Skip to main content

THE MELITA HUME SHORTLIST 2014: BETHAN TICHBORNE (3 OF 11)


 


Bethan Tichborne (pictured) was born in London in 1984 and grew up in Tonbridge, where she attended Tonbridge Grammar School. She graduated from Exeter College, Oxford in 2008, where she studied Philosophy and Italian.
 
She is involved in social justice activism and has written for various political blogs including Bright Green, Liberal Conspiracy and New Internationalist. She works at a printing co-op in East Oxford that prints leaflets and zines for activists and community groups.
 
She was also shortlisted for the first Melita Hume Poetry Prize in 2012. Her poetry has appeared on nthposition.com, in Alan Morrison’s anthology Emergency Verse: Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State, and in a feature article in the Big Issue. She is related to the poet Chidiock Tichborne.

 
Sisyphus
 
The sun, the rain, the mud
the hooves, the sun, the dust
the archaeologist.

Silt shifts and unearths you
and the rivers will suck you up
and sort you, heavy bones here, light there.

In this river bend there are hundreds of teeth
and little else, pitted, spitting, twisted, bitten
into earth, chewing upwards, hungry for air.



poem COPYRIGHT THE POET 2014

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise...