Peter Thabit Jones, "The Boy Who Drew John Lennon"

 

Peter Thabit Jones has authored eighteen books, including the Dylan Thomas Walking Tour of Greenwich Village, New York with Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan’s daughter. He and Aeronwy Thomas did a poetry reading tour across America in 2008, organised by Stanley H. Barkan, their American publisher. Peter has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. He has received a number of awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, UK), The Royal Literary Fund Award (UK), an Arts Council of Wales Award, the 2016 Ted Slade Award for Service to Poetry (UK), and the 2017 Homer: European Medal for Art and Poetry. His poem "Kilvey Hill" is incorporated into a stained-glass window in Saint Thomas School, Swansea.

Three of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for renowned Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, the Theatre National Du Luxembourg, and the Sofia Opera and Ballet in Bulgaria. 

In April 2014, he was inducted into the Phi Sigma Iota Society at Salem State University, Massachusetts, USA, for his contribution to literature and literary translations. He gave the Guest of Honour speech before his induction.

He tutored English Literature and Creative Writing on the part-time degree programme at Swansea University’s Adult Education Department for twenty-two years, retiring in 2014.  

Further information can be found on his website here. 

Front cover drawing of John Lennon by Peter Thabit Jones ©2026

About The Boy Who Drew John Lennon, by Peter Thabit Jones

The poems range from the poet’s childhood in the shadow of Kilvey Hill in Eastside Swansea, where he was raised by his Welsh grandparents, to his times (2010 to 2025) spent as an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. Other subjects include poems about poets, such as Elizabeth Daryush, Ivor Gurney, Federico Garcia Lorca, R. S. Thomas, and Welsh language poet Alan Llwyd, artist Stanley Spencer, the jazz and swing music singer Billie Holiday, Elvis, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, war, a refugee mother, a victim of domestic abuse, homelessness, widowed women, and the 1926 General Strike in Wales.

You can read more about The Boy Who Drew John Lennon here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From The Boy Who Drew John Lennon

Lassen Volanic Park, California

            (for Patricia and Bill)

We followed the rough path,

Below the mountains

Stretching to a visual heaven

And the wide splinter of a lake

Of greyed placid blue.

We talked as we walked

Above the deep valley of nature,

Like two people who have awoken

In another planet’s landscape:

A landscape that was shaped 

Through a time before mankind’s

Strict calendars and clocks.

A time when volcanoes raged

With eruptions and the land

Slid and moved, broke apart,

Catapulting boulders

In the rising collapse,

Until the agitated storm

Noise of it all settled

Down to a stilled calmness,

Like the silence sleeping

On the glassy face of a pond.

We strolled down to where

The geysers were smoking

From a dulled snow surface

And the strong sniff of sulphur

Fouled the afternoon’s air.

Tourists, we took our photos

To solidify our memories.

Then breathless with hiking

And our excited achievement,

We climbed back to the parked car.

Below, the warm day spread out,

The landscape the physical evidence 

Of this planet’s ever-changing 

Body, its chaos and its creation—

The natural engines of its internal magic.

In the Poetry Class

He left you, you said,             

In the country of tears.           

He left you broken,                  

Your beaten mind                      

A junkyard full                              

Of his angry menace.                

I am your teacher                       

And you told me                         

Last week, when my other         

Students had left.                                   

I glance at you,                                    

Your young hand hovering       

Over the blank sheet                

Of writing paper.                                                       

Do your eyes now sadden    

 

Because of the ugly bruise        

Of your memories,                    

The Jekyll and Hyde                 

Of his so-called love?           

I watch as you                          

Start to scribble                      

Down your gathering thoughts,     

The nervous rivers       

Of blue words claiming       

The clean land of the page,        

As I hope one day                              

You fully claim back your life        

From the prison of pain,      

Claim back the true you      

That his shadows still occupy,      

So that you find the calm       

Rhythm of real caring               

And a happiness unchained  

In the whole of your being.       

