Cantos from a cage
Today I am reposting this reflection on the true heritage of Ezra Pound, Cantos from a…
Poem: South Ward
I have made many visits to mental health hospitals over the years, almost all of them in support of my mother who suffered for most of her adult life from severe mental illness. The experience of these institutions humbles the mind. It teaches us how each of us is a “preposterous hodgepodge, uniquely arranged” – in the words of the great Inga Clendinnen who knew the gulf between the experience of the well and the sick – “a more significant division in any society than class or gender or possibly even homelessness.”
Borderlands of madness
Demi-fous. Mazeland. Dazeland. Driftland. Incipient lunatics. Hysterics. Neurotics. Carriers of latent brain disease. Neurasthenia. Sufferers of…
Craft, voice and the fire
“We all know poetry isn’t a craft that you can just turn on and off. It…
Cantos from a cage
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou…
Dr Cogito brings his mind to heel
Here is another in my series of Dr Cogito poems Dr Cogito brings his mind to…
Improvisation on a train
On a red sore train I wonder what I will leave Behind when I am gone…
The recurring reproach to reason
Today, I finished reading Andrew Scull’s Madness in Civilization: a cultural history of insanity, which has…
Strange salt
All I’ve suffered, and all the suffering I’ve caused, might have arisen from the lack of…
The Great Confinement
Image Source: photograph, Sarah Lee, Bethlem Museum of the Mind exhibition, The Guardian From Keats, Hyperion: Just…