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Thursday, 5 June 2025

Artlyst: The Art Diary June 2025

My June Art Diary for Artlyst has been published today. I begin with two important recently published books about religion and contemporary art. Next, I highlight several exhibitions and artists whose work connects with the themes explored in these books. These include Anselm Kiefer, Vincent van Gogh and Andy Warhol, alongside plans for Manifesta 16 Ruhr. I conclude with group shows that engage with contemporary issues and explore, as the title of one exhibition puts it, ‘The Shape of Now’. These include two fascinating exhibitions which are local to me, in Essex, at Focal Point Gallery and Beecroft Art Gallery:

"‘The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art’ by Jonathan A. Anderson offers a critical guide for rereading and rethinking religion in the histories of modern and contemporary art. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a marked increase in attention to religion and spirituality in contemporary art among artists and scholars alike. Still, the resulting scholarship tends to be dispersed, disjointed, and underdeveloped, lacking a sustained discourse that holds up as both scholarship of art and scholarship of religion. ‘The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art’ is both a critical study of this situation and an adjustment to it, offering a much-needed field guide to the current discourse of contemporary art and religion."

For more on Jonathan A. Anderson see here, Andy Warhol see here, and Maurizio Galia ('The Shape of Now') see here.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Leonard Cohen - Amen.

Friday, 8 April 2022

Amethyst Review: Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages

My two newest poems are being published by Amethyst Review and Stride respectively. 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages' appears today in Amethyst Review, while 'The twin poles of Rouault and Girard' will be in Stride on 21 April.

In 2020 two of my poems 'Are/Are Not' and 'Attend, attend' appeared in Amethyst Review. I also had three poems appear in Stride magazine that same year. All those poems concerned other poets beginning with the artist-poet David Jones, continuing with Dylan Thomas and ending with Jack Clemo. The third of these poems featured in a Stride series entitled 'Talking to the Dead'. These poems can be read at http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/search?q=evens.

Amethyst Review is a publication for readers and writers who are interested in creative exploration of spirituality and the sacred. Readers and writers of all religions and none are most welcome. All work published engages in some way with spirituality or the sacred in a spirit of thoughtful and respectful inquiry, rather than proselytizing.

The Editor-in-chief is Sarah Law – poet (mainly), tutor, occasional critic, sometime fiction writer. She has published five poetry collections, the latest of which is Ink’s Wish. She set up Amethyst Review feeling the lack of a UK-based platform for the sharing and readership of new literary writing that engages in some way with spirituality and the sacred.

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Carolyn Ahrends - I Can Hear You.

Monday, 7 February 2022

Poetry for Amethyst Review and Stride Magazine

My two newest poems are to be published by Amethyst Review and Stride respectively. 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages' will appear in Amethyst Review on 8 April while 'The twin poles of Rouault and Girard' will be in Stride on 21 April.

In 2020 two of my poems 'Are/Are Not' and 'Attend, attend' appeared in Amethyst Review. I also had three poems appear in Stride magazine that same year. All those poems concerned other poets beginning with the artist-poet David Jones, continuing with Dylan Thomas and ending with Jack Clemo. The third of these poems featured in a Stride series entitled 'Talking to the Dead'. These poems can be read at http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/search?q=evens.

Amethyst Review is a publication for readers and writers who are interested in creative exploration of spirituality and the sacred. Readers and writers of all religions and none are most welcome. All work published engages in some way with spirituality or the sacred in a spirit of thoughtful and respectful inquiry, rather than proselytizing.

The Editor-in-chief is Sarah Law – poet (mainly), tutor, occasional critic, sometime fiction writer. She has published five poetry collections, the latest of which is Ink’s Wish. She set up Amethyst Review feeling the lack of a UK-based platform for the sharing and readership of new literary writing that engages in some way with spirituality and the sacred.

Stride magazine was founded in 1982. Since then it has had various incarnations, most recently in an online edition since the late 20th century. You can visit its earlier incarnation at http://stridemagazine.co.uk.

I have read the poetry featured in Stride and, in particular, the work of its editor Rupert Loydell over many years and was very pleased that Rupert gave a poetry reading when I was at St Stephen Walbrook (an event that Sarah Law, editor of Amethyst, attended). As one or two of my early poems featured in Stride, I am particularly pleased to be published there once again.

Rupert Loydell is a poet, painter, editor and publisher, and senior lecturer in English with creative writing at Falmouth University. He is interested in the relationship of visual art and language, collaborative writing, sequences and series, as well as post-confessional narrative, experimental music and creative non-fiction.