Peter Thabit Jones, "The Fathomless Tides of the Heart: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, American Poet and Artist"

Carolyn Mary Kleefeld and Peter Thabit Jones

Peter Thabit Jones has authored sixteen books. He has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe and is an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. A recipient of many awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, London) and the Homer: European Medal of Poetry and Art, two of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, and Theatre National Du Luxembourg. The Land of Dreams, a new opera, will premiere at the Sofia Opera and Ballet Theatre, Bulgaria, in in June this year. His biography of Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, The Fathomless Tides of the Heart, is published in 2023 by The Seventh Quarry Press. Further information about Peter's work is on his website here. 

About Fathomless Tides of the Heart: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, American Poet and Artist: A Biography, by Peter Thabit Jones

Carolyn Mary Kleefeld’s story is one from a talented young girl to the poet and artist she is today. It is a journey against overwhelming social pressures to fit in to a privileged life, a journey of a young Beverly Hills socialite to a reclusive lifestyle in Big Sur. Carolyn is a woman answering a creative calling from childhood, and is someone who has deservedly and impressively achieved publication, recognition and admiration for her poems and paintings around the world. 

It’s a fascinating biography and it references iconic figures of the literary world, Hollywood, and the counter-culture of the Sixties, including Jane Fonda, Rod Steiger, Anaïs Nin, Allen Ginsberg, Dr. Timothy Leary, and John C. Lilly, Jacques Cousteau and Laura Huxley, the wife of Aldous Huxley.

“It is no small matter to write the development of a poet, artist, and thinker of Carolyn Mary Kleefeld’s stature, yet Peter Thabit Jones’s biography rises to the challenge, offering insight not only into her voice and vision, but into the dynamics of creativity itself – its tensions, complexities, mysteries.” —Arthur Williamson.  

You can see more information about the book on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the biography.

From The Fathomless Tides of the Heart, by Peter Thabit Jones

Carolyn’s home in Big Sur to is situated on an isolated steep cliff, which slants its long way down to the mesmerizing swell of the Pacific Ocean. The property, 500 feet above the sea, has a 300-degree view from every angle. Her “dragon’s crown,” as she lovingly calls her part of the mountain, depending on nature’s mood, offers the silence of paradise and the aggressive and wild music of the sea and ferocious winds. Fog can descend at any time and like the chilled breath of a god, submerge all in its cloud of damp and eerie smoke. In the summer, when the fog does lift, it can get as hot as a desert rock and one goes about one’s day in a sluggish and uncomfortable manner. During the winter and even earlier, the anger of the winds is amplified and accelerated and they bully the whole place relentlessly. As Carolyn would write in her poem "The Squall," published in her book Vagabond Dawns: 

The icy grip of winter

wounds the hallowed air.

And the wind wails like a baby 

Abandoned in the squall ...

The wind, though, can brutally claim any month of the year. This is Carolyn’s observation from a June journal entry, focused in its exact sense-impressions, “The garden is quivering. The storm moves its pulse, trembling, rushing in the squall. My soul is in this compelled rush—a sense of quickened current—to the unknown. The air is icy and blowing carelessly all that is in the beast, the wake of the tempest. The seas are like a receptive, needy beast—await[ing] heaven’s blood humbly, vast, and eternal. The moonstone veils drape the mountain range, softening in this touch. The tiniest daisy bares its petals to the rippling, bristling blasts." 

Peter Thabit Jones, "Under the Raging Moon"

 

Peter Thabit Jones has authored sixteen books. He has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe and is an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. A recipient of many awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, London) and the Homer: European Medal of Poetry and Art, two of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, and Theatre National Du Luxembourg.  A book of poems, A Cancer Notebook, is forthcoming. Further information is on his website here.  

Front cover artwork by Swansea artist Jeffrey Phillips

About Under the Raging Moon: One Night with Dylan Thomas in Greenwich Village, New York: A Drama in Four Acts, by Peter Thabit Jones

October, 1953. Dylan Thomas, unwell and harassed by personal problems, is on his fourth and fatal visit to America, organised by John Malcolm Brinnin, Director at the YM & YWHA Poetry Center in New York. 

