Poets are liars

Ricardo Blanco’s Blog

• Waylaid by a man-root in the Pyrenees
    As we follow a trail across the Alberas – the lower ranges of the Pyrenees as they dip towards the Mediterranean – I am stopped in my tracks by an outgrowth of woody root-stuff in my path, in the shape of a man. It is quite perfect in form, and the thought crosses my […]
• What if the future determines the present?
  Retrocausality is the ability of the future to influence or alter the present (or of the present to do the same with the past). This is not, I think, to be confused with the fundamentalist protestant idea of predestination, of one’s life being mapped out in advance by an all-knowing God; although it might, at […]
• The unicorns and the ghost in the wall
    I try to imagine what they are thinking, and realise that not even they know this; that perhaps they are not capable of thought. Either that, or their thoughts are concerned with subjects so remote from anything I consider to be ‘thoughts’ as to make any comparison pointless. So instead I concentrate on the […]
• I have wasted my life
    Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In […]
• Tarkovsky’s Stalker & Sympathetic Magic
  There is a moment in the film Stalker when the Writer, after a terrifying journey down a long tunnel known as The Meat Grinder, discovers a round metallic cylinder or container, a little over a metre in diameter, into which he peers, picks up a rock, and lets it fall. According to Zona, Geoff Dyer’s […]
• Ten ground rules for microfiction
  Since I am currently teaching a course on microfiction, that weird mutating gene/genre that swerves and sways between the prose poem and the short story, I thought I would post a translation of some points made by Andrés Neuman a few years ago in his excellent blog Microrreplicas. The points are succinct and aphoristic. I […]
• Welsh or Elegant?
  Customers at London’s exclusive Fortnum & Mason (The Queen’s Grocer) are presented with an unusual choice: would they prefer their rarebit Elegant or Welsh? Evidently these terms are mutually exclusive, so I cannot imagine affluent shoppers really have much of a struggle making up their minds.
• George Smiley’s anti-Brexit tirade
  Listening to the audiobook of John Le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies as I drive home from work, I am startled by an extraordinary passage in which George Smiley is reflecting with his protégé Peter Guillam on their past as spies, and the reasons that guided him through the Cold War. At one point, near the end, […]
• The mosaics of Torcello
    In an essay by Kathleen Raine on ‘Yeats’ Holy City of Byzantium’, there is a quotation from A Vision in which Yeats speaks of mosaicists as being at the heart of a community of philosophers and craftspeople and painters: ‘I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend […]
• Landeg White
  It was with shock that I learned last week of the death of the poet Landeg White, at his home in Portugal. He was seventy-seven years old. Landeg, who was born in Taff’s Well, near Cardiff, published around a dozen poetry collections, three of them with Parthian, and I had a lot of fun working with […]