He has edited Stride magazine for over 30 years, and was managing editor of Stride Books for 28 years. His poetry books include Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone (both published by Shearsman), and The Fantasy Kid (for children).

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Rupert Loydell - Boombox.

Monday, 28 October 2013

Lou Reed RIP

'With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example.' (Rolling Stone)

'No songwriter to emerge after Bob Dylan so radically expanded the territory of rock lyrics. And no band did more than the Velvet Underground to open rock music to the avant-garde — to experimental theater, art, literature and film, to William Burroughs and Kurt Weill, to John Cage and Andy Warhol, Mr. Reed’s early patron ...

he seemed to embody downtown Manhattan culture of the 1960s and ’70s — as essential a New York artist as Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen. His New York was a jaded city of drag queens, drug addicts and violence, but it was also as wondrous as any Allen comedy, with so many of Mr. Reed’s songs being explorations of right and wrong and quests for transcendence.' (Washington Post)

'As an English major at Syracuse University Reed fell under the sway of the poet Delmore Schwartz, and, as a result, his focus has frequently been more literary than musical. While most songwriters from Reed's generation were inspired by folk songs and blues music, Reed's influences were the Beat writers like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs.' (Gadfly Online)

'Reed's more profound ambition was to use rock's immediacy as a vehicle for a certain kind of literary approach. "Let's take Crime and Punishment and turn it into a rock'n'roll song," he said. As well as Dostoevsky, his heroes included Raymond Chandler, Hubert Selby Jr, William Burroughs and Edgar Allan Poe. His later career included collaborations with artists from various fields, including theatre pieces with Robert Wilson, films with Wim Wenders and works with the composer Laurie Anderson, who was his companion for the last 20 years.' (The Guardian)

'Many of the [Velvet Underground's] themes — among them love, sexual deviance, alienation, addiction, joy and spiritual transfiguration — stayed in Mr. Reed’s work through his long run of solo recordings. Among the most noteworthy of those records were “Transformer” (1972), “Berlin” (1973) and “New York” (1989) ...

“Heroin” ... treated addiction and narcotic ecstasy both critically and without moralizing, as a poet or novelist at that time might have, but not a popular songwriter.' (The New York Times)

'Quite simply, the [Velvet Underground and Nico] had no real precedent in popular music. While the most of the rock world was busy extolling the liberating possibilities of drugs and free love, Reed’s songs saw past the scene’s carefree facade to the nervous junkie waiting for his dealer on a Harlem street corner, the whip-wielding dominatrix in an underground dungeon, and the weary society girl crying alone in her room after the party had ended. The music was just as distinctive, ranging from the sweet, wistful folk-pop of “Sunday Morning” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” to the propulsive Stonesy rock of “Run, Run, Run” and the ear-splitting dissonance of “European Son.”

... 1969’s self-titled third LP marked another abrupt shift in the group’s approach. Ballad-heavy and spare, the record was perhaps the band’s cleanest, most straightforward showcase for Reed’s strengths as a songwriter, climaxing with “Pale Blue Eyes,” a haunting, ethereal tune that ranks among Reed’s most beautiful vocal performances.' (Variety)

'The moments of brilliance were usually those most likely to lose him his following, such as a song-cycle of epic morbidity titled Berlin (1973) ... Street Hassle (1978), The Bells (1979) and The Blue Mask (1982) all contained pieces in which he stretched himself in interesting directions, but with New York (1989) and Magic and Loss (1992) he hit his full stride once more, the songs Dirty Blvd and What's Good proving his continuing ability to invest the two-chord rock'n'roll song with an irresistible freshness.' (The Guardian)

'Berlin is a song cycle that uses the decadence of its namesake and some Brecht/Weill-esque orchestrations to tell a story of two psychically damaged people and their doomed relationship ... Far from the rock-star poses of Transformer, Berlin is lyrically and musically frank and blunt. The arrangements move from sophisticated, arch orchestration to naked-sounding acoustic sparseness, but the words are uniformly unflinching in their depiction of violence, addiction, and desperation. Not for the faint of heart, Berlin is a harrowing journey through the aforementioned tribulations, and one of Reed's most unusual, demanding, but ultimately rewarding albums.' (CD Universe)

'The Blue Mask, one of Lou Reed's bona fide masterpieces. Sparse and unflinching, the album takes on such harrowing themes as self-abuse, mental decay, powerlessness, and heroin addiction; and yet still manages to find some tranquil moments of beauty amidst the chaos.' (The Modern Word)

'Lou never got more intense and soulful than on The Blue Mask. It’s one of the toughest, truest, funniest albums about husbandhood ever made. Lou’s fallen in love, but he finds it just scares the hell out of him. As he sings, "Things are never good / Things go from bad to weird."' (Rolling Stone)

'New York (1989), Reed’s dispatch from the crumbling necropolis of the late Koch era, the city of AIDS and Howard Beach and Tawana Brawley. This is Reed as a cranky New York moralist, fulminating over his morning Times ...