October 25th. Dylan, accompanied by Liz Reitell, Brinnin’s assistant, with whom he started an affair on his third visit, is in a taxi on the way to Greenwich Village. Since his arrival in the city, she has been trying to keep him away from his ‘hangers-on’ and to focus him on the upcoming two performances of his Under Milk Wood at the Kaufmann Auditorium. Unhappy and upset by his general behaviour, she stops the taxi near her apartment and abandons him to do whatever he pleases.

In this imagined scenario, he stops at some bars where he mainly meets people unknown to him. The final bar is the White Horse Tavern, his favourite drinking place in the Village.

Note: In the early hours of 3rd November, Dylan would leave the Chelsea Hotel and an upset Liz. His last-ever drinking spree would lead to him being rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital on November 5th, where he would go into a coma and die on November 9th. 

This imagined evening with Dylan Thomas, unwell and who becomes somewhat drunk as the hours pass in his visits to four pubs in Greenwich Village, New York, aims to show the man behind the legend when he is among non-literary people: people unknown to him, apart from two bar people and two hangers-on. Always in the back of my mind were some comments by his Swansea friends, such as the poet Vernon Watkins and the painter Alfred Janes, who knew the pre-legend Dylan, that he could be ‘ordinary’ with the right people. I have aimed for that ‘ordinariness,’ the ability to empathise with others, in a genius of a man. 

His time with my chosen characters brings out certain themes: fatherhood, childhood, money, love and death. They were some of the themes that permeated his works and his letters.

You can read more about Under the Raging Moon on the UK publisher's website here and in the US here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening of Act Two. 

From Under the Raging Moon

ACT TWO

The stage is lit to show a section of another American bar. AVA, the young barwoman, is behind the counter. Enter DYLAN THOMAS. 

AVA: Mr. Dylan Thomas! (Looking at EZRA LOWELL, who is sitting at a table).  This is Dylan Thomas, a very famous poet. 

DYLAN THOMAS: I’m just posing as Dylan Thomas, my dear.

AVA: Oh, you are a wicked, Mr. Thomas! You don’t fool me!

AVA to EZRA LOWELL: He’s from England.  A very famous—

DYLAN THOMAS: From Wales. I’m Welsh. Welsh as a slice of bara brith from Carmarthen market.

AVA: Oh, I just love it when someone speaks another language! Don’t you, Mr. Lowell?  No friends with you tonight, Mr. Thomas?

DYLAN THOMAS: No.  I’m a dumped poet. Dumped by a female friend who thinks I am not fit to share the Manhattan air with her.

AVA:  Oh, poor Mr. Thomas.  Sit with Mr. Lowell. He’s by himself too.

DYLAN THOMAS (looking at EZRA LOWELL): May I become the second member of your club for lonely men? 

EZRA LOWELL: Take a seat. What you drinking, famous poet?

DYLAN THOMAS: An Old Grandad whisky, Ava.

EZRA LOWELL: Another gin for me.

AVA: Drinks for the lonely men coming up.

DYLAN THOMAS sits at the table. He lights a cigarette.

EZRA LOWELL: I’m Ezra Lowell, company manager of Ezra Lowell Cars Limited.  I have six car showrooms throughout New York and I’m planning to set two up in Boston next year. I own two properties in Greenwich Village, which of course is the more genteel part of Manhattan.  

DYLAN THOMAS: I’m Dylan Thomas, company manager of various poems and stories. I don’t have a car and I don’t own a single property. I live in Laugharne, which is not even shown on a map of Wales.

EZRA LOWELL: I take it sarcasm is part of a poet’s baggage?

DYLAN THOMAS: I prefer to call it the Welsh wit when it comes to words.

EZRA LOWELL: So what do you think of our Manhattan?

DYLAN THOMAS: All is (emphasising) now in this city! It’s gaudy carnival of neon lights calling all to worship mammon. Its canyons of skyscrapers threatening the ceiling of the night. Car horns going into battle with each other. Traffic flooding the avenues and people flooding the sidewalks. It’s as if a dream and nightmare have got into bed together. Is this the madness before the second Fall of mankind?  

