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Heaney's 'Scaffolding' at 'Even More than a Pub' event with the Abingdon Arms, Beckley

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 Last month (February), Jane and I were excited to host our first virtual workshop on Poetry and Structure, considering Heaney's poem 'Scaffolding' in relation to the community of the Abingdon Arms, Beckley, Oxfordshire - a community