New website

www.ruthstacey.com

On the sixth day of Christmas...

I was asked to join in with the Droitwich Arts Network Advent Calendar and it seemed like a great idea. 24 pieces of art are to be displayed throughout Droitwich in various places, like shop windows or the church. 

A number sheet will be attached to the front, and the work itself will be hidden. On the day of December corresponding to the number, the work of art will be revealed and displayed until after Christmas. 

I was pleased because the place I had been allocated was a shop called Jewels, which happens to be run by a very dear friend of mine; Laurie Terry. 

This made it feel even more special, to be producing something for her window display, because her shop is full of stunning gifts and items of jewellery. Every time I go in to buy a gift for someone I end up buying things for myself...there are just too many cool and kooky things inside!

Jewels can be found at 33 High Street Droitwich, WR9 8EJ: you can see my advent calendar box in the window right now, but it won't be open until the 6th...and if you don't live anywhere near Droitwich, well don't worry because there are some pictures below!

   












The Droitwich Arts Network exists to advocate and champion the arts and crafts in Droitwich Spa and to act as a collective voice for the arts.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Two poems in blue...

Halfway Between Sadness and Distress & Iglu

Zoe Murdoch Dead Magpie Blues, 2013

From Abridged Online 'This issue encourages the consideration of the vital connotations of the concept of ‘blue’ to the human condition and the individual’s contemplation of place, purpose, self and essence. The strong association of the colour blue with the natural (the sea and sky), the broken (melancholy) and the forbidden (pornography) have led to said colour concurrently evoking ideas of apparent wholesomeness, failure and seedy delinquency. Blue runs underneath us and domes above us; it is what bore us and what we aspire through imagination to return to: another dimension, another means of perceiving, breathing, moving, experiencing… It is the colour of the most subtle moods of pain, not burning with the disarming immediacy of horror or despair but throbbing in mellow multiplicity and tonal diversity, slowly moving through the depths of reflection. Blue dances with dappled light, altering perception and renewing reflection. In creative discourses we take it from outside us and hold it as our own, making our subtle moods of humanity material by weaving them through its soft, swelling diversity. Blue was our home, to blue we long to return. We wish to wallow in its mellow discontent hoping for a return to the good old days. Days that never did or could have existed: days that define us.'

Peace between all nations...

Anthem for Doomed Youth

By Wilfred Owen


What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
      Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

George Stinney Jr

He was too small to lift the murder weapon.

Josh Aiken performs George Stinney in Edison Theatre in Washington University in St. Louis at the 2012 Poetry Grand Slam.










Lawyers seek new trial for 14-year-old South Carolina boy executed in 1944.



'The request for a new trial points out that at 95 pounds, Stinney likely couldn't have killed the girls and dragged them to the ditch.

The motion also hints at community rumors of a deathbed confession from a white man several years ago and the possibility Stinney either confessed because his family was threatened or he was given ice cream. But the court papers provide little information and the lawyers also wouldn't elaborate.

At 14, Stinney was the youngest person executed in this country in the past 100 years, according to statistics gathered by the Death Penalty Information Center.

Newspaper stories from his execution had witnesses saying the straps to keep him in the electric chair didn't fit around his small frame and an electrode was too big for his leg.''

(Wikipedia)  George Junius Stinney, Jr., (October 21, 1929 – June 16, 1944) was, at age 14, the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century.

Stinney was convicted of murdering two pre-teen girls after police said he confessed to the murders. But the question of Stinney's guilt, the validity of his alleged confession, and the judicial process leading to his execution have been criticized as "suspicious at best and a miscarriage of justice at worst" and as an example of the many injustices African-Americans suffered in courtrooms in the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

One Love, One Heart

Let's get together and feel all right...

Poets reading their poems...

The Forward prize tried to add glamour or celebrity by bringing in actors to read the poems. As if the poets, lacking in a Rada training course, could not inject the right meaning or excitement to their own words. Don't get me wrong, I love listening to actors read, or rather act, out lines that other people have written.

