#pandemicpoems

[hattie-morahan]

Hattie Morahan reads Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson as part of Samuel West’s #PandemicPoems series. [x]

[phoenixflames12]

My morning discovery has been Samuel West’s #pandemicpoems on soundcloud and I hope you’ll all understand that there’s no going back for me now

[addictedtoeddie]

An outtake (x) from the Time Out Magazine photoshoot during the Fantastic Beasts promo in 2016.  You find more images in the Eddie Redmayne Web Gallery here (HQ). Photographer Andy Parsons. 

New Audio here!!!  🎧

A poem reading for #PandemicPoems  

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost 

[churchofsatannews]

"Static Cream" by Count MoriVond, from MLS: The Covid19 Writings

“Static Cream” by Count MoriVond, from MLS: The Covid19 Writings

Episode three: Static Cream

The 3rd installment of “Mortification-Like Sentiments: The COVID19 Writings” series called: STATIC CREAM …and further down the existential, corona-laden mind-grave we go… a- jolting and a-jarring. More poetry and less performance.

—Count MoriVond

[msarlenefinnigan]

Summer On The Royton Riviera Four years ago, on our honeymoon We had beer and pizza in the Tiergarten I raised a glass to Rosa Luxemburg He toasted Ronald Reagan. We're still together though. In October, we had wine In the gardens of the Palace of Versailles While Handel played through hidden speakers And, you know what, the trees were as well manicured as the ones here. I don't think you're allowed to play footy there though. This summer, we'll settle for wiping down a picnic table Plastic glasses in the park And toasting to the council gardeners' good health. Cheers! #PandemicPoems #LoveOldham (at Royton Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CBqrg9sg7ZC/?igshid=vxtynrbn0zd3

[poemsofcomplaint]

isolation 08

how many emails 

and virtual panels 

with the same information 

will make this 

okay? 

susceptible, infected, recovered, repeat 

the prisoner 

understanding her prison

is not free 

get me out of here 

[hellocrusoe]

Twisting, turning Scratching, yearning We are the v i b r a t i n g Pulsing, Hoping, Bleeding, Burning, Slapping, Joking, Throng of Life And we WILL Get Through THIS. . . #shipmantrail #pandemicpoem #twistingtrees #twistingvines #luckywelivehawaii #hawaiijungle #hawaiijunglehike #verdantforest (at Shipman's Beach) https://www.instagram.com/p/CAWKNk6FPFF/?igshid=jsn7mlunhit6

[more-better-words]

*swoon*

[elennemigo]

Benedict Monthly Report

Your monthly review about all news related to the best actor of his generation: Benedict Cumberbatch.

AUGUST

3rd

STXfilms has won the U.S. rights for the “former known as Prisoner 760″ film, with Jodie Foster,  Shailene Woodley and Benedict Cumberbatch. 

4th

The Royal Mail announced new stamps to celebrate Sherlock´s 10th Anniversary.

6th

The Courier (aka Ironbark) was pushed back to October 16.

It was published an interview Benedict did for Tatler HK.

16th

Benedict read John Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning for #PandemicPoems. 

29th

Benedict, among other Marvel co-stars, made a statment after the sudden and heartbreaking passing of actor Chadwick Boseman.

31st

Benedict took part of ABC¨s tribute to the late actor Chadwick Boseman.

✏

January | February | March | April | May | June | July

[the-end-of-art]

Well played, anxiety, my old friend

On Breathing by Alicia Jo Rabins

I’m OK during the day, but at night I get scared, Which makes it hard to breathe, which is a symptom Of the pandemic, which is what scares me. Well played, anxiety, my old friend. You’ve always Warned me something like this might happen. You’re a gift from my ancestors who survived plagues, And worse. They wove you into my DNA to warn me, So that I too might survive. Now that it’s happening, Anxiety, I don’t need you any more. I need The ones who gave you to me. Hear me, ancestors Who lived through danger times: I’m ready for you now. All these years I’ve carried your worries In my bones. Now I need your love, your thousand-year view. Tell me it’s going to be OK. Remind me you made it Through, and we will too. Teach me to breathe.

(From her Bathtub Pandemic poems: https://aliciajo.com/pandemicpoems/)

[hattie-morahan]

Hattie Morahan and Blake Ritson read 430 Effort At Speech Between Two People by Muriel Rukeyser as part of Samuel West's #PandemicPoems series. [x]

[afoulkingdomprincess]

“To celebrate reaching 150 days of #PandemicPoems, here's Benedict Cumberbatch with a beautiful new reading of John Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning...”

