Does anyone read Berryman, these days? Or has he become one of those once feted poets now lost in the cracks of oblivion? Current fashions and trends do not augur well for his survival. His drunken testosterone-driven poetic rants and sentimental attachment to racial stereotypes raise every red-flag imaginable. His privileged academia-confined background reeks of […]Read Post ›
As a teacher and language test setter, I am well aware how individual questions or whole tests can tend unwittingly to disadvantage candidates of different social, racial and educational backgrounds. In an ideal world, we would eradicate all such inequalities but, in practice, attaining such a perfect equilibrium would be impossible and would not necessarily […]Read Post ›
Jeremy Corbyn is already the most successful Labour leader since Harold Wilson in terms of average share of the popular vote gained in national elections, as the chart below illustrates. In terms of increase in the Labour vote from one election to the next, he is the most successful leader since Attlee. Can we now […]Read Post ›
In a recent press conference on the resignation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s spokesperson, Sean Spicer, used the phrase “There is nothing that would conclude me that…” There is something odd about the way this is formulated. ‘Conclude’ is a verb, like many in the English language, that hovers between transitive and intransitive status, but has […]Read Post ›
Spelling norms, as any papyrologist or epigraphist will know, are a relatively new development in human language history. In British English, spelling conventions emerged out of the needs of printers and readers and different publishers have developed slightly different solutions to these needs over the years. Despite this apparently liberal approach to orthography, in the […]Read Post ›
This is my first post in a while, after a year of illness. It is a poem I have been working on for some time, which somehow seemed to come together today. It was originally intended as a companion piece to Honey, which I published on this blog last year. Sugar I Candy […]Read Post ›
[This is the fourth poem I have posted that forms part, along with The River Biss https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/the-river-biss/ , Ode to Thread https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2016/01/07/ode-to-thread/ , and Hymn to the Moon https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/hymn-to-the-moon/ , of my ongoing free ‘translation’ of Catullus Poem 64. It fits well with this week’s Poetry Rehab prompt https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/31982590/posts/1035383680 Note that, although these pieces are […]Read Post ›
May is the hobbling month: one foot in summer dance, while Winter drags. May is the month I waited three weeks to be born. Blossom is shed; fruit yet to swell; a touch of frost curses the fertile ground. Weddings are consummated; maypoles danced around; the old songs sung; a new world lurks around stark & […]Read Post ›
So many ships sink crossing the Bermuda Triangle simply because there are so many ships that cross that sea. So many famous people grace obituaries simply because there are so many celebrated folk these days. An explicable statistical conspiracy is at play. No-one logs the many names of refugees lost in the sea nor […]Read Post ›
So many wait in the sickly light the morning long in the stale air stirred by creaking fans to be ushered in to the bright clean-cut doctor’s consulting room for a minute and sent off satisfied, clutching a prescription for pills. * Cheap smart shoes worn matt by use tap at the disinfected concrete floor. […]Read Post ›