EZRA LOWELL: Are you serious? This is the greatest city in the greatest country in the world.

DYLAN THOMAS: And money electrifies this buzzing, massive fairground! Ah, the heart is a green dollar! Even I, an overweight and word-burdened poet, have a beer-cleansed belly of hunger for it. The need for money sings among the rhyming lines in my mind. Money for Caitlin, oh my lioness of a wife. Money for our little litter of children, and money for me as poor as a public bar mouse.

Why have I come once more to this insomniac city, to parade my roar of a voice in the judging-eared halls, to be tortured by the educated questions of the sweet salaried academics? Ah, a pocket’s bulge of tempting dollars as green as envy!

EZRA LOWELL: Very fancy words, as expected from the likes of you.

AVA places their drinks on the table.

AVA: Enjoy!

EZRA LOWELL: Wouldn’t a proper job feed and clothe, what did you say, your litter of children?

DYLAN THOMAS: Each man and woman contributes to this blessed planet. If you need an electrician, a poet is of no use to you. If you need a poem, an electrician is of no use to you.  We all serve a purpose. You sell cars. I sell poems and stories, dear man.

EZRA LOWELL: You can’t be serious in comparing your contribution to society to that of a nine to five worker? (He downs a mouthful of his drink).

Ava, would you rather go out with an electrician with a regular salary and a Chevrolet or an impoverished poet?

AVA: Most gals I know like a guy with a load of dollar notes, but I like the thought of a poet writing love poems all about me, and whispering romantic words in my ear!  (She laughs loudly). Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (She laughs again). We did that one in college!

Caroline Gill, "Driftwood by Starlight"

Caroline Gill lives in Suffolk with her archaeologist husband, David. Her first full poetry collection, Driftwood by Starlight, was published by The Seventh Quarry Press in 2021. Caroline graduated in Classical Studies from Newcastle University in 1982, and gained a PGCE from the University of Exeter, followed by a TEFL Certificate from the Bell School of Languages in Norwich. She has worked as a teacher, an EFL tutor, and a Cataloguing Assistant in the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. 

The Holy Place, a ‘Poet to Poet’ chapbook shared with Monterey-based poet, John Dotson, was published by The Seventh Quarry Press (Swansea) in conjunction with Cross-Cultural Communications (New York). The Holy Place was launched in 2012 at the Dylan Thomas Birthplace in Swansea. ‘The Figure at the Phoenix Mine,’ a sestina, was awarded First Prize in the General Section of the International Petra Kenney Poetry Competition (2007). ‘Raft Race’ took Overall First Prize in the ZSL ‘Conservation’ Poetry Competition (2014). ‘Penwith Fingerstone’ was awarded Third Prize in the Milestones Competition (2017), judged by Brian Patten. Three poems were included in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms by Lewis Putnam Turco (4th edition, University Press of New England, 2012). 

Caroline has read her poems at the Hay Festival, the First International Poetry Festival in Swansea, Poetry in Aldeburgh and Winchester Poetry Festival. She has taken part in several short writing courses, including one run jointly in 2014 by the Poetry School and the Polar Museum (SPRI, University of Cambridge). Another, The Write Stuff, was organised by Disability Arts Cymru. Caroline’s outlook is shaped by her Christian faith. She loves to watch puffins, and many of her poems reflect her concern for the planet. 

Caroline's website is here. 

About Driftwood by Starlight

Driftwood by Starlight by Caroline Gill was published by Peter Thabit Jones of The Seventh Quarry Press in June 2021. While many of the poems have a coastal theme, some concern wildlife, landscape and archaeology. The majority have settings in England, Scotland and Wales. The author has a life-long love of Cornwall; the cover photograph, showing Cadgwith Cove under moon and stars, was taken by Laurence Hartwell. 

You can read a review of Driftwood by Starlight on Everybody's Reviewing here. You can read an interview with Caroline Gill about the collection on her blog here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.

