Poems for staying at home (Day 18)
Today we have a short and apposite poem from Beatriz Vignoli. I have no idea which hotel is referred to by the four asterisks, but the poem always makes me think of the Hotel Castelar in Buenos… Read More
Poems for staying at home (Day 17)
A second poem from Laura Wittner of Argentina to accompany the one I posted on Day 6 (which was in fact Day 36 of the UK lockdown), just because it felt appropriate, as we spend time watching… Read More
Poems for staying at home (Day 16)
Today’s poem follows the announcement by the Prime Minister of the UK to ‘stay alert’ (whatever that means), while the leaders of Scottish and Welsh governments have told us to continue to ‘stay at home’, which seems… Read More
Poems for staying at home (Day 15)
Something set me off with Micaela Chirif’s poem on Day 12, which recalls a phone call from a dead friend, and I have decided to revisit an old favourite by poor, wasted Jorge Teillier – the only poet… Read More
Poems for staying at home (Day 14)
Not everyone owns a house, least of all a house that affords them privacy, or a place where children might play outside, even if the sun itself reminds one of the endless casualties in a terrible… Read More
Poems for staying at home (Day 12)
Today’s poem come from the excellent Micaela Chirif, of Peru. Her theme is talking with the dead, an activity with which I identify ever more closely as the years go by. This poem can be found in… Read More
Poems for staying at home (Day 11)
I have known this poem since my teens, but returned to it in 2015 after a visit to Neruda’s house in Valparaíso, and decided to try my hand at translating it. When I first read the… Read More
Reflections on Insomnia (Part 2)
(Continued from Part One . . . .) It seems only fair, at this point, to say something about how to deal with insomnia; how to approach it with a sense of purpose, how to break its… Read More
Reflections on Insomnia (Part 1)
As an interlude from the series of ‘poems to stay at home with’, I am posting an essay inspired by my reading of two recent books on insomnia: The Shapeless Unease, by Samantha Harvey, and Insomnia… Read More
Poems for staying at home (Day 10)
For today’s reading we join the inimitable Jorge Fondebrider at home in Buenos Aires for a reading of ‘Clearing out the house’, that sad activity most of us will carry out at some point in our lives,… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- The hill of wild horses and the nature of risk
- Returning to animism in the Anthropocene
- Cwm Banw and the Clowde of Unknowyng
- Cwm Banw and the myth of core identity
- The configuration of confusion
- A day in the high Pyrenees
- The untimely departure of Javier Marías
- Dues serralades
- The Black Mountains and the human brain
- Capel-y-Ffin and the many worlds interpretation
Ricardo Blanco, Citizen of Nowhere
Ricardo Blanco's Blog 