After reading the poem and analysing the lines, I have realised that this  an interesting choice of poem to read...A little information on the poem: John Donne, a 17th-century writer, politician, lawyer, and priest, wrote "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" on the occasion of parting from his wife, Anne More Donne, in 1611. Donne was going on a diplomatic mission to France, leaving his wife behind in England. A "valediction" is a farewell speech. 

This poem cautions against grief about separation, and affirms the special, particular love the speaker and his lover share. poem tenderly comforts the speaker's lover (his wife) at their temporary parting, asking that they separate calmly and quietly, without tears or protests.

Here is the detailed analysis of the lines:

Lines 1-4: The beginning of the poem causes some readers difficulty because the first two stanzas consist of a metaphysical conceit, but we do not know that until the second stanza. We should not read the word "as," which begins the poem, to mean "while," although that might be our instinct. Instead, "as" here means "in the way that"; it introduces an extended simile comparing the death of virtuous men to the separation of the two lovers. This first stanza describes how virtuous men die. Because they have led good lives, death does not terrify them, and so they die "mildly," even encouraging their souls to depart their bodies. In fact their death is so quiet that their friends gathered around the deathbed disagree on whether they are still alive and breathing.

Lines 5-6: The speaker now reveals that he is addressing his love, from whom he must separate. The poem itself will prove to be the "Valediction"—the farewell—of the title. He also reveals that he has been using a simile, and that the lovers' separation should resemble the quiet way virtuous men die. This example of metaphysical conceit might seem a bizarre comparison to make—dying men with the separation of lovers—but the key comparison is the quietness of the two events. He might also be suggesting that their separation, though only temporary, will be like a small death to him. Still, he asks his love that they part quietly and "melt" instead of split: the image of melting together suggests they might still be connected in liquified form, an idea the poem returns to later. He also asks her not to indulge in the overdramatic and clichéd anguish of conventional separating lovers.

Lines 7-8: These lines suggest why he wants a quiet separation: the joys the two of them share, both spiritual and sexual, are holy to him. To complain loudly with tears or sighs would be to broadcast their love to those he calls the "laity." Through this metaphor, he suggests that ordinary people resemble "laypeople" who do not understand the holiness and mystery of their love. The speaker thus implies that the two of them are like priests in a "religion of love." Therefore, for her to make loud protests about his departure would be to "profane" the joy of their holy union by revealing it to the uninitiated and unworthy. The wish to be let alone, to be able to love privately, is especially characteristic of Donne. Several other of his poems similarly covet privacy, such as "The Canonization" and "The Sun Rising." This celebration of the private world of two lovers contrasts strongly with the conventions of Renaissance love poetry, in which the lover wishes to broadcast his love to the world.

Lines 9-12: This stanza contrasts dramatic upheavals on earth with those in heaven. Earthquakes cause great destruction and create great wonder and confusion among human beings. In contrast, "trepidation of the spheres," a trembling or vibration of the whole universe, is far more significant in its scope, but also "innocent"—we cannot see or feel it because it is a heavenly event. Donne here uses the old-fashioned Ptolemaic model of the cosmos, in which each planet, the sun, the fixed stars, and a primum mobile, or "prime mover," occupied a crystalline sphere surrounding the earth, at the center. The contrast between heavenly and earthly vibrations anticipates a contrast to be developed in lines 13-20, between earthly lovers directed by sex and lovers who, like them, depend on their spiritual union.

Line 11: In ancient and medieval astronomy, trepidation of the spheres referred to the vibration of the outermost sphere of the Ptolemaic universe, causing each sphere within to move accordingly.

Lines 13-16: The speaker moves from his contrast of earthly with heavenly events to a contrast of earthly love with the experience he and his lover share. In this stanza he develops why earthly lovers cannot endure separation from each other. The "soul" or essence of such ordinary, "sublunary" lovers is "sense": that is, their love is based on the five senses and so consists of sexual attraction. Therefore, when such lovers separate, they remove from each other the very basis of their love, which changes and fades like the moon.

Lines 17-20: The speaker continues to reassure his love by developing the qualities that make the love they share capable of enduring a separation. In contrast with sublunary lovers, their love is not based solely on sensual gratification. In fact, it is a love so pure that even they themselves cannot define it. But because they feel confident in each's feelings for the other, their physical separation—the absence of eyes, lips, and hands—causes them less anxiety.