From Driftwood by Starlight, by Caroline Gill

Penwith Fingerstone

           SW437374, Treen, beside B3306

Zennor Quoit, Robin’s Rocks, Great Zawn
and Gurnard’s Head ripple off the tongue,
raining their music on this granite land.

I tilt my neck and watch the sky display
its spectral colours as the clouds recede;
two farm dogs scamper up the hill. I walk

towards the fingerstone, which hides
between the tarmac and a Cornish hedge;
a snail trail shimmers in the afternoon.

I check the surface of the milestone block.
A hand points to Penzance: it’s ‘6M’ up
and over to the arc around Mount’s Bay.

This ‘stone with benchmark’ sends me on
to find a town called ‘ƧTIVƧ’, without an ‘e’
in Ives. Each ‘S’ is back to front: was this

through lack of learning? It could be
the maker was left-handed for when I
was small and shaping letters into words,

my text ran right to left, which seemed
its natural ebb and flow. I filled the pages
of my stapled book, flicking from the end,

until convention’s channels turned the tide.
My current ‘S’ advances in a coil of surf,
unlike these stone-based characters,

which chime when rain comes pelting
down: Gurnard’s Head, Zennor Quoit,
Robin’s Rocks, Great Zawn …

The Ceilidh House

The peat fire crackles and burns with stories;
footsteps scurry through mist and mountain
to warm a Hebridean hearth with stories.

A figure crosses turf where St Columba
knelt long ago beside the Snizort;
the crofter’s creel is laden with stories.

He pauses to watch the snow-stars drifting
on the loch, with its kelp and pebbles;
hares in the lazy-bed leap with stories.

The crofter enters his neighbour’s parlour,
rests on the settle while divots smoulder;
a plaintive skirl fills the room with stories.

Shadows dance round the doleful piper,
whose music makes the embers tremble;
the single oil lamp flickers with stories.

A mother stirs her three-legged cauldron;
sisters spin, or weave at the handloom,
infusing a homemade plaid with stories.

Hailstone tears pound the snow-flecked Cuillin,
recalling the Clearances, emigration:
the Ceilidh House overflows with stories.

Rebecca Lowe, "Blood and Water"

Rebecca Lowe is a journalist, poet and poetry events organiser, based in Wales, UK. Her climate emergency poem ‘Tick,Tick’ was a Bread and Roses Spoken Word 2020 Award winner. Her poetry has been featured on BBC Bristol, BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Workshop and BBC Radio 3 and featured in many anthologies including Black Bough, Three Drops from A Cauldron, Merrimac Mic: The River Widens (Massachusetts, USA), Red Poets, Blackheath Countercultural Review, and Ymlaen/Onward! anthology of radical Welsh poetry (Culture Matters, 2019). Her first collection of poetry, Blood and Water, was published by The Seventh Quarry in November 2020. A further collection, Our Father Eclipse, is due for publication with Culture Matters in April 2021.

 

About Blood and Water

Blood and Water is Rebecca Lowe's first full-length poetry collection. With poems spanning more than a decade, change and identity form an overarching theme, from the title poem describing the wonderment and bewilderment that comes with having a new baby to the later, more self-assured work which encompasses themes of empowerment and vulnerability. Tender and searingly honest, her work takes in Celtic folktales, mythology, climate and the natural landscape to create a celebration of life in all its rich variety, pain and beauty.

Writing about her work, Rebecca says: “We can fall into despair, or we can dare to hope. Those really are our only options. The future is a blank page, and it’s up to us to choose how we fill it. We need to speak up boldly and wisely, with radical passion and revolutionary compassion. We need to write new, better words into the world—words like equality, peace, sustainability, and justice. Because words create worlds.”

You can find Blood and Water on the publisher's website here.

Below, you can read three sample poems from the collection. 

From Blood and Water

Snowman

Soft, white hands caressed me into being,
Moulded and patted, arms marbled with cold,
Lips parted, snowflakes caught them, as she
hunkered down against the weight of my bulk,
Rolled me downhill to where I stood, anchored
by the efforts of her love.

