Sorry for your loss.

Ian Duhig recommends 'Singletary'. "I have followed Geraldine's work for decades and Singletary contains all her characteristic strengths of exuberant wit, intellectual depth, idiosyncratic learning, slant wit and real spiritual and deep human love expressed with great linguistic panache. If you don't know her, take this chance to get acquainted."

📚 It's August, which means the #SealeyChallenge is underway! To help you on your journey to read a book every day this month, The Poetry Society has gotten in touch with poets we've recently worked with for some recommendations.

Next up is Ian Duhig, who is on the judging panel for (...)

Michael Hofmann accompanied me to the lido.

Michael Hofmann accompanied me to the lido.

Jonathan Stroud.

I love the way Michael Hofmann describes Wallace Stevens as “the Matisse among poets” and “imitating a whole orchestra, not despising the triangle.” (Behind the Lines by Michael Hofmann, published by Faber & Faber.)

Today at the lido: 18 degrees in the water. Cycled 10KM here and about to cycle the 10KM home after a gorgeous swim. Forgot to bring a sandwich.

Happy birthday to you and to FH. Hope the Dirty Martinis are going down well.

I hope you’re planning boots on the ground and a double row of brassicas along the border.

The course of true love never did clean poos.

After two months using the leisure centre’s sweat-drenched yoga mats, I finally rested my third eye on my own mat.

Congratulations. V much looking forward to reading it.

I’ve been in love with James Taylor and Carole King for nearly half a century. Lovely programme on the telly. ❤️

The rage doesn’t seek to cancel the art. It’s nothing to do with the art. I’m taking a sort of bastardized Barthesisn position: the monster author is dead…to me.

No monster too monstrous? No woman’s rage more important than a monster artist’s art?

My decision to decline to engage with an artist’s work doesn’t interfere with anyone else’s engagement with the art. I’m a fan of Muriel Spark. Her personal failings make her more interesting to me, not less. Munro crosses my line and to quote Elizabeth Bishop: Art just isn’t worth that much.

Sorry but siding with a paedophile against your own daughter is horrific for any human. Readers are allowed to apply their own standards. This isn’t the same as condemning an artist for his fiction, eg Lolita. This is case where the perpetrator admitted it and was sentenced.

It’s my understanding MS’s husband won custody in the divorce. She was living in Africa at the time, having moved there for her husband’s teaching job. He lost his job due to mental Illness. MS returned to London during the war to earn a living having arranged for her son to be sent to boarding sch.

Alexa, how hungry am I?

Christmas treats.

If you have Irish parents, you never leave on the lights unnecessarily. Even necessarily.

Happy birthday to William Blake and to me.

Holy Trinity Church in Blythburgh is very special to me. Such a joy to find Humphrey Jennings—my latest poetry crush— looking at the same rafters in his poem ‘Blythburgh’.

This is the famous photo St Paul’s taken on the night of the second great fire of London, 29th/30th December 1940. It was taken from the roof of the Daily Mail offices in Tudor St by their chief photographer, Herbert Mason. I think Humphrey Jennings’s poem I See London is about that night.

<TS Eliot voice> October is the cruellest month.

Dreamt I was with Humphrey Jennings on the terrace at Tate Modern. HJ was filming Hieronymous Bosch’s Ascent of the Blessed against the backdrop of St Paul’s at night. It was my job to turn on and off off an enormous floodlight. (I blame @jntod.bsky.social ’s wonderful poetry Substack.)

Method suggests some sort of coarsening or refining to influence the outcome, a pursuit of knowledge. In maths indifference is an equivalence relation. x OR y. They are equivalent but not the same. Beckett the QS’s son means it mathematically, hence his use of the word contingent.

@peterjosyph.bsky.social Beckett’s Murphy yearned for a “self-immersed indifference to the contingencies of the contingent world” Malone is certain “Beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.” Indifference = the goal.

I came across Palgrave in my state school. I was born in the 60s.

I agree. Indifference is absolutely energy-less; you need to expend energy to boil your piss or for your heart to race.

I don’t think indifference can be vituperative; indifference lacks the energy necessary for scalding.