20 years old

an old piano in a paddock

I was looking about some of the dark corners of this site last night and discovered that my first blog or ‘plog’ entry was dated 18-10-2005  – nearly 20 years ago! Back then i was still living in London, was about to release my first collection of poems ’27 Watt’ and started the website as … Read more

The slow pull

Chernobyl Classroom by Brook ward

Feeling a bit light this evening so i think i can talk about it.. the slow pull. Maybe it is just the advancing years, the lengthening shadows. The dough, folded and folded again, to make a millefeuille. The complexifying of every little thing and yet — an increasing vagueness, a thinning out, a diminishing opacity. … Read more

Lorca, language, translation and a libation

Reading Lorca, and then reading about Lorca in Spanish Wikipedia, I think about the how the quiet poet becomes a rebel, not through any change in himself, but through his being an unchanging self while society around him changes.  (photo courtesy KlimBim) One thing I like about the Spanish Wikipedia apart from the intimacy of … Read more

Collected Works, Ken Taylor and general Happenings

My holiday readings are scattered about, and it’s hard not to be distracted with the goings on in GENIUSVILLE (which stupidity threatens to engulf us all), but one of the more gentle amusements has been cruising thru the pages of Kris Hemensley’s blog ‘Collected works‘ namesake of the precious bookshop/hive/dive at Melbourne’s core, which I … Read more

New recording of Accidentals

I have made a garage recording of Accidentals with accompaniment from local wildlife. The poems, which I wrote in 2008, are all on this website. I still have some of the paper copies left. This is me in my garage studio. I actually was testing out a new microphone reading the poems and thought the … Read more

New book: Bleeding Nose Poems

Nones. No good can come of it. So here is my new poem book: “Bleeding Nose Poems”. Is that a bit weird? The acronym is BNP, unintentionally.   You can buy it over on Lulu, but better still, send me a message on Twitter and I’ll send you an autographed copy, wherever you are. A

making sense of things past

I recently had a clear out of my notebooks which i took when traveling in 1997-8-9 and filled with poetry and drawings (most are not publishable – but some of the o.k. ones are in the ‘poem library’ part of this site). The ‘little red notebook’ and Schrÿfbloks. Schrÿfblok scribblings. The “little red notebook” which … Read more

the blankness inside

new poems.. like new leaves on trees soon to be felled. the darkness the darkness.. what is the simplest path now? the straightest path leads into emptiness .. the vast gasp of new verbiage heaping onto blogs, spilling from pages into vacant minds, pictures pouring into eyes. the heart like a tickertape machine, printing painful … Read more

meditation

to practice meditation is to engage with a paradox for at its heart to meditate is to do nothing this nothing-doing is very difficult * meditation is sustained by an absence of effort such sustained effortlessness is exhausting a thousand teachings vacillate on this conundrum

the last post

it’s ten years since i started this site. I’d made websites before, but ten years ago i started a poetry website, and then took it down and destroyed all the poems a few weeks later. Eventually I got it going again and tried a few concepts, uncompromising-poet.co.uk, accidentals.org, i-am-not-the-body.com and forkword.com before settling into what … Read more

A A Watts’ commentary on Wordsworth

frontispiece of lyrical ballads

I was looking at the 1801 edition of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in the Australian National Library the other day and was amused to find it heavily annotated by Alaric Alexander Watts, the English poet from the 19th century with whom I curiously share my name and birthday. Anyway he didn’t like Wordsworth – here is … Read more