She ground me rocks for a smile, jagged,
Coal eyes burned pinprick memories
of dead pines needled against white clouds,
Her breath blew a frosted trail, as she
laughed at my comical carrot nose,
My scarf which slid beneath her grip,
Whispered wings through the snow.

We posed for selfies, her arm around my
pristine waist, I grinned, the words frozen
on my lips, stupid in love – when she left
in search of warmth, my branch-arms reached 
to claw her back, twig-tangled and wretched.

Through the snow, her footsteps carve 
her distance; I stand, implacable, stiffly smiling
to please her – what else can I do?

And when she sleeps, under a silvered moon
I cry soft, wet tears to the immaculate stars,
My ice-heart melts.

Dyfatty Flats

A bowling green mapped incongruously upon the scrub,
Weeds subdued to stubble; cigarette ends, glass bottles,
A broken mannequin lies abandoned behind boarded-up shops
Above which the sky hangs long and heavy,
Weltering rain through purple bruises,
The sun closes her eyes through streaks of silver,
Dreams…
The sound of a river
Crying itself to sleep.

First Kicks

Not a kick at first
But a beating of wings,
A heart’s flutter,
Not a shouting into being
But a murmur, a whisper
Of assent.

On the screen
She is grainy, grey,
Her fingers translucent,
Clasped, in prayer,
Her pixelated face
Stares back through 
Layers of time,
Suspended.

Her skin, a spider-skein
Of threads, still weaving
To vein, corpuscle,
Tender fontanelle – 

We gaze across 
An ocean’s distance,
Farther than we
Have ever travelled,
Closer than we
Will ever be again. 

Christopher Norris, "A Partial Truth"

Christopher Norris is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff and a visiting fellow at Birkbeck College, London. In his early career he taught English Literature, then moved to Philosophy via literary theory, and has now moved back in the direction of Creative Writing. He has published widely on the topic of deconstruction and is the author of more than thirty books on aspects of philosophy, literature, the history of ideas, and music. More recently he has turned to writing poetry in various genres, including – unusually – that of the philosophical verse-essay. His verse-collections to date are The Cardinal’s Dog, For the Tempus-Fugitives, The Matter of Rhyme, A Partial Truth, and Socrates at Verse. At present he is finishing work on two further collections: As Knowing Goes and Other Poems and an extended series of verse reflections on themes from the writing of Jacques Derrida.

Over the past few years Chris has also been active as a left-wing political poet with satires and invectives brought together in two volumes: The Trouble with Monsters and A Folded Lie (with cartoons by Martin Gollan). His political poems appear regularly on the website Culture Matters and his more philosophical pieces in the weekly (now monthly) online magazine The Wednesday. He has lectured and held visiting posts at universities around the world, and his books have been translated into many languages. For the past thirty years Chris has sung with Cor Cochion Caerdydd (The Cardiff Reds Choir), a campaigning socialist street-choir, and has more recently joined The Eclectics, a smaller Swansea-based non-political group. During lockdown he has offered a series of Zoom lectures at various universities in Iraq as well as poetry readings at Aarhus University and elsewhere.

Chris lives in Swansea with his wife Valerie, a novelist and retired Professor of Materials Science at Swansea University. His daughters Clare and Jenny both live in Penarth. 

See also: https://norriswriting.com/

A Few Thoughts About My Poetry ...
By Christopher Norris

First off a bit of anecdotage for those who may wonder why an erstwhile literary theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas should now have turned to poetry as his preferred mode of writing, albeit poetry of a character which – at times – will put readers in mind of those earlier preoccupations. At its simplest this was a practical matter and a case of preemptive, in some degree preconscious  psychological strategy. As retirement from full-time university employment loomed ever closer I found myself wondering how best to satisfy on the one hand my need to carry on writing – a more than forty-year habit – and on the other my desire to do something different after all those academic monographs and articles. But this led on to some more germane or at any rate less personal-strategic ideas, among them the thought that certain kinds of verse-form might lend themselves to thinking differently – in a creative-exploratory way – about certain issues thrown up by my previous work.

