https://richardpierce.bandcamp.com/track/january

Excerpts from an imaginary conversation with TS Eliot. April is not the cruellest month, I tell him, January is.

JANUARY

You were wrong, Thomas Stearns, with your parchment voice,
Your cracked vowels, your indifferent style of reading,
And the hissing of your consonants, broken syllables.
January is the month which inflicts most violence
On kindness, sucks dry the well of human empathy,
Coming so hard on the heels of an invented season
Of caring and trumped-up empathy.

You were wrong, TS, with your snatched conversations
And imagined scenes of growth buried under the death
Of love and forgiving, mountains flattened by guilt.
January burgles the mind of its foraging intent, robs
Kindness from the barely lengthening days, plays vindictive
Tricks on the suffering of the chronically sad.

You were wrong, TSE, with your buttoned-up shirts, your
Tweed suits, in your sanctuaried office with your dusty papers,
Your well-chosen phrases and patterns, and your forgetfulness.
January holds out a bouquet of foreign flowers with one hand,
Clutches the red blossom of a dripping stiletto behind its back,
To strike just as a sigh of relief escapes its victims.

You were wrong, Thomas, to think that words can make everything
Seem whole in the pictures they paint of unwilling seasons
And patients and landscapes and soundscapes and
Deserted rooms and ebbing echoes and silent despair,
When the feeling lingers long after the words have faded.

And yet you were right, Thomas Stearns Eliot.
Love songs make better companions of us all.

R

Music & production: Helefonix

January

Are you a romantic genius? Are artists incapable of understanding their own creations? Where does inspiration come from? Is Nature divine? Can art divide? When/why does a creation become property? Are you the owner of your own Self? When does one have the right to copy? Do you copy yourself? Did print technology create the individuated author? Do you know what an author is? Which language do you create in? Is listening/reading re-creating? Does repetition create difference? What is the difference between art and commodity? Is the process of creation a dance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Did ancient Greeks have a creator God? Does music need to be human? Could technology cause autoamputation of human organs? Is the relationship between the original and the copy always hierarchical? Is originality a necessary myth? Were you born with a purpose? Are books made up of other books? How do you whip yourself into a frenzy? Do you sense life in rocks? Could AI diminish, homogenize, and dominate us? Can the inanimate (dolls, puppets) help us think about machines (& ourselves)? &, will/should there be artificially intelligent non-human creative geniuses in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Dr. Arun Iyer, IIT Bombay,  Mumbai), law (Prof. Lawrence Liang, Ambedkar University, New Delhi) & music (Rabbi Shergill, Delhi NCR). Listen in...

#TCATC (The Creator And The Created) --- SynTalk

Anita

Mark Perlin © 1983

From this thing’s inception
We’ve been standing still
Nothing ever happened nothing will
Constant missed connections
Living silly lies
Seven years of nothing have gone by

I don’t know you Anita from the strangers in this room
We have sat and chatted and we’re leaving all too soon
I don’t know you Anita from the stories I could tell
Eliot regrets it ’cause he said it oh so well

Once more indecision
Left us each alone
You touched me yes but told me no
One more missed connection
One more lost regret
Only minutes later we’d have met

I don’t know you Anita from the fog that fills the air
It twists and dances till you look then nothing’s there
I don’t know you Anita from the voices in the sea
I hear them singing but they’re not inviting me

No more indecision
No more wretched plans
I must take some action if I can
We make our own connections
From our dreams we rise
Or human voices wake us, and we die

I don’t know you Anita and I doubt I ever will
All our empty motion only kept us standing still
I don’t know you Anita from the hunger in your eyes
Human voices wake us and I’m powerless to rise

Human voices wake us, and we die
Human voices wake us, and we die

Anita

august 2023 in dememoriam pour le Jhee Kaye , RIP DAVID BERMAN

Super Beef Wav

Listen to the first five of this year's Young Critics reviews in podcast form. You can watch all ten reviews on our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/YoungCriticsReviews

Priyanka Moorjani reviews Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus, guiding the viewer through the speaker’s ‘avalanche’ of emotions upon becoming a parent. Joe Wright considers the formal and poetic influences mapped throughout Hannah Copley’s Lapwing, while Sylvie Jane Lewis pays close attention to the epigraphs of Helen Farish’s The Penny Dropping and how they haunt the rest of the text. Eira Murphy situates Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy within the poet’s wider corpus and influences, asking ‘in what ways might we come to a world increasingly pushed to the horizon of its own collapse?’, and Orla Davey interrogates Gustav Parker Hibbett’s use of mythology in High Jump as Icarus Story.

Since 2022, the T. S. Eliot Prize (the most valuable prize for new poetry collections in the UK and Ireland) and Young Poets Network, The Poetry Society’s leading platform for poets aged up to 25, have run an exciting new collaboration to support the next generation of poetry reviewers: the Young Critics Scheme.

This year’s scheme follows a hugely successful first two years, in which two cohorts of Young Critics’ video reviews were seen over 60,000 times and shared online by readers, publishers, poets and critics. Several of the Young Critics have since been invited to review for leading magazines including The Poetry Review, Poetry London and Magma.

Find out more about The Poetry Society's programmes for young people: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/young-poets

Young Critics review the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist - part 1

Music: Mc Manus Experience
GERONTION by T.S. Eliot 
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
                                              I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.


Signs are taken for wonders.  ‘We would see a sign!’
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.  In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;

By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind.  I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.  Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving.  Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or is still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion.  Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear.  Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us.  Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism.  Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

The tiger springs in the new year.  Us he devours.  Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house.  Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils.
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact?

These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors.  What will the spider do
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay?  De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.

                                   Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

Gerontion by TS Eliot  (Heart Burn Funk)

The Poetry Society was founded in 1909 to promote "a more general recognition and appreciation of poetry". Since then, it has grown into one of Britain's most dynamic arts organisations, representing British poetry both nationally and internationally. Today it has more than 4000 members worldwide and publishes the leading poetry magazine, The Poetry Review.

With innovative education and commissioning programmes and a packed calendar of performances, readings and competitions, the Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages. 

"The Poetry Society is the heart and hands of poetry in the UK – a centre which pours out energy to all parts of the poetry-body, and a dexterous set of operations which arrange and organise poetry's various manifestations. It has a long distinguished history, and has never been so vital, or so vitalizing as it is now." Sir Andrew Motion

Genre-hopping author. Poet. Champion of new music on Radio Stradbroke.

f(q) = Is soil a definitive sign of life? (#TCAFG)

SynTalk is a freewheeling interdisciplinary talk show with a philosophical approach to understanding the world from a long term perspective.

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