The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: Penned in the Margins

  • Chanctonbury Rings

    Chanctonbury Rings

    Chanctonbury Rings is a new spoken word and music project on Ghost Box Records by the poet and writer Justin Hopper and folk musician Sharron Kraus, and featuring Ghost Box’s own Belbury Poly. The album is based on live performances of Hopper’s book The Old Weird Albion (Penned in the Margins, 2017), a poetic and…

  • The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static

    The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static

    I write from Edinburgh, from a flat enveloped by the haar, a cold fog that comes in off the sea and whites out the world. The fog binds land with sea and sky. It feels like an apt place and time from which to respond, briefly, to two recent books by JR Carpenter – The…

  • The Old Weird Albion

    The Old Weird Albion

    Histories and hauntings of the English South When I think of the South Downs, I see a watercolour of Beachy Head by Eric Ravilious. A chalky white cliff illuminated by a lighthouse with an ominous raincloud hovering above it. I remember climbing to the top of the Devil’s Dyke to look at the pastoral Constable…

  • Who’ll Guard the Horse?

    Who’ll Guard the Horse?

      for Tim Cope, and his horseback journey from Mongolia to Hungary.     Sheered pig fat for the dog, and in his eating, a spirit passing continental drift toward another day revolving. The dog that is protection, the dog that is the anti-crisis. The dog descendent from what is firecracking in temporary fear from…

  • Sunspots, a conversation via email

    Sunspots, a conversation via email

    Sunspots is the latest poetry collection from Simon Barraclough, Poet in Residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory. Below Barraclough discusses the collection’s origins and ideas, and plenty more besides, over the course of a series of emails with our poetry editor, Crystal Bennes.     —–Original Message—– From: crystal bennes < > To: SimonBarraclough…

  • Books of the Month

    February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 Like a Tree, Walking Vahni Capildeo Carcanet November 2021 Pothos Rosa Campbell Broken Sleep Books October 2021 Cartographies of the Imagination Kirsty Badenoch, Sayan Skandarajah (editors) September 2021 Epic Camilla Nelson Guillemot Press August 2021 Echtrai Journal B G Nichols / Bran Graeme Nairne (editors) AnMór July 2021 Florilegia…

  • On Collaboration

    On Collaboration

    SJ Fowler is a poet, artist, martial artist and vanguardist. He works across poetry, sonic art, visual art, installation and performance, has published five books and been commissioned by the Tate, Mercy, and the London Sinfonietta. He is the poetry editor of 3:AM magazine and founder of the Maintenant series. Most recently, Fowler has curated…