But there is something very interesting and intimate hearing the inflection the poet chooses to put into their own words, the pauses, the emphasis on certain words I might have skimmed when reading it on a page. Plus, the pleasure of their personal accent, tone, personality that then becomes attached to the poem when I read it in the future and still hear the poet's voice in my head.

Elizabethan purse

Frog purse, courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

getting ready for National Poetry Day tomorrow...

By John William Waterhouse

I am going to be doing poetry activities with the children at the local school tomorrow. The theme is 'Water' so I have had an enjoyable day today reading different poetry anthologies and wallowing in various water themed poems, collecting some together to read with the children. For the reception class I have made the top half of a mermaid and I am going to get them to help me make her scales and write words on that they think describes life under the sea.

The Mermaid

by Alfred Lord Tennyson

I.

Who would be
A mermaid fair,
Singing alone,
Combing her hair
Under the sea,
In a golden curl
With a comb of pearl,
On a throne?

Season 4 GOT: I want Arya to get her assassin face on...

Arya's theme music in my mind...

Use the coin, kill all your enemies
(don't kill the Hound though, I like him!)

Sagrad: Grimes

love love love this music

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

Young boy in Baltimore slum area, July 1938

Original Photograph by John Vachon
Colorized by Jay (photojacker on Reddit) | Photo Chopshop on Facebook

Honor the Treaties

design by Shepard Fairey

'Honor the Treaties is an organization dedicated to amplifying the voices of Indigenous communities through art and advocacy. We do that by funding collaborations between Native artists and Native advocacy groups so that their messages can reach a wider audience'

Natalie Merchant: incredible TED talk

TED talks are always interesting and inspiring...but this one was haunting and beautiful. Natalie Merchant sings old poems back to life. Her voice has a wonderful, dangerous edge. Like a beautiful, sharp, ornate dagger.You could hold it in your hand and marvel at the silver beauty of it but if you slip it will cut you.

'Natalie Merchant sings from her new album, Leave Your Sleep. Lyrics from near-forgotten 19th-century poetry pair with her unmistakable voice for a performance that brought the TED audience to its feet.'


I especially like how she sings the Sleepy Giant. Her voice transforms the words and imbues it with a different meaning to me, something regretful about past love affairs and it is deeply sensual.  

 The Sleepy Giant

Charles E. Carryl (1841 – 1920)


My age is three hundred and seventy-two,
And I think, with the deepest regret,
How I used to pick up and voraciously chew
The dear little boys whom I met.

I’ve eaten them raw, in their holiday suits;
I’ve eaten them curried with rice;
I’ve eaten them baked, in their jackets and boots,
And found them exceedingly nice.

But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare,
I think it exceedingly rude
To do such a thing, when I’m quite well aware
Little boys do not like to be chewed.

And so I contentedly live upon eels,
And try to do nothing amiss,
And I pass all the time I can spare from my meals
In innocent slumber—like this.

Antique shop cat

I love antique shops, especially ones that are overflowing with things. Piles of maps, pyramids of old china and glassware. Dust and corners where people can't quite reach and the items lie undisturbed. I really like vintage photographs although I find them emotional to look at. All those once loved faces, long dead and forgotten and not cherished in a family album but stacked in a shop of curios. Their names are sometimes written on the back but mostly they are anonymous.

Whilst I was at Much Wenlock poetry festival this year I spent a happy half an hour looking at a rack of photographs. I wanted to buy quite a few but I resisted as I collect too much clutter and I had just had a clearout before I left. However, this small picture (it is the size of a large stamp) could not be left behind.

Photographs were expensive but someone bothered to take a picture of this little cat. I imagine it is marmalade and white and it doesn't look very old. It is watching something/someone. I have been carrying it around in my wallet every since and look at it sometimes imagining the person who owned the cat. Was it a child playing with the camera or an adult who loved their cat? A test shot? It's not a great picture; the cat blends into the lawn and bushes but it is still there, cheating time and death, a surviving image of a long lost cat.