The resultant project, or series of projects, has occupied the larger part of my time for writing during the past half-decade. All the poems collected in A Partial Truth (2019) and Socrates at Verse (2020) are instances of formal verse. That is, they all have a clearly marked rhyme-scheme along with a metrical structure and a range of other, perhaps less obvious formal features. If there is a general case being made then it is the case for formalism – broadly defined – as an attribute of any verse that genuinely merits the name. Thus ‘free verse’ is a flat contradiction in terms since if it is verse it can’t be ‘free,’ at least in the sense mostly intended by users of the phrase, and if it is free then it can’t be verse. Of course there is such a thing as prose poetry, or poetic prose, just as there is such a thing as verse that never attains the imaginative power or the expressive depth of poetry. A competent versifier might always be denied the title of poet despite their acknowledged technical prowess. But this judgement is one to be made on distinctly qualitative grounds, and one to which my poems will be subject quite aside from issues of form or verse-technique.

I am sometimes asked why so many of them have to do with matters of a philosophical or literary-critical import that very closely mirror my own interests as a one-time academic who spent a working lifetime involved in just those disciplines. The straightforward answer is that one has to have something to write about and that they throw up issues of particular interest to a formalist – like myself – who thinks that poems have distinctive ways of addressing them. Of course there is the just as obvious objection that these are not the sorts of problem that typically engage readers of poetry, or readers in search of poems that communicate across widely shared areas of human experience. I would make three points in response. First, there is currently a large academic and even non-academic readership for debates in the capacious area of ‘theory,’ a readership seemingly capable of perceiving their larger significance. Second, the poems themselves make a regular point of moving out beyond ‘technical’ issues to just such wider concerns. And third, these are issues that are, so to speak, in the public domain, or sufficiently a matter of open debate for their import to come across without access to modes of experience or states of feeling that are ultimately private to the poet in question. If these poems involve certain kinds of specialist interest or out-of-the-way knowledge then it is always the sort of thing that readers can find out – or (thankfully) look up on Google – and not the sort of thing that presupposes privileged or intimate reader-poet acquaintance. 

In other words they are much less obscure or private than a good deal of so-called ‘confessional’ poetry that presses the lyric impulse toward an extreme of self-absorption inimical to effective communication at any but a well-nigh visceral level. What I hope to have managed is a synthesis of musicality and the kind of thinking – or discursive intelligence – that poets and critics at least since Eliot have been anxious to expel from poetry’s domain. That this expulsion had some less than desirable effects on Eliot’s thinking beyond that domain is a point worth noting, as is the cost in lives wrecked or prematurely ended by the confessional cult that disfigured so much mid-to-late C20 verse. Not that formalism offers a guaranteed bulwark against such destructive extremes, as witnessed by the case of a rigorous ultra-formalist like Veronica Forrest-Thomson. But it does combine a check on the lyric tendency toward excessive or damaging self-absorption with the challenge (and incentive) to linguistic creativity posed by the exigences of formal structure.   

Below, you can read two poems: one from the collection A Partial Truth, one from Socrates At Verse.

San Pedro and the Aeroplanes

The cave-shrine of Catholic Saint Hermano Pedro (1626-67) occupies a striking and very beautiful layered-rock site near El Medano, South Tenerife. It is located at the end of the airport runway, directly beneath a main flight-path. The reference to Ezekiel concerns a visionary passage sometimes taken to prefigure the advent of jet aeroplanes. 

Glossing Ezekiel the saint maintains
Two theses contrary to common sense:
Time-travel and a thought of aeroplanes.

His cave and shrine abut the airport fence.
Such to-and-fro his hermit soul disdains,
Yet no affront to God, the switch of tense.

Flight-paths reduplicate the angel-lanes.
San Pedro stoops to count the pilgrim pence.
A turbine drowns his eventide refrains.

