ‘is the thing with feathers’ by one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time, Emily Dickinson. “As with many of her poems, Emily Dickinson takes an abstract feeling or idea – in this case, hope – and likens it to something physical, visible, and tangible – here, a singing bird. Hope, for Dickinson, sings its wordless tune and never stops singing it: nothing can faze it. In other words (as it were), hope does not communicate by ‘speaking’ to us in a conventional sense: it is a feeling that we get, not always a…
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Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – Scottish Poet Robert Montgomery
Robert Montgomery’s poetry has become so ‘in vogue’ that some people are adorning their bodies with tattoos of it. (see below). Montgomery’s work reaches a wide audience because he shares it from advertising billboards and the like. He has also been involved with the ‘Pay with a Poem’ campaign, which allows customers in poetry cafes to exchange poetry for coffee across the world. The aim is that Montgomery will collect these poems and create an installation in a secret location. It’s a very cool and a very interesting concept. I am all for reaching new audiences, whether we are discussing poetry or photography and art. Of course, I like to…
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Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – In a Garden by Amy Lowell
“An oft-quoted remark attributed to poet Amy Lowell applies to both her determined personality and her sense of humor: “God made me a business woman,” Lowell is reported to have quipped, “and I made myself a poet.” During a career that spanned just over a dozen years, she wrote and published over 650 poems, yet scholars cite Lowell’s tireless efforts to awaken American readers to contemporary trends in poetry as her more influential contribution to literary history. “Poet, propagandist, lecturer, translator, biographer, critic . . . her verve is almost as remarkable as her verse,” opined poet Louis Untermeyer in his 1923 work American Poetry since 1900. A collection of…
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Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – Sentenced to Life – Clive James
I am a huge fan of Clive James, he made his name as a television critic, essayist and wit but he started as a poet and five years ago he was diagnosed with leukaemia, emphysema and kidney failure – he describes it as ‘the lot’ and he is ending as a poet. There’s a particular story I remember reading about James, it goes like this… One time he was going through a creative dry spell. He had written a play for the London stage and it bombed spectacularly. Not only did it ruin his family financially but it also cost him some dear friends. He fell into the deepest depression…
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Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – ‘Purple Elegy’ by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is a poem entitled ‘Purple Elegy’ by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Born and raised in New York City, poet, literary and art critic, and translator Rowan Ricardo Phillips earned a BA at Swarthmore College and a PhD at Brown University. He is the author of the poetry collections The Ground (2012) and Heaven (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. In addition to his collections of poetry, Phillips is author of the critical volume When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (2010). He translated Salvador Espriu’s story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (2012). Phillips received a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award and…
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Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – St Rose of Lima’s Revenge by Geraldine Clarkson
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is a poem entitled ‘St Rose of Lima’s Revenge’ by Geraldine Clarkson. This poem was commended in the 2015 National Poetry Competition. Geraldine Clarkson is the winner of the Anne Born Prize 2015. In 2015 she also won the Poetry London Competition, Magma Editors’ Prize and the 2015 Ver Prize. She was included in The Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt) and she was ‘Selected Poet’ in Magma 58. She has two poems in This Line is Not for Turning: An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry (Cinnamon Press). She was a Writers’ Centre Norwich Escalator winner in 2011 and she was shortlisted…
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Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – Ageing- By Ruth Fainlight
I wanted to celebrate my birthday with you this weekend, tomorrow I will be another year older and I am bursting with gratitude to you all. We are fertilised by time thus allowing our individual uniqueness to blossom. Each one of our powerful hearts, illuminate and inspire, enabling us to conjoin and to share. Thank you to each and everyone of you, we are one! This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is a poem aptly entitled ‘Ageing’ by Ruth Fainlight.“Fainlight provided a role model for women poets at a time when sexism and tokenism were nastily predominant” The Guardian. Born in New York in 1931, Fanlight is a…
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Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron (George Gordon) – Including @24hourproject
In honour of the @24hourproject, a street photography project designed to document streets of the world over a 24 hour period, created by Renzo Grande @aliveinnyc and Sam Smotherman @whittiersam, we have decided to feature a wonderful poem by Lord Byron the most flamboyant, notorious and fashionable of the major Romantic poets of the day. The poem is entitled ‘She Walks in Beauty’ and I really feel it epitomises the essence of the @24hourproject. To tell you a little more about the @24hourproject, essentially it began as a personal project to document two different cities for one full day. That same year, other photographers became interested in covering it too…
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Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – Frenzied by Sarah Howe
Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Source: ThePoetrySociety I have matched @dannytorabi’s image with this poem. You can follow him on Instagram here. To view the others we have published in…
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Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – Lunchbox Love Note
As it is Mother’s Day tomorrow here in the UK, I thought it would be a good idea to team our Saturday Poetry theme with an appropriate poem. This one entitled, Lunchbox Love Note by Kenn Nesbitt seemed to fit the bill perfectly. It is a sweet poem about a young boy who discovers a heart shaped note in his lunchbox and ponders whether he may have a secret admirer or two. When he finally opens the note, after great suspense, he discovers the note is from his mother, just saying ‘I love you’. Having slipped many a note, with those exact words into my children’s lunchboxes when they were…
