Alicia Stallings takes on the men for Oxford poetry chair

[Petrushka]

http://barneyspender.com/2015/06/04/stallings-takes-on-the-men-for-oxford-poetry-chair/

[Petrushka]

1. Clear Media Bias on The Vote: The Oxford Professor of Poetry 2015

http://www.vidaweb.org/clear-media-bias-on-the-vote-the-oxford-professor-of-poetry-2015/

[Petrushka]

2. Simon Armitage Wins Oxford Professor of Poetry Election

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/19/simon-armitage-wins-oxford-professor-of-poetry-election?CMP=share_btn_fb

[Petrushka]

3. Avalon --- by simon Armitage

Avalon
By Simon Armitage

To the Metropolitan Police Force, London:
the asylum gates are locked and chained, but undone
by wandering thoughts and the close study of maps.
So from San Francisco, patron city of tramps,
I scribble this note, having overshot Gloucester
by several million strides, having walked on water.

City of sad foghorns and clapboard ziggurats,
of snakes-and-ladders streets and cadged cigarettes,
city of pelicans, fish bones and flaking paint,
of underfoot cable-car wires strained to breaking point    ...
I eat little?—?a beard of grass, a pinch of oats?—?
let the salt-tide scour and purge me inside and out,
but my mind still phosphoresces with lightning strikes
and I straddle each earthquake, one foot either side
of the fault line, rocking the world’s seesaw.
At dusk, the Golden Gate Bridge is heaven’s seashore:
I watch boats heading home with the day’s catch
or ferrying souls to glittering Alcatraz,
or I face west and let the Pacific slip
in bloodshot glory over the planet’s lip,
sense the waterfall at the end of the journey.

I am, ever your countryman, Ivor Gurney.



Source: Poetry (May 2013).