Tag: poetry
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Lunch
The man used to think that cars grew on trees. He imagined them growing like apples or lemons, weighing down the boughs of trees until they snapped and the cars settled slowly on the uneven dirt. He liked thinking this way. It was nice that the blue blush of the late afternoon sky in summer…
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CO2 Cherries
I Rust thing against rot Thing against resting skin red Cheery parallel Lines the blinds of grey once gold Then wood between me and sand. II I spit into lines Those cherries sum the blossoms I would and they wood Now grow pink and red and brown Above, aground, and around. …
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Euclid’s First Definition
Cover image: Euclid, Stoicheia (Elements). Manuscript, Constantinople, September 888. MS. D’Orville 301, fols. 113v-114r © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (via Alain R. Truong)
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from ‘swims’
swims is a long poem documenting wild swims across the UK. swims starts and end in Devon, my home county, moving through Somerset, Surrey, the Lake District, London, Wales and Brighton. Each swim is conceived of as an environmental action, testing ways individuals might effect environmental change. swims is an overall sequence of twelve swims,…
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Table of Contents (in the Form of a Sonnet) for an Imaginary Post-punk Poetry Chapbook
1. underground cellars, Experimental Trajectories. 2. La volonté de rupture ou la beauté radicale. 3. extensive rehearsals make (even) le moins que parfait perfect. 4. I Could Not Handwrite Any Longer. 5. the TYPEWRITER becomes an ACCORDION. 6. The Poet(ess) as a Cultural Machine. 7. Converting Ulysess into a quilt—A kind of Steve…
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Reliquiae
If writing is an act of preservation, it is a flawed one. Words change their meanings, books rot, papers burn, whole libraries are lost to time. The longevity of a text is therefore as much a result of material history – and chance – as it is of any inherent truth or beauty. Nonetheless, the…
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The New Concrete
The history of concrete poetry charts a path from utopia to dystopia. You could say that there’s a secret history of the second half of the twentieth century embedded in this little movement, one that parallels larger changes across cultural output. By the late 1970s, when concrete poetry collapses into a smouldering heap, few could…
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The Learned Pig presents…
As a pig-themed entity, we generally prefer to shun anything relating to human kitchens. You never know when you might end up inside a sandwich. But, having made an exception last year for the inaugural Literary Kitchen Festival, we thought we’d do so again for its second instalment – taking place this October down in…
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The Barometer of My Heart
On 20th February 2002, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, philosopher Jacques Derrida asked an audience of students the following question: “The phallus, I mean, the phallos, is it proper to man?” This question opened the eighth session of a series of lectures given by Derrida between 2001 and…
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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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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…
