Glasfryn Project

The youth sits in his bedroom, reading. Who is it? It’s just a youth, any youth. He sits sprawled in an armchair reading a book. What book? It’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy. His eyes ache and he’s getting a headache, but he doesn’t know yet that his eyes are aching; he doesn’t know yet that he’s getting a headache, or he may have forgotten it. He’s forgotten everything. In fact he has no idea where he is, if indeed he is anywhere at all, at that moment, if indeed one could speak of that moment as a moment in any very useful sense of the term. Let’s call it a moment, for the sake of argument, because I’m writing about it, it’s a thing I’m writing, a picture I’m conjuring up: a youth, any youth, in a room, with his feet up, reading a novel. What...

Content that we are fully warmed-up and engaged, Carrie now invites us into flowing – the first of the Five Rhythms. For the benefit of a couple of newcomers, Carrie explains that flowing is a rhythm of long, continuous movements without end or beginning; earthy; connected to the feminine, but also expressing the emotional key of fear. On this occasion she proposes that we start by spending a few minutes simply attuning to our bodies and listening-in to what is happening there – physically, emotionally, energetically. Although the orthodox advice in flowing is to focus on one’s feet, Carrie suggests to allow our whole-body awareness to lead us into movement – seeing if a particular part of the body presents itself as willing to start. I immediately think of my right knee and the impacted...

April 27, 2012. I’m reading on the plane: Doris Chapin Bailey’s biography of her deceased husband, Roy. The book is called A Divided Forest. Roy was a Tlingit elder from Sitka, Alaska, the town I called home for fifteen years. I still call it home, although I was born and raised in Anchorage and I’ve been in the San Francisco Bay area since 1999. And there is so much I want to say about Sitka, about Roy’s life and so many others, about my own connections to the place as a poet. Let me begin: I am flying back to California from Sitka after the memorial service for my old friend Isabella Brady, another Tlingit elder. Isabella died suddenly at the age of 88. She was a cancer survivor, ready for another ten years. She, like Roy, knew my grandparents, Les and Caroline Yaw, Presbyterian missionaries...

The project began with the intention of providing filmgoers with a comprehensive and objective guide to the plotlines of overlooked examples of British narrative cinema. Along the way, however, readers began to demand in-depth information about the plots of a wide variety of movies, and so the project has expanded to include examples from European and U.S. cinema. Editor-in-chief: A. Mellors. In Transporter 3 (2008), Jason Statham plays Frank Martin, a sensitive Swiss composer who falls in love with a soulful Ukrainian scrubber while retracing the journey across central Europe made by Patrick Leigh-Fermor in Between the Woods and the Water. There are various setbacks, with Frank on a steep learning-curve when his once-reliable Audi needs constant ad-hoc repairs, but the experience is enriching...

Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is haunting the last two weeks of this pregnancy, as is the reporting of the 2011 Irish census. My entry to the largest maternity hospital in Dublin, and one of the busiest in Europe (it is nicknamed ‘The Baby Factory’) followed the publication of the final Mahon Tribunal Report on the 22nd March, 2012. For those possibly uninitiated to Irish politics, its official subtitle is The Tribunal of Inquiry Into Certain Planning Matters and Payments. Established by Dáil Éireann in 1997 to investigate allegations of corrupt payments to politicians regarding planning permissions and land rezoning during the 1990s in Co Dublin, it is named after its last chairman Justice Mahon. The findings of this public inquiry were reported baldly by the headline of the Irish...

In Summer 2002, Lesley and I were on our way to see the Documenta 11 art festival at Kassel, Germany, when we dropped into a calligraphy exhibition at the Manna Kunsthuis in Bruges. One artist’s work transfixed us: we found ourselves asking who had created these waterfalls and soaring windrows of letters, shapes so tactile and dynamic flexing over pictorial space? We were told that these were images created by the American artist, Thomas Ingmire. After our return home, pace all we’d seen at Documenta, those calligraphic images wouldn’t let me be. In response I wrote the poem ‘Tabula Gratuloria’ which helped me break through a lexical impasse... I sent the poem to Thomas and, in reply, he made the most extraordinary one-of-a-kind hand-crafted book... TO READ THIS ARTICLE CLICK...

