Thank you all. I watched the Navalny documentary last night - if you haven’t seen it yet, it is brilliant… and incredibly sad. Authoritarian regimes don’t like storytellers, when the story isn’t theirs. I also recommend Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia for his take on the poets, novelists, playwrights & thinkers of the last century who kept the flame alive, as the lights around them were going out.
Comment is about Tough on Rhyme (blog)
Original item by R A Porter
Excellent, RA, your humour only serves to emphasise the serious threat to freedom of artistic and academic expression.
In the UK, we are told that we believe in academic and artistic freedom, however, however, however…coming soon to a university or college or bookshop near you…
Kamila Shamsie, who delivered the 2018 Orwell Lecture at University College London, and who had been announced as winner of the Nelly Sachs Prize, named after a Jewish poet and Nobel laureate, has been stripped of her German literary prize, because of her support for the Palestinian people through the BDS movement, modelled on the anti-apartheid South Africa boycott…………….Poets, writers, artists beware!
Comment is about Tough on Rhyme (blog)
Original item by R A Porter
At a poetry open mic recently, a young poet from Belarus shared a poem with us that she'd written while imprisoned for political dissent. It was quite a moment.
Love the last verse - very JCC.
Comment is about Tough on Rhyme (blog)
Original item by R A Porter
This is brilliantly written, RA. Wonderful humourous touches, although somewhere in the background lurks a dark reality, I fear.
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Original item by R A Porter
John Gilbert Ellis
Sat 17th Feb 2024 17:59
Great stuff RA. Reminder how important poetry is as an indicator of freedom.
Also reminds me of the book I read recently, the stasi poetry circle by Philip Oltermann. He describes how at the start of the GDR they wanted poets, creatives to be central to society, as a contrast to the nazis. That changed over time as the Stasi got more paranoid and wanted to know more about people. Poetry gave them a glimpse into what people really thought, poetry circles were encouraged, and outputs acted on.
Comment is about Tough on Rhyme (blog)
Original item by R A Porter