the english thinker

he’s on the garden chair
hands clasped, thinking
with pear-drop breasts
dandelions buttering
the unmown grass

bob dylan–dj

You can never, ever predict Bob Dylan–unless your prediction is that he’s going to do something unexpected. Yesterday marked his debut as a dj on The Theme Time Radio Hour on the XM satellite radio network. What? Yes, you heard. Well, maybe you didn’t like me if you live outside of America. But it sounds terrific. Each week he plays music he has chosen, linking the songs by a theme: yesterday it was the weather. And as unpromising as that sounds as a platform for something of musical interest, he used the theme as a pretext for playing such incredible stuff as “Walkin’ in the Rain” by the Prisonaires and “It’s Raining” by Irma Thomas.I wish I’d heard it.

keith richards

Did we all hear about Keith Richards, rock ‘n’ (do we still say “‘n’”?) star falling out of a tree and having a brain bleed? Oddly reassuring after the Stones sell-out allowing the Chinese Government to censor their concerts behind the bamboo curtain. It reminded me how important Keith was as the embodiment of irresponsible anti-Bush, anti-grown-up bohemian style and sensibility. Let’s hope the wirey old devil goes on for another hundred years riffing like an electric Beethoven and rifling our pockets like a gentleman thief.

spam robots at suffolk punch

Suffolk Punch is my other site, on Blogger. I got home from work tonight to find That Blogger’s spam robots had locked the site for the second time in two weeks because they detected, ingeniously, that it had characteristics of a spam blog–that is, a phoney site set up to lead people somewhere else and sell them something. This is an automated process: when it happens you have to appeal to Blogger so that a human being can review your site and determine whether or not it’s legitimate. And I’ve been down that road. And my sites passed inspection. Now to have to do it again???

d.a.levy

A big favourite of mine at the moment is Cleveland poet d.a.levy. I don’t know much about him biographically–except for the one fact everybody knows, that he shot himself back in the Sixties–but the poetry I’m discovering is fantastic. There’s one in particular called “roses that” which I love so much I copied it from a website tonight and pinned it up in my kitchen in the hope that the very few (mercifully) visitors I have will read it. There’s no point in reproducing any part of it here because it should be read as a whole, or it becomes nonsensical. The point of the poem lies in the mesmerising music that the words make when they are repeated, reformulated, then repeated again. If you’re interested try and find the poem on the web and let me know what you think.

welcome to bardstock!

bardstock! is the new blog from Blue Fred Press, publisher of poetry and prose in the UK. I’m Bruce, the publisher/ editor of the press, and I’ll be your host. Here we’ll publish occasional poetry by me and anyone I like (bardstock! only pretends to be a democracy); we’ll also have reviews of books, music and–occasionally–film, opinion pieces and occasionally–though not often–political commentary.
You can submit to bardstock! via email as long as you copy-&-paste–attachments will not be considered–sending (please), no more than three items at a time. Too much material will discourage me from reading any of it.
Blue Fred publishes a non-profit ezine called ANGEL HEAD at http://bkerouac.tripod.com , but I won’t be able to refer to that again because I’ve just discovered it’s considered a form of search engine abuse to keep linking to the same site. The internet world is a minefield. Bookmark the site now and go and see the other thing that we do.

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