My favorite Lou Reed record is Magic and Loss, the elegiac 1992 album inspired by the death of Reed’s friend, songwriter Doc Pomus. Since I heard the news about Reed this afternoon, I’ve listened several times to “Cremation,” in which Reed laments his friend’s demise and envisions his own cremation. “The coal black sea waits for me me me/The coal black sea waits forever,” Reed sings. It’s one of Reed’s loveliest songs — listen to Rob Wasserman’s moaning double-bass — and one of his saddest. But Reed allowed himself a dark chuckle in the face of death, a joke that held a hint of solace: “Since they burnt you up/Collect you in a cup/For you the coal black sea has no terror.”' (Vulture)

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Lou Reed - Caroline Says II.

Sunday, 23 June 2013

Ordination: Rev. Santou Beurklian-Carter

The ordination as priest of Rev. Santou Beurklian-Carter, curate at St John's Seven Kings, took place this morning at St Mary's Chigwell. Santou was ordained along with Rev. Sharon Guest (Chigwell and Chigwell Team Ministry) and Rev. Young Lee (Walthamstow Team Ministry). Our prayers are with them and all those being ordained in the Chelmsford Diocese today as they enter this new phase of their ministries.

Here are some thoughts on what their ordination means from Nicholas Anderson, Chair of the House of Clergy in Liverpool Diocese:

“Through your ordination into the presbyterate [you] commit yourselves as members of that group of men and women whom we call the ordained ministers of our Church. You will declare before all your willingness to do your best to rise to the great challenges which this way of life will put before you, and through the laying on of hands and the prayer of consecration, the Holy Spirit will take hold of you just as the same Holy Spirit once took hold of the prophets and saints of old enabling you to rise to the challenges which your unique vocation places before you.

As you stand there on Sunday, I would like to invite all to think of you carefully with the eyes of faith.
Through your ordination to the presbyterate, as well as being our friends, our brothers and sisters in faith, you become something more. In the mystery of God’s love, you become a living sign of the presence of Jesus among us in a whole new way. From now on as we look at you with the eyes of faith, we will see something more of the mystery of the Lord’s love for us unfolding in front of our eyes …

What then of you our new priests? To what are you called as witnesses in committing yourselves on Sunday? Of what are you now called to be a living sign? We will hear the answer to all of this in the questions posed to you in The Declarations. We will hear about willing and generous service. We will hear about the faithful proclamation of the faith. We will hear about a ministry of prayer on behalf of the Church and the whole world. We will hear about respect and obedience. We will hear about sincere love, concern for the poor, unassuming authority, self-discipline and holiness. And at the end of The Declarations, we who are there will be asked: “Brothers and sisters, you have heard how great is the charge that these ordinands are ready to undertake, and you have heard their declarations. Is it now your will that they should be ordained?” Our response is a simple, “It is.”

There it is. It is this which your whole life must now be about. This is what you take on this Sunday, this is what God is calling you and empowering you to be and to do – that in every pastoral encounter, people now encounter, in a new and deeper way than was already the case, a living image, a living icon of Jesus the servant.”

This is the charge that St Alcuin made to his monks. It is also of relevance to those being ordained and may be something we could pray for Santou:

“Be an honour to the church, follow Christ’s word, clear in thy task and careful in thy speech. Be thine an open hand, a merry heart, Christ in thy mouth, life that all may know a lover of righteousness and compassion. Let none come to thee and go sad away. Hope of the poor, and solace to the sad, go thou before God’s people to God’s realm, that those who follow thee may come to the stars. Sow living seeds, words that are quick with life, that faith may be the harvest in their hearts. In word and in example let thy light shine in the black dark like the morning star.

Let not the wealth of the world nor its dominion flatter thee into silence as to truth, nor king, nor judge, yea, nor thy dearest friend muzzle thy lips from righteousness.”

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John Rutter - The Lord Bless You And Keep You.