The Missing Links
Jean-Luc Godard’s abandoned 60s manifesto. * Sometimes the only cure is to disappear. * Vanishing films. * A rose is a Christine Brooke-Rose is a Christine Brooke-Rose: “Innovation has a strange way of surviving. In those distant days (the late 1950s), there was active prejudice in England, led by C. P. Snow, against the new […]
Maintenant #91 – Gunnar Harding
I started to write poetry during my military service in the then still mounted Swedish cavalry — The Royal Northern Dragoons. The cavalry gave you few opportunities to paint, bur very generously gave you time for meditation as a stable-post, guarding the horses at night. The poems I wrote there contained very little of the manure-stinking surroundings though. It took me some years to find my own voice. The visual quality in poetry has always been important to me. And that led me to Apollinaire, who tried to transform the Cubist painters’ methods, like the collage, into poetry.
In the 91st of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Swedish poet Gunnar Harding.
Three Poems
It isn’t everyone who grew up in a psychiatric house
with a green sofa that reeked of neuroses
though the place was forever being aired out
even on cold winter days when the bullfinches
sat bleeding in the bare apple trees.
It isn’t everyone who knows what it means
to sit on a parapet
high up and without a flyboard
although you can see others flying by,
some of them even sitting up in their beds.
By Gunnar Harding.