I’m taking a break from posting for a few days - to fulfil my obligations to the marking of poetry.
Who the hell marks poetry? etc - but ‘I am tied to the stake and I must stand the course’, in this case the MA course I teach at the Poetry School by the river Thames.
It was the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear who was tied to the stake and must stand the course.
I’m just doing my actual sodding job, marking some effing poems and essays - (rather fine ones, as it happens) but before one accuses me of making a big deal of doing my actual sodding part-time job - which I mostly love doing - I might just point out that the Earl of Gloucester, though he was having a pretty bad time, wasn’t literally tied to a stake any more than I am.
[The Earl of Gloucester having a bad time but not literally tied to a stake. Okay it’s not Gloucester in the picture it’s Lear. Okay it’s not Lear it’s an actor. It’s just a great picture. And thanks to Kevin Scully for correcting my error, which was not so much schoolboy as 1st-round University Challenge level.]
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This Shout-Out is to everyone who follows (I like you) or subscribes (I love you) or pays (yours to the end of time) to support Silly Games To Save The World. Thank you.
What is it? Here, as quite a few folks have joined on lately, is what it is…
In July 2023 I started writing a book called Silly Games To Save The World and posting it here on this Substack, to which I gave the same name.
It’s a sequel to my books On Poetry (2012)…
'The best book about poetry I've ever read' - The Guardian
and Drinks With Dead Poets (2016)…
'A wholly brilliant evocation of a mysterious university campus...' - The Guardian
I emerge from lockdown in a strange flat by a canal, I meet my old friends from those books, I think about poetry and politics and everything that’s gone to shit in the world in recent times. I think about psychology and philosophy and sex and drugs and I make up Silly Games.
The book is archived here from July to December 2023, from DOT: The 2nd Say to OUT YOU GO: The 14th Say. (DOT: The 1st Say was re-posted in September 2024.)
After Silly Games was finished (on New Year’s Eve 2023) I wrote further essays on the same subjects, they’re all here on the site.
Having decided to train for psychotherapy, I started writing about that too. After encountering ecopsychology in the spring of 2024, I decided to write 101 poems about the Most Endangered Creatures in the world by New Year’s Eve of 2024.
[New Year’s Eve in action.]
And I did just that, posting the poems as I wrote them, largely for free. A few of them are still on here somewhere, but I took most of them down as I want to publish them in book form as Extinction Songs.
‘Cayman Islands Ghost Orchid’ is in The Spectator this week; more of the poems will appear there soon…
‘Paridis Burchellanus’ is in Consilience, the wonderful science & poetry magazine…
The wonderful science/poetry magazine Consilience
There is an extract from Silly Games To Save The World (mostly about sex and drugs) in the fabulous poetry magazine Black Iris founded by poets (and former students on my course) Sarah Gibbons and Lauren Thomas…
I have begun 2025 by continuing to think about poetry and psychotherapy, and somehow organising a literary conference by mistake…
I have had several excellent contributions on the subject and will start talking about them once I finish the damn marking…
[Me having fun with marking.]
Of course!!!
Good luck with marking. You told us alot about you future studies and production. That's fine.
and your teaching. I haven't read 'Drinks With Dead Poets" Mybe I should.