Category: Writing
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All Tomorrow’s Publishers
Saturday-Sunday 17th & 18th October 2015, Noon – 5pm The Peckham Pelican FREE! This October, The Learned Pig is delighted to be co-curating All Tomorrow’s Publishers, a weekend fair for independent publishers, as part of the week-long Literary Kitchen Festival. Taking place at the Peckham Pelican in south London, the fair features a host of…
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Medieval Graffiti – Charms and Curses
This month sees the publication of Matthew Champion’s Medieval Graffiti. The book is a fascinating tour through the centuries of hand-carved writing and art that adorns the walls of churches across the country. One of the key themes that emerges is an apparent lack of clear delineation between official and unofficial – in thought, word,…
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Sunspots, a conversation via email
Sunspots is the latest poetry collection from Simon Barraclough, Poet in Residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory. Below Barraclough discusses the collection’s origins and ideas, and plenty more besides, over the course of a series of emails with our poetry editor, Crystal Bennes. —–Original Message—– From: crystal bennes < > To: SimonBarraclough…
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A Fixed Vocabulary
Is there a word for arriving home after a hot day and finding the place changed, as if everything has been picked up for inspection and put back down in a different spot? What is the word for being surprised by how high the weeds on the train line have grown? What is the word…
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The Rapture
I dreamed I was the only one left in the world. It was a Friday. I was going to see you all Monday. I went to the marshes on Friday night and lay on the ground on my woollen blanket. I was utterly alone. I took my socks off and my jeans. It was a…
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you are and onto
neither of you nor not this in stance beside congruities one thing not a way …
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Soap / Eternity / Rendering
INSTRUCTIONS ON A BAR OF NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY SOAP Do what you want, live how you want. Get it behind your ears and all over the skin you want. Do not think about machines. Read what you will, focus your eyes on grime and slime and free will. Or grace,…
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Our Wings
Fair is fair, and clear is clean. Clean air is clear, clear air is clean, though I fathom the factories fair fouled it up. Particulate, exudate, aerosols, mud, benzene, dioxins, DDT, blood. Filthy factory runoff grimes up our groundwater. Oozes thin. Gurgles thick. We slide and we slip on greased oilcloth earth. Our dirt is…
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Liquorice
With drains for legs the rain runs off you And though it’s always cold, (with lead for legs) it’s not wet. Black roots are hard but damp liquorice runs like mascara Making pandas of eyes Heavy like the lid that the scent lifts on memories as distant as feet, Ash boots the fag ends…
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When It Breaks
When the side of the building falls, it is a spring morning, April, not yet dawn. And there is no warning. The crack was there for a long time, all up the side, visible on every floor. Everything’s broken, all broken. You can’t worry about these things. What Sondra’s mother told her: You stop worrying….
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There are 355 letters in Genesis 4:9-13
An excerpt from a sequence of 31 perfect anagrams of Genesis 4: 9-13 in which Cain shares an apartment with Father K. in a disputed territory. Genesis 4: 9-13 And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And He…
