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Some pungent Wystan in this moment when it's hard to remain very positive about humanity's inherent goodness. It's such a lapidary poem....

I have been listening to the last movement of Tom Adès' ballet score Dante which was released on disc this Summer by the LA Philharmonic...

This transcript comes from the second week exploring the transcendental action (paramita) of generosity. You can join in the cornucopia...

From the first of two live sessions dedicated to the "transcendental action" of generosity, in November 2023. A recording of the practice...

If you've been following our Live Sessions of late, you may have noticed this word paramita cropping up again and again. Apologies if it...

Photos from the summer retreat courtesy of Darika Barker and Elaine Gray. Obviously, we didn't have our phones in October! We went to...

Gillian Allnutt is a British poet from the Northeast of the country and the recipient of the Queen's Prize for poetry. This poem is from...

Just in case you think I don't like any poetry before 1920, here is the sumptuous "Ode to Autumn" by Keats. Familiar as it is, it's...

I stumbled across this delicious poem in the London Review of Books (which is my only source of news these days). Burnside is a Scottish...

I am a big fan of organised retreats. There is something so potent and human in being with a group of people who signed up for a week or...

I am entering one of my periodic periods of great doubt. I have these on a fairly regular basis - once every five years, perhaps - and...

Something a little different. A long rollicking carnivalesque of a poem from Tom Hirons , a writer and mask-maker from Dartmoor. (The...

One of the factors that Johann Hari identifies in his excellent book Stolen Focus is the crippling exhaustion that most humans in the...

I don't usually care for prose-poems but there are, of course, some masterpieces. (Rimbaud, par example). But I have been really enjoying...

A participant in the last retreat I led asked a very good question that often arises in retreats. “It’s all very well us pondering our...

Cattafi was one of the generation of post-war Italian poets I was inspired to read at university in the 1980s. He lived through the...

This is the second in my series of Victory Mind blogs exploring the ways in which we can gird our minds against the incursions of Big...

translated from Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh This beautiful poem was suggested by Mindsprings regular Mechteld-Hanna...

Marianne Moore is one of the greats of American modernism. Friend of TS Eliot and one of the most distinctive voices of the age. And this...