Day 17: Longplayer dialogues
The Guardian’s Literary Diet continues with video chats between interesting thinkers. I sat and listened to this one while embroidering an ensō and, while most of what they said went completely over my head – I’d never heard of forensic architecture before and had to google afterwards – it has got me thinking about the way I construct fiction and poetry. I’m going to try listening to one of these conversations, while embroidering, every day in February. I think I could learn a lot!
Day 18: Jay Bernard: Surge
Today, The Guardian returns to literature for its diet plan, and gives us a young poet, Jay Bernard, reading “from his (sic*) shortlisted collection, ‘Surge’, at the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings held on 12th January at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall.”
It is a rather moving reading.
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*I believe Bernard prefers gender neutral pronouns.
Day 19: Alice Oswald: Interview with Water
What with work commitments, world events, and the unputdownable book I’m reading at the moment, I didn’t get round to looking at this video of Alice Oswald delivering her first lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry until day 21. It’s only an hour, and if you are interested in the relationship between poetry and water, as I am, it’s definitely worth making time for. She shares a number of lovely poems with us, and she quotes from, and analyses sections of, Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. Two poems I feel I really should know better. Oswald has now given me a way in to them, and I hope, when things calm down a bit, maybe in the spring when I can get out to walk again, to find audio versions to listen to.