On kitschy goods the vapor trails condense
As kerosene anoints the saint's remains
And candles waver in the turbulence.

Still daily rise the heaven-touching strains:
'Sire, they take off downwind, a good league hence;
For decibels, consult the weather-vanes.'

As Pedro tolls for Prime so flights commence.
At Terce, Sext and None he regains
Ezekiel’s wingéd vision, God knows whence.

Blessing or curse, still nothing to the pains
They bore whose dark prophetic sapience
Brought thunder fit to shake the martyr’s chains.

Some aerial law of cause and consequence
Must hold, he thinks, if flight’s what God ordains,
Though miracles may hold them in suspense.

Why scorn these gaudy relics? he who feigns
Belief in them may come by such pretense
To credit tales of gods or aeroplanes.


Showings (Wittgenstein): a double sestina 

This inseparableness of everything in the world from language has intrigued modern thinkers, most notably Wittgenstein. If its limits—that is, the precise point at which sense becomes nonsense—could somehow be defined, then speakers would not attempt to express the inexpressible. Therefore, said Wittgenstein, do not put too great a burden upon language.

   - Peter Farb, Word-Play

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he 
tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections (ed. Rush Rhees)  

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

The world is everything that is the case.
All that's the case is all that we can say.
Some things cannot be said but may be shown.
These are the most important things in life.
A change in them will be a change of world.
Let silence show where saying leads astray.

So many ways we can be led astray!
Delinquent speech is not the only case,
Though certain evils may infect our world
Through word-abuse. Believing we can say
What matters most, in language or in life,
Is Russell's error. This much can be shown.

That's why my faithful few won't have it shown
How moral compass-points can swing astray
Even with such ascetic forms of life
Or utterance as mine. Count it a case
Of things-gone-wrong that nobody could say
Belonged exclusively to word or world.

Russell and Moore: they were my Cambridge world
Back then although, despite some kindness shown,
They failed to grasp how using words to say
Those things unsayable led sense astray.
Their verdict on me: genius, but a case
Of life screwed up by mind and mind by life.

'Just tell them that it's been a wonderful life.'
My dying words, and spoken from a world
So distant, now, from all that is the case
With their world that what's said by them, or shown,
Will likely lead my auditors astray
As much as anything I've had to say.

Yet there's some truth in what the others say,
My critics, who'd regard a tortured life
Like mine as leading and as led astray
Since formed within the solipsistic world
Of my obsessions. That's the sole thing shown,
They’d say, by such a cautionary case.

I keep my life a closed book just in case
Some rogue biographer should have his say
And seek, for no good cause, to have it shown
That there were certain chapters in that life
Kept secret from the academic world
Lest scandal lead my acolytes astray.

Yet could it be some young men went astray
Because I'd cruise the Prater and then case
The gay joints in my craving for a world
As far removed as possible from, say,
The wealth and privilege of my old life,
Or the mixed spite and condescension shown

By Moore and his Apostles? If I've shown
A seamy side, a will to go astray
In quest of what they'll call 'his other life,'
It's not (the vulgar-Freudian view) a case
Of my abject desire that they should say
Harsh things that show me up before the world

For what I am. Rather, I deem that world
Of theirs a world in need of being shown
Such truths as neither they nor I can say
Since, in the saying, sense would go astray
And make me out a monster or a case
For some corrective treatment. It's my life,

Not anything I've written, but my life 
As lived that bears sole witness to the world
Concerning just those matters in the case
Of Ludwig Wittgenstein that should be shown,
Not said, since uttering them sends words astray
And has them mimic what they fail to say.

And yet I ask: why think of 'show' and 'say'
In such bi-polar terms unless your life,
Like mine, has gone unspeakably astray
And left you stranded in an alien world
Where your 'condition' can at most be shown,
Not talked about or stated, just in case.

A modest claim: to say, not save, the world,
Yet still too statement-bound, as life has shown.
What was it went astray with what's the case?

No world exists that logothetes might say
'Here's all we've shown: that words bring worlds to life.'
What if 'the case' just is what goes astray?