CHAPTER SIX
Make It New
Ezra Pound and the Lost Generation
London, 1908 — The American Arrives
In February 1908, a twenty-two-year-old from Idaho arrived in Europe with light luggage, a manuscript of poems that had been rejected...
CHAPTER FIVE
The Prophet
Kahlil Gibran
Bsharri
He was born on 6 January 1883, in the village of Bsharri, high in the mountains of what is now Lebanon — then part of the Ottoman Empire's Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate,...
CHAPTER FOUR
The Poet Who Learned to See
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that...
CHAPTER TWO
Flowers of Evil
Charles Baudelaire — The Poet Who Made Darkness Beautiful
Before the Beautiful Era
Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century was a medieval city undergoing violent modernisation. Its streets were narrow,...
HOME
There is art and beauty everywhere.
Never forget,
It is small joys,
That bring great happiness.
Seek inspiration from ennui,
Magnificence in minutiae,
Motivation from the marvellous,
Wish upon your wonder.
In the moment,
Be as still as a pebble,
At the bottom...
A Glass of Noir
Sweetness and silk on the tongue,
Cherry kisses,
Falling to the floor of the forest,
Sweet, sweaty scents of sexual arousal.
Poetry, fanning out along neural pathways,
Little eddies of complexity swirling around synapses,
Coaxing, seducing, whispering...
The Serpent’s Tale
We shed our years like serpent skins
When young, we wriggle out of them.
Awkwardly and with impatience,
Nothing can stop us,
As we hurry to reach our freedoms
Later, they run off new skin like...
New Dawn
As we celebrate the passing of time,
The changing from a shortening
to a lengthening of days,
Let us ponder and be grateful,
For the small things
For the tiny minutiae, the seemingly unimportant
The moments, details, and...
