Here’s my first piece of self-advertisement.\u00a0 Miriam Obrey and I are due to read at The Red Parrot, No 46 Wine Bar, Presteigne, on the 2nd September, between 7.30 and 9.00.\u00a0 Not sure where Presteigne is\u00a0 – somewhere on\u00a0 those misty Welsh borders,\u00a0 I think?\u00a0 Miriam has written a wonderful sequence, giving voice to the various corbel carvings around Kilpeck church.<\/p>\n
Am just finishing reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Thomas Hardy – much more succinct and insightful than any of the other multi-volume accounts?\u00a0\u00a0 My immediate thoughts are 1) how snobbish the literati were until well\u00a0 into the middle of last Century – Hardy always seems to have been condescended to by publishers etc because of his Bockhampton upbringing as the son of a builder 2) how wonderful it was that he kept writing (and so profusely, richly) into his late eighties.\u00a0 (Such continued creativity anything to do with his continued sex drive, I wonder?\u00a0 He boasted about, and Florence Dugdale complained about, his overactive libido…) 3) How, far from “making nothing happen”, as Auden claimed, poetry\/literature can really affect you into wanting to make changes…I can never read TH’s searing too-late poems of regret about having mistreated and ignored Emma for years\u00a0 without inwardly determining never to make the same kinds of mistake, if\u00a0 at all possible.\u00a0 Perhaps we really can learn from Literature, if only through imaginative empathy?\u00a0\u00a0 Shakespeare’s Lear, Austen’s Emma – real examples to\u00a0 us\u00a0 all?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here’s my first piece of self-advertisement.\u00a0 Miriam Obrey and I are due to read at The Red Parrot, No 46 Wine Bar, Presteigne, on the 2nd September, between 7.30 and 9.00.\u00a0 Not sure where Presteigne is\u00a0 – somewhere on\u00a0 those misty Welsh borders,\u00a0 I think?\u00a0 Miriam has written a wonderful sequence, giving voice to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-177","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}