Empathy and New Year

Empathy and New Year A notion like that of empathy inspires great distrust in us, because it connotes a further … More

Goodbye to being a poet

For reasons I cannot go into here, I am finishing 2019 in a tired frame of mind. (I am not … More

In Mind in Society, his seminal book on learning and thinking, the Russian philosopher and psychologist Lev Vygotsky said this: … More

I nearly went back on Twitter the other day. Not once, but several times. One of my very lovely relatives … More

At a guess I’ve been wearing them somewhere around the last ten years. Not having inherited my father’s genius … More

Phil has been round. I know this because we came home the other night to find a pack of Toffee … More

Though I know him, his name escapes me. He is really a friend of a friend of a friend, … More

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? You are close at hand yet very far away. So long since I have … More

I love this time of year. There is a wonderful Anne Lamott line somewhere about the welcome of the cooler … More

As the holiday season continues I repost this list of various found poems that I have made over the … More

Some of you will have seen this blog post before. It is a taster of some of the contents … More

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the ‘poets I go back to’ idea, that I first came across in … More

Dear James (may I call you James?) Though it’s been a while (at least ten years, maybe more) it feels as … More

I have been reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life recently. In it she asks … More

About a month before my friend Pammy died, she said something that may have permanently changed me. We had … More

A few words about the piece below. I wrote the first draft of it in 1989, a year after the … More

I have just started reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn it and use it for life. Like those other classics … More

As we get to the business end of Lent, in the week the church still names Holy, I have been … More

This being a Saturday in Lent, I am reblogging a favourite post from my archives. Here is one of … More

I’ll admit it straight away: I didn’t last the whole week. Sometime on Friday evening I switched the radio on … More