Posts
Thursday, 5 January 2012
The Big Clear-Out Blues
January is a good time for a big clear-out. The trouble is, you start going through all the old files, papers and photos stored away in a succession of different attics and garages, and you come across things like these old programmes from 1969-1970. It makes me think: still playing the same three chords as I did back then! Or, "I was so much older then..."
Practising "Honey Just Allow Me One more Chance" and "John Wesley Harding"
for Ethiopian TV performance
Still, I must have blown a mean blues harp...
Six Poems in Swedish
"Sex dikter", translated by Boel Schenlaer, Lyrikvännen, Stockholm, April, 2004.
Wednesday, 4 January 2012
'Je est un autre' (Laugh, Kookaburra, Laugh!)
Kookaburra sits on my balcony,
Merry merry king of the bay is he...
(Elizabeth Bay, Sydney)
Ioana Petrescu, Australian Poet
I recommend these moving new poems just published in the distinguished online literary journal Asiatic, December 2011, by the brilliant Romanian-born Australian poet Ioana Petrescu
Three more of her poems, on Friendly Street Poets . Readers enjoy "Dracula".
Ioana once translated a selection of my own poems into Romanian:
Poems by James Potts, translated into Romanian by Ioana Petrescu, in Calende, No 1-2, 2000.
I particularly admire her collection, Fumigated, Ginnninderra Press, 2001.
See also two poems, different reactions to Munch's The Scream
This is one of my own poems that Ioana translated into Romanian. It was written in Bucharest in June 1990:
The revolution's not over
(Bucharest, National Gallery, 12.6.1990)
The revolution's not over,
Not in the gallery, at least.
The paintings, stacked in storerooms,
Gather dust in sticky heat.
Armed guards stand watch amidst the rubble,
Indifferent to Art's untreated wounds,
To bullets through breast, through brain and heart;
To vandalised canvases, peppered with holes;
To shattered frames, to splintered icons.
I'm shown a Brueghel, and then El Greco.
Both safe, but needing expert care.
Which priceless works went up in smoke ?
And the restoration studio ? Lost.
I'll never invest in works of art.
Slashed and defaced; such shredded flesh.
Did trigger-happy snipers
Do their target-practice here ?
They couldn't have done much worse,
If they'd ushered in a gang of thugs
To poke out/pluck out each painted eye.
Three more of her poems, on Friendly Street Poets . Readers enjoy "Dracula".
Ioana once translated a selection of my own poems into Romanian:
Poems by James Potts, translated into Romanian by Ioana Petrescu, in Calende, No 1-2, 2000.
I particularly admire her collection, Fumigated, Ginnninderra Press, 2001.
See also two poems, different reactions to Munch's The Scream
This is one of my own poems that Ioana translated into Romanian. It was written in Bucharest in June 1990:
The revolution's not over
(Bucharest, National Gallery, 12.6.1990)
The revolution's not over,
Not in the gallery, at least.
The paintings, stacked in storerooms,
Gather dust in sticky heat.
Armed guards stand watch amidst the rubble,
Indifferent to Art's untreated wounds,
To bullets through breast, through brain and heart;
To vandalised canvases, peppered with holes;
To shattered frames, to splintered icons.
I'm shown a Brueghel, and then El Greco.
Both safe, but needing expert care.
Which priceless works went up in smoke ?
And the restoration studio ? Lost.
I'll never invest in works of art.
Slashed and defaced; such shredded flesh.
Did trigger-happy snipers
Do their target-practice here ?
They couldn't have done much worse,
If they'd ushered in a gang of thugs
To poke out/pluck out each painted eye.
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Oil near Ioannina?
I'm surprised that there is oil in the Ioannina area.
I remember only too clearly the chaos and consternation when AGIP started prospecting and planning to drill for oil on the island of Paxos.
I remember only too clearly the chaos and consternation when AGIP started prospecting and planning to drill for oil on the island of Paxos.
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