Ayres and Graces

I read at least ten weblogs regularly, by a wide range of people who are musicians, poets and psychologists. Something is happening in the world at the moment. It seems I am not the only person to lose the plot over the last week or so – virtually all of the weblogs I visit have been inactive over this time period.

In my own case, the lack of any activity has been caused by a slip into uncertainty and inertia. I am about to change jobs, and am just drifting through the ‘oh my god! I can’t do that’ phase before I grab the thing by the scruff of the neck and get moving.

Music in the meantime is very spread around…

As I write this I am listening to an album of Bach’s Cantatas sung by Andreas Scholl which just purifies the soul and brings one back to the art of productivity.

I’ve been reading poetry by Michael Ayres recently and really enjoying it, available online at the www.shearsman.com website. The collection, which is free there as a pdf file, is called ‘Recent Poems’. I am waiting for a delivery of poetry books from Peter Riley’s Mail Order bookshop in Cambridge, England. Amongst these will be another Ayres book which I am really looking forward to seeing. His work is expansive, bold and uses repetition and rhetorical questions in a marvellous way. Many of the poems are quite long, and have a graceful pace to them. His essay at the end of the collection talks about the use of musical forms and theories to inform his work. This is something which I have experimented with myself, so I was particularly interested to see how he had achieved this. I particularly like the love poems in the pdf collection, which are tender and passionate too.

The Shearsman website is well worth a visit anyway. There is loads of great poetry there.

Other music at the moment: –

Eberhard Weber – Pendulum

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – anthology: through the years

Can – Landed

Madonna – American Life

Marcus Stockhausen, Arild Andersen, Patrice Heral & Terje Rypdal – Karta

David Sylvian – Orpheus 88 / Trauma / A Fire in the Forest (compiled from downloads)