The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: poetry

  • Clouting

    Clouting

    December   It takes two years off their life, if they have lambs when they’re shearlings, if they’re going to live on the fells.   Not much of the thin wintery daylight filters through the half-open door, and the straw on the floor lends a glow to the place. The barn is chilly and has…

  • Last Glacial Maximum

    Last Glacial Maximum

    We often look to the past in order to understand the present. Those in northern Britain who engage in such an activity will eventually encounter an impenetrable wall of ice. In the deep-time cycles of cold and warm, stadial and interstadial, scientists call this most recent freezing episode the ‘Last Glacial Maximum’. It is the…

  • Wild City Manifesto

    Wild City Manifesto

      the wild city is only the past repeating * wildness doesn’t begin or end at the edge of the city * the wild doesn’t shut at 10pm * wild things have their own sequence * bring back the seasons! * our material existence cannot be sustained without wildness * the wild city reverses destiny…

  • Editorial: Radical Landscapes

    Editorial: Radical Landscapes

    Radical Landscapes takes its title from Harriet Tarlo’s seminal collection of British ecopoetries The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011) – a collection that came out in the penultimate year of my PhD devoted to Reading and Writing with a Tree: Practising “Nature Writing” as Enquiry, which was itself a radical,…

  • love poetry: the slug edit

    love poetry: the slug edit

    I offer words of love to water, and to the place where it emerges, streams, out of the earth. One small book (precious), A Little Treasury of Love Lyrics – 1963, 79 pages, Pictorial pale blue dust jacket over red cloth boards, is lain on the moss bank, beside the stream — by the sermon-spilling…

  • The same scene (nightish)

    The same scene (nightish)

        James Sanders is taking part in Radical Landscapes: Innovation in Landscape and Language Art at The Plough Arts Centre, Great Torrington, Devon from 23rd March to 22nd April 2019. www.singingapplepress.com   In support of the exhibition, The Learned Pig’s Spring 2019 editorial season is devoted to Radical Landscapes.        

  • The Book of Feral Flora [extract]

    The Book of Feral Flora [extract]

    I planted a garden and removed the weeds because they were getting too tall and too abundant. Some were choking my other plants and some smelled of decaying spinach or mint. Then when summer came I noticed lichens (plants that eat light and nothing more) growing on the trunks of my fruit trees like tiny…

  • Nature Studies

    Nature Studies

        Plants Plants are deceptive. You see them there looking as if once rooted they know their places; not like animals, like us always running around, leaving traces. Yet from the way they breed (excuse me!) and twine, from their exhibitionist and rather prolific nature, we must infer a sinister not to say imperialistic…

  • On the Edge [extract]

    On the Edge [extract]

    This is a little story of a garden that lies there, by night, when no one can see it and also at the first light of day The garden lies on an island The island in a sea Between two countries, two continents There, where the East begins and on the other side the West…

  • The Look Away

    The Look Away

      Although I cannot see them, I know they are out there. Hare. Fox. Raven. Each waiting to play their part. – Richard Skelton, The Look Away     A sense of ominous foreboding pervades The Look Away, the debut novel from Richard Skelton, musician, poet, and co-founder, along with Autumn Richardson, of Corbel Stone…

  • Pig Dreams Pig Life

    Pig Dreams Pig Life

    In some dreams we are dead. It is never a surprise. Life doesn’t last long after all. Someone did ask, what is a life? Does it feel like something? Is it solid or a shadow? Comfortable? Forgiveable? ‘A pig is an unlikely bird’, grunted a pig. It couldn’t speak the answers and it wanted to…