The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: poetry

  • Editorial: Wolf Crossing

    Editorial: Wolf Crossing

    Look into the eyes of the wolf. What does it see? On 29th August 2016, shortly after the announcement of Steve Bannon’s appointment as Donald Trump’s new campaign CEO, The New Yorker ran a cartoon by Paul Noth. It shows a large billboard standing in a field of grazing sheep. Upon it is a wolf…

  • Wild Alphabet: The Wolf in Irish Poetry

    Wild Alphabet: The Wolf in Irish Poetry

    The final wolves in Ireland were wiped out some time during the eighteenth century, outliving the wolf in England by almost three hundred years. The process of their extinction, exacerbated and even engineered by the English colonisation of Ireland, bears multiple parallels with the gradual diminishment of the Irish language, itself subjected to a sustained…

  • Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad

    Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad

      Corrie nam Fiadh, Deer Corrie the gentleness ………of browsing deer Allt a’ Mhadaidh, Wolf Burn will never ………dissolve the wolf   Some place-names refer to one-off events, like pegs stuck in the ground of memory. Others reckon the catastrophe of species loss over centuries. In his pioneering study of the influence humans have on…

  • Asterisk

    Asterisk

    High electric masts broadcast the turnpike’s hyphenations: Flat, dashed boxy. Their bold yellow glow adumbrating distance, blinking smaller then vanishing. The slow-going traffic signals our taking it for granted, this mousetrap of freeways diverging to crowded intersection, their outer limits disappearing into darkness. While the avenues less taken are singled out and swarmed, I reassess…

  • Great and Small Mythologies

    Great and Small Mythologies

    Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, released last year in a posthumously published translation by Seamus Heaney, is concerned, amongst other things, with the inadequacies of art. In it, Virgil describes a mural painted by Daedalus, the mythological artist, which fails in its attempts to represent the death of his son, Icarus. In Heaney’s translation: ……………………………………………………………….Twice…

  • Open Call: Wolf Crossing

    Open Call: Wolf Crossing

    In Finland there is a line around the city: susiraja, the wolf border. Within is law and order: shopping malls and social security. Beyond the susiraja lie the wilds and the wolves – just 200 at the last count. Who will howl in the forests when the last wolf departs? The susiraja may be inviolable…

  • Little Island Press

    Little Island Press

    Little Island Press is an independent publisher of new and classic poetry, fiction and international literature in translation. Inspired by some of the amateur presses of the 1920s, Andrew Latimer founded Little Island Press in 2015. Its output spans three different series: Memento, which presents the work of overlooked modern poets; Transits, which offers poetry…

  • Frankenstein: Before the Beginning

    Frankenstein: Before the Beginning

      Every thing must have a beginning… and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.     It was precisely two hundred years ago tonight that a very particular nightmare first appeared. In the early hours of 16 June 1816 – around 2:30am if a recent headline-grabbing astronomical…

  • An Orgy of Toads

    An Orgy of Toads

    Soon after the clocks have gone forward and April Fools has passed, a spring event occurs which has yet to capture the popular imagination in quite the same way as eggs and rabbits. From the sodden depths of secret muddy highways, frogs and toads descend on their annual breeding grounds. For one unnerving week I…

  • Sophia

    Sophia

    In 1818, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, newlywed husband of Sophia, Governor-General of Bencoolen, surveyed the island of Singapore, which was made a British colony early the following year.   i. 12 December, 1818. Governor-General’s Residence, Bencoolen. Last night, my love, I took the nameless book That arrived with our mail on Thursday’s ship And sat…

  • What is listing?

    What is listing?

        What is lost when words are wasted? Tomatoes. What is trust when tomatoes are wasted? What is truth? Men, words, hours, waist? When wait women. What is lost when haste is made? That is tossed, is left us that linger, aside. What is lust? What is frost, but sitting on the wooden cutting…