#poetry

from denmark hamlet brought silver

from denmark   hamlet brought   silver
speciedalers and cronin

and so he paid   to wear the black robe
and the recognition from the towns’ folk
that he was a student here

so he paid for admission
into these corridors of ignorance and revelation

admission to these classrooms
where both daydreams and fascinations were
brought to the table

for me he bought
memories of how he knelt
at his waking and at his bedtime prayers

memories of his voice when he sang hymns

but now   sure as i knelt beside his dying
he’s long forgotten what he paid
for a chair

for a place among the gathered
in the assembly hall

his understandings
of german   of latin
of philosophy   of theology

his ability to speak
in all these languages   to read

all these things he bought   he left   where

like all of us   occupants   temporary
his bed in the dormitory   was rented

#DramaticPoetry #earlyModern #Education #HamletAndHoratio #HistoricalFiction #Imagery #literary #literature #Poetry #SerialPoetry #SpokenWord #UniversityOfWittenberg #writing

This week's #NewBooks at the library: A toss-up of three different titles
- Having reviewed a biography about Edgar Allan Poe, I determined that Thomas Olive Mabbott's version, originally published by Belknap Press, is probably one of the more authoritative collections of Poe's work. I managed to find a 1979 hardback original of the first volume via eBay.
- I found a very affordable second-hand version of Cambridge University Press's Meteoroids: Sources of Meteors on Earth and Beyond in their Cambridge Planetary Science series.
- One more book from my employer's January clearance sale is Muhammad H. Zaman's Biography of Resistance: The Epic Battle Between People and Pathogens, published by Harper Wave.

#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #Gothic #Poetry #Astronomy #Astrodon #Microbiology #Disease @bookstodon

'know your place' they said -
she sat in the garden
planting hemlock

#haiku #DailyHaikuPrompt (calm) #senryu #poetry #WritingCommunity

'What I Mean When I Say I'm Tired'
~ K.E. Sermonté

"I want quiet.
I want the mercy of being unseen
without being unloved."

#Poetry

#ScribesAndMakers 19 Apr 'Have you ever been to a poetry reading?'

Yes, both in the audience and on the stage.

There's one coming up in London next Saturday. I'll be there, but I'm not sure if there's an open mic session.

25 April 2026

https://poetrysociety.org.uk/projects/free-verse/

MaxChaos is in the Talent Contest in Book 1. He’s on stage as a fictitious character named Gordon Bennett.

#scifi #London #poetry #PoetrySociety #UKeduChat #writingCommunity #IndieAuthor #GordonBennett

Rilke’s Advice to a Young Poet

This is from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet—one of the most beautiful pieces of writing advice ever put to paper:

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that.

You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.

This above all — ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.

Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the depths in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it—its burden and its greatness—without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.

But perhaps after this descent into yourself and into your inner solitude you will have to give up becoming a poet; (it is enough, as I have said, to feel that one could live without writing: then one must not attempt it at all). But even then this inward searching which I ask of you will not have been in vain. Your life will in any case find its own ways thence, and that they may be good, rich, and wide I wish you more than I can say.

What more shall I say to you? Everything seems to me to have its just emphasis; and after all I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.

#AdviceOnWriting #AdviceToAYoungPoet #Books #CticismOfArt #LettersToAYoungPoet #Life #MentalHealth #Poem #Poetry #RainerMariaRilke #TheArtisticLife #TheCallingOfAnArtist #Writing

This is the first half of my #poem about the freedom to read and those who fight for it #library #books #margaretatwood #jamesbaldwin #progressive #kurtvonnegut

I will be on a bookshop and library tour if my new #poetry book and the paperback edition of Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal www.robinince.com