Bardolatry

 April 23 Word of the Day: Bardolatry

 

[Found Poem]

 

Ranking Shakespeare's plays is so subjective.

Is it the intricate plot?

So much of Shakespeare is about the contradictions

between the private and the public self,

and how we adopt a part to perform the latter.

But of course, your personal favourite may be influenced

by the actual production and the cast. While there are

some obvious strong and weak plays,

different plays speak to different situations. 

Even the (reputedly) bad plays often have sheer brilliance

within them. Because most Shakespeare plays

have some very meaty roles, a great performance

can really boost the enjoyment of the play,

in my opinion, transcending

some of the weaker plot elements.

 

Ranking Shakespeare's plays is so subjective.

Is it the evocative and sometimes impenetrable dialogue?

It's a concentrated assault on the language processing centres

of the brain, for sure,

but it leaves me giddy with emotion.

Love the language in all the plays.

Yet atomising the plays here

apart from the nominal multi-parters

ignores the reality that no play stands alone,

the sum is greater than the parts,

and there are clearly much larger-scale projects afoot.

The camera angles are typical of its director.

 

Ranking Shakespeare's plays is so subjective.

Such ranking is necessarily an exercise in both futility

and eccentric preference. Shakespeare should not be read

as history, despite the desperate attempts of some

to insist they are true biography. Of course,

all the politically incorrect plays are lower down the list:

every age creates the Shakespeare

that reflects its self-image best. Shakespeare wrote

for the theatre at the time,

not for PhD theses centuries later.

The outdoor ambience is amazing,

with songbirds around the park

adding ad-libs from nearby.

Just magic.

 

[Found Poem: Fragments from the Comments column to ‘To see or not to see : every single Shakespeare play – ranked!’, by Michael Billington. The Guardian, 22 April 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ng-interactive/2026/apr/22/every-shakespeare-play-ranked-lear-antony-cleopatra-hamlet ]

 

 

Jerusalem

 April 22 Word of the Day: Jerusalem

 

City of my childhood prayerbook

Acres retold, promise unseen

Temples pool sides stone golden gates

I have not a rhyme for those

 

Promises retold, aches unseen

Ancient columns of politics.

I have not a rhyme for those

Saints who deal with all the damage

 

Modern columns of politics,

There aren’t the words to express that.

Saints have acts for all the damage

Morning after to start again,

 

There aren’t the words to express this.

Here are some: light, home, food, warmth, rest

Mornings after. To start again

Is enough to hope for in this world.

 

Here are some lights, homes, food, warmth, rest

Ample on hill lovely afar

Quite enough to lose in this world.

Enough to sing when they’re quite gone.

 

Ample on hill lovely afar

All languages reiterate

Enough to sing when almost gone,

Adults understood at best in part.

 

Languages reiterate

The city of my childhood prayerbook,

Adults understand at best in part

Temples pool sides stone golden gates.

 

[August 2020 & April 2026]

 

Images: Iso-mandala No. 85 – Jerusalem (September 2020). In online poetry group during lockdown, as an exercise I invited members to write a poem about a city that they currently could not visit: “The poem can go anywhere. It can be descriptive. Memories may fill the poem. Longing to return is possibly at work. By imagining the city then and now and even in the future, you play with one of poetry’s strongest devices, which is tense. The reader is left with a strong sense of the city.” I chose the pantoum and wrote three poems for the group (Florence, Jerusalem, Tokyo) in August 2020, which are released here, with little alteration, in April 2026.

Fog

 April 21 Word of the Day: Fog

 

Fog estranges the early riser at the undrawing curtain view, softly encumbering roofs and gardens and vision itself whitely with condensation divested of all the usual linearity. Estranges, not exactly, the verb is more like surprises or soothes or gratifies, the way difference envelopes or calmness descends or airiness nubilates before our very eyes. Indeed, makes domestic rather than estranges, makes of our familiar habitation a tranquil mind of belonging, makes of our indigenous present a stillness stiller still, missing any sign of motation. Eftsoons fog has not budged from its former glory of the half-hour previous, glowing increasingly by degrees with niveous splendour, albeit the latitudes are temperate in these parts more given to various pluvious thicknesses on any a time but today; fulsome immensities obstructing cloudiness from cloud abstractedly and rendering the watcher, casting waking looks, into a state of sedate obmutescence. Eftsoons fog as they say is thick, damp, blanketing those waking up with the densest definition of undefined blank, structures their foundations dreamy to vision and gentle against glass; settles across acres of the convenient commonwealth of city, an enigmatist converting nature into watercolours and nursing the ravaged edges with autumnal cool. Eftsoons fog lowers itself lower, raising questions of and amidst more early birds. If fog is neither chimera nor chiliaedron how then to name it or which shape to compare? Surely evaporation is not instincted with animate anatomy nor virtuoso with deity, never let it be said? Eftsoons say ten o’clock fog as they say lifts, if they must, perhaps too quickly unnoticed, vehicles seem cleaner and flora brisker and fauna all whiskers and the epidermis of the wakeful tenses tenderly with sunlight, our epitome of measure. Light blue reaches through and opens wide. Had the humanists amongst us only more time in the day, the answers might be plain to see and dilate upon, as the charming layers of white, not so much layers as penetrable substance, dawdle about treetops and sail idly and without incident above riverbends and reflect in portholes before they pale and unfleck, and suchlike verbs, into the all-purpose atmosphere.

 

[Selections from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755]