Lines 21-24: The speaker begins drawing conclusions about the relationship between his soul and his love's. The "therefore" sounds like the conclusion of a logical argument, and he has in fact been attempting to persuade his love not to mourn during his absence. Because they are "inter-assured of the mind," he suggests their closeness by saying their two souls actually have combined to form one soul. When he leaves on his journey, that one soul will not tear in two; instead, it is flexible enough that it will actually expand. He uses gold as a simile to clarify this expansion. Although the preciousness of gold suggests the preciousness of their love, the key property of gold here is its malleability. Gold can be made to expand greatly because it can be hammered into an extraordinarily thin, "airy" sheet. Donne therefore uses a simile that works emotionally, since gold is valuable, but also scientifically, since the malleability of gold corresponds to the flexibility and expansiveness of their love. Their love will not snap but expand, keeping them bound together during their separation.

Lines 25-28: The speaker now admits that he and his love may have two separate souls rather than one. He then develops the connectedness of their two souls in one of Donne's most famous and most ingenious metaphysical conceits, an extended simile in which the speaker compares the lovers' two souls to the feet of a drafting compass. He compares her soul to the compass' "fixed foot" and his to the other foot. Like the compass, their two souls are joined at the top, reminding us that their love is a spiritual union "interassured of the mind."

Lines 29-32: The speaker now develops the compass conceit. Although his love's soul is the fixed foot and his soul will roam in his travels, her soul will continually incline faithfully towards him, since their two souls are joined, and will return to its proper, upright position when his foot of the compass returns home to her. At this point in the poem, Donne engages in a number of puns that suggest the completeness of the love of these two people. Although the speaker has been emphasizing the spiritual purity of their love, his assertion that the compass "grows erect" reminds us that their union is important and satisfying to them sexually as well as spiritually. Line 26, with its earlier description of the "stiff twin compasses," may also hint at the man's erection. The speaker may be indulging in further punning by describing how the compass, when closing, "comes home," a common expression for "reaching the target," which might suggest sexual intercourse.

Lines 33-36: The speaker concludes the conceit—and the poem—by reasserting that his love's fidelity and spiritual firmness will allow him to carry out his journey and return home happily. His running "obliquely" literally describes the angle of the open compass and also suggests the indirect, circuitous route of his journeys. In this final stanza, Donne may have included additional sexual puns to underscore the happy future reunion of the lovers. In the spiritual terms of the compass conceit her firmness enables him to complete his circle, or journey; in sexual terms, his firmness would make her circle just. And in making the speaker "end where I begun," Donne may be suggesting that the speaker will finish his journey by returning to her womb as her lover, just as he originally began his life by leaving his mother's womb. The possibility of Donne's having included these sexual puns shows the richness of his language and the muliplicity of meanings available to readers of his work. It also suggests a vision of human love as healthily integrating both the spiritual and sexual aspects of our nature.

[bespokeredmayne]

A gift for tough times

Starting the week with Eddie Redmayne reciting one of my favorite poems, “The Road Not Taken” by the beloved American poet Robert Frost, was a greatly welcome surprise. 

The reading was No. 100 in the series #PandemicPoems during Poetry Month, offered by Samuel West (@exitthelemming) through Twitter and SoundCloud. 

https://soundcloud.com/user-115260978/100-the-road-not-taken-by-robert-frost-read-by-eddie-redmayne 

Followers were asked to submit their favorite poems, and the Frost classic received the most requests. Here is the poem itself, but hearing Eddie read it so wistfully is a real pleasure.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 

And sorry I could not travel both 

And be one traveler, long I stood 

And looked down one as far as I could 

To where it bent in the undergrowth; 

Then took the other, as just as fair, 

And having perhaps the better claim, 

Because it was grassy and wanted wear; 

Though as for that the passing there 

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. 

Oh, I kept the first for another day! 

Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. 

I shall be telling this with a sigh 

Somewhere ages and ages hence: 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, 

And that has made all the difference.

The image above is actually a stillframe I made of Eddie, portraying an anguished Stephen Hawking in a deleted scene from The Theory of Everything, edited with the Waterlogue app.

[churchofsatannews]

"Viral Rabid Spume" by Count MoriVond, from MLS: The COVID19 Writings

“Viral Rabid Spume” by Count MoriVond, from MLS: The COVID19 Writings

Episode 4 of “Mortification-Like Sentiments: The COVID19 Writings”

This one is called: Viral Rabid Spume

“Lathering in viral rabid spume, demoralized in one’s isolation” – the symptoms of media over-exposure are frothing the human soul at the muzzle. The mind degenerates as the stagnant body f*cks itself away from depression. …and further still down the existential, corona-laden mind-grave we go…

[msarlenefinnigan]

My book buying has gotten as out of control as my drinking. Looking forward to reading these. #PandemicPoems #currentlyreading📚 #bookstagram (at Boundary Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CBjCkcOAMJz/?igshid=14izezv9jfwi