Ralph Windle RW

For over three years, ‘Poetry Matters’ has probed and explored the role of contemporary poetry in these critical times, progressively widening the critique to include other art-forms such as theatre, film and the wider role of the ‘public intellectual’. Now, ‘Poetry Matters’ has reached a defining moment in its gestation, and is to become the spear-head for a wider movement to be called ‘Arts Social Action’. As it gains momentum you will be able to engage with its ideas and action programmes here. Continue Reading »

If a week is a long time in politics, then the years since the last financial meltdown in 2008 have been an eternity. Another such may now be on its way.

Austerity has burned deep and cruelly into lives and services, made infinitely worse by the obscene inequalities splintering our societies and progressively enriching a tiny minority of our citizens at the expense of most. Worse still, our hopes and plans for future generations are being blighted.

All this, by a regime in denial of the gratuitous hardship being heaped on the most vulnerable and arrogantly deaf to more informed or more compassionate counsel. Continue Reading »

Between May and December 2012, and under the generic sub-heading ‘Poetry Matters’, we published a series of blogs aimed at sparking some response, across the contemporary poetry community, to its alleged detachment from the unprecedented real issues of social, political and economic degeneration all around us.

Could it be something to do with poetry’s widespread relocation to the university campus and ubiquitous ‘creative writing schools‘? This was one hypothesis I had discussed with my American poet friend and collaborator Dana Gioia (“On The Silence of the Poets” September 2012) quoting his chastening conclusion for the US (in Can Poetry Matter? Continue Reading »

It’s now over half a century since CP Snow delivered his ‘The Two Cultures’ Lecture (the ‘Rede’ Lecture 1959) in Cambridge. Though persistently argued over and misunderstood ever since, it is proving uncannily prescient of our contemporary malaise.

He was exercised by what he saw as the dangers, in the UK, of a society so split between divergent cultures – at that time, that of the confident, forward-and outward-looking ‘ scientists’; and that of a traditionalist establishment (inadequately labelled at first ‘ the literary intellectuals’ but closely allied with the keepers of the ‘governing culture’ of the time ). Continue Reading »

With the probable exception of Wole Soyinka, who might well have won but for the machinations of our never-sleeping, omni-present, culture-celebrity Melvyn Bragg, the world has generally welcomed Simon Armitage to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, and the dreaming spires quietly resumed their slumbers.

Here, at Arts Social Action, where we encourage poets, and others in the arts, towards a more active involvement in this dangerous world about us, our usual regrets about another creative talent temporarily lost to an academic ivory-tower, creative writing school or perpetually-rotating literary festival, was happily tempered by Armitage’s promise, via Alison Flood in the Guardian, to eschew “professorial grandstanding” and give Oxford an insight into “what is occasionally quite a muddy world, and a muddy artform”. Continue Reading »

George Bernard Shaw’s well-known aphorism on the Anglo-US relationship… “two countries divided by a common language” …has been much in mind in the days since the recent election. Except that, in the more parochial ‘UK only’ scenario, the language and understanding problem is between the so-called ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the new UK political spectrum, with a disenchanted electorate looking on.

Arts Social Action stays firm in the hope that a keen eye for the nuance of language is a characteristic of people in the arts; so you will have noticed that, in its renewed ascendancy, our predominantly ‘rightist’ governing regime has lost no time in imposing its preferred agenda on a dispirited ‘left’. Continue Reading »

If Arts Social Action were that way inclined (it isn’t) a good case could be made for making our far-sighted predecessor, George Orwell, our patron-saint.

Certainly, there seem to be some distinctly 1984ish features to our contemporary world as we slither down the electoral slopes towards decisions which may at last determine the future of our planet and the kind of society in which we wish to live.

The two key issues – of climate change and widening inequalities in our societies – continue to head our ASA agenda, and both are complicated by a deepening distrust of our hyper-active politico-corporate establishments. Continue Reading »

Climate activist Bill Mckibben gives a welcome, relatively upbeat, status report (“Keep it in the ground” The Guardian, 10 March 2015) as we get closer to this year’s UN Climate Summit in Paris in December.

“The good news is that pressure is growing. In fact, that relentless climate movement is starting to win big, unprecedented victories around the world, victories that are quickly reshaping the consensus view – including among investors – about how fast a clean energy future could come … and its thinking can be easily summarised in a mantra : Fossil freeze.

15th September 2008 was the date when the sudden bankruptcy of Lehman Bros in the USA led to the domino collapse of major banks in the USA, Europe and around the world and triggered an as-yet unfinished sequence of low growth with widespread punitive policies of austerity, income constraint and shrinkage of basic social amenities and living standards.

The supposed causes of the meltdown have been widely sought, speculated on and pontificated about – banker/corporate greed, lax regulation regimes, complacent attitudes towards risk, global over-stretch, over-borrowed property speculation etc. Continue Reading »

Pharrell Williams, who this June had been due to head a global music event to get the world’s population behind stopping climate change, has pulled out of the event for ‘personal reasons’.

Mr. Williams was unavailable for comment, but a source close to Al Gore, who is behind the pro-environment music extravaganza (reportedly involving one hundred acts on seven continents), said that the U.S. government had threatened to revoke entertainment licences and security cover due to fossil fuel companies threatening to sue for compensation under TTIP legislation. Continue Reading »