Thursday 14th November. A cold clear night. A three quarters full moon rising above the city of London. We cross from the brutalist Barbican Centre along a raised concrete walkway, down some steps and join the short queue waiting outside St Giles Cripplegate. We're here for Benjamin Britten's chamber opera Curlew River - A Parable for …
admiring Mira
Last Saturday I avoided the mayhem of the fireworks display in Battersea Park and instead took in the Mira Schendel exhibition at Tate Modern. And a thoroughly rewarding experience this was. I hadn't come across Schendel's work before, and the Tate show is a wonderful introduction to her prolific and varied output. Schendel emigrated to …
uncomfortably blonde
When I was little I had blonde hair. As I grew older it darkened to what could best be described as 'dirty blonde'. So for years, every six weeks or so, I have restored my 'natural' blondeness with the help of a home hair dye kit. I hope I'm not especially vain, but somehow 'blonde' …
lost poem
it was about sweetcorn. it was about hidden layers. it was about changing my name starting the process of becoming myself my own person. it was a statement before i knew what a statement was. i may have used husk and silky threads. grade one or grade two. stay there poem about sweetcorn with the …
I am not Frank O’Hara
but sometimes I write poems in my lunch hour. Or, to be more accurate, I muse, jot, fiddle with a poem coming-into-being. Most of my poems have a long gestation. They're a gradual accretion of words, phrases, images, and a honing and chipping away to get the shape, the movement, that I is buried somewhere …
wine, women, words
That's a recipe for a convivial and enriching evening, and that's exactly what we got last Thursday at the launch of the fourth Loose Muse anthology, downstairs at Cottons on Exmouth Market. Once again, Agnes Meadows and her co-editors have put together a varied and top-class collection of writing by women who have attended one …
poetry panic attack
I spent Saturday morning sitting at my desk, thinking about a new poem, jotting down words and phrases, delving into dictionaries and reference books, nurturing that little knot of something in the back of my brain that I hope will evolve, take shape, emerge slowly onto the page. So I was already in a rather …
a short, vaguely feminist, marginally existentialist reading list
My younger sister asked me this week to help her with a request from a work colleague, who had approached her for suggestions of female writers to read. Her colleague likes Sylvia Plath, apparently, is interested in feminism and existentialism, and is planning to take four months off work to go to France and read …
Continue reading a short, vaguely feminist, marginally existentialist reading list
encores galore
I'm listening to a blistering performance of Glazunov's Piano Concerto No.2 live on the radio from the BBC Proms, performed by Daniil Trifonov and the London Symphony Orchestra. As the piece finishes, there's sustained and rapturous applause until the audience is rewarded with a thrilling encore. For the last five or so years the BBC …
posters and coasters
Biblical weather last night as we ventured far north, deep into zone 3 and along the Seven Sisters Road, to the private view of an exhibition of posters at G511ERY. A fabulously unlikely location for a gallery, next to a kebab shop in Tottenham, but just the spot to showcase some maverick printmaking. The work on …