Allen Fisher, Notes for the Glasfryn Seminar, The Æsthetics of the Imperfect Fit, and a coda (Sustained Resilience: Joseph Beuys, Vitrine 28, 1962-1980) delivered on 25th February 202 in Llangattock, Wales. These pages are notes made in preparation for the Seminar and should not be thought of as a complete articulation of it. preamble today’s seminar is in three sets, two before lunch, one after the subject is aesthetics, the underlying themes are facture and aesthetic reception eventually the subject will be how meaning might be achieved by slow accretions and lead to aspects of truth telling the two sets before lunch blur some of their parameters, these are the ideas of the natural and cultural worlds, worlds that are clearly inseparable. TO READ THIS ARTICLE...

"Many thanks for the invite. I have a manuscript of short stories that I occasionally play with in the privacy of my own room. It's called "1000 Short Stories by Tim Atkins" -- would a few of them tickle your etceteras?" "When you say 'a few of them', are they short short? Actually, it doesn't really matter as we have infinite space." TIM ATKINS is the author of many books, including Petrarch, To Repel Ghosts, 1000 Sonnets, Honda Ode, and Horace. Petrarch is forthcoming from Vancouver's Book Thug Press. He is editor of the online poetry magazine onedit, and translator of Petrarch, Horace, and Buddhist texts. Online links: http://www.onedit.net/index.html http://www.archiveofthenow.org/authors/?i=1 http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/poets/atkins.htm http://www.saltpublishing.com/writers/profile.php?recordID=208004 TO...

[caption id="attachment_2244" align="aligncenter" width="263" caption="Antony Gormley, Field for the British Isles (detail) from the book cover Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970, Wesleyan University Press, 1999"][/caption] It was on a Saturday morning three or four weeks ago that Sara and I drove to Ilminster near Yeovil in South Somerset for the opening reception of Antony Gormley’s Field for the British Isles installation at Barrington Court, a National Trust house. From here we take the back roads through beech woods and over Woodbury Common towards Ottery, joining the noisy concrete A30 near Exeter airport. This is where Swampy and his fellow protestors were camped out in the trees and dug into tunnels to delay the building of the new road. Once you get up beyond Honiton...

Open country is corridor-prone, closed edges are dynamic or merely advancing.  Living on the edge of a small Midlands town (Kenilworth), itself rather like an assarted wood in outline, nearest open access takes the form of a wedge fanning out broadly north-west and dotted with beleaguered quadrants or triangles of small woods.  Northwards are Crackley and Rough Knowles with the three-cornered wedge of Whitefield Coppice beyond.  A dismantled railway now a greenway penetrates Crackley but has become partly reabsorbed by it as it allows access to the flank of the wood furthest from the road.  More to the west is Chase Wood, now reduced to a track-side linear copse by the height of the wheat prairie era. North of here are Stakes Wood and Long Meadow Woods, while Poors Wood and Black Hill Woods...

Self Portraits I was born in Germany in 1968. My dad was in the British Army. My mother went to live with him. We all moved back to Wales when I was 2 years old. My dad was medically discharged from the army with multiple sclerosis. He opened a butcher’s shop with my brother. My dad was a strong man before the illness took hold. I had 2 brothers. We were a handful for my mother. She had to take over the role as breadwinner because my dad had to give up his part of the shop. It was a hard time for us. My mum started taking it out on me. I didn’t think she liked me very much. Her bitterness towards me continued into my youth. I started stealing things from the local shops. I was good at it and had lots of friends. At 11 years old, we moved to the same street as my Nan and Gramp...

24/5/12: A Walk By The Dyfi Estuary: 19 Sequenced Photographs Christopher Twigg lives in Talgarth and paints.  'Glimpses of unfamiliar Japan' is an ongoing series of photographs of the landscape of mid Wales. His poetry collection 'In the Choir'  (Alces Press)  was paperback of the week in The Guardian in 1997. WebRep currentVote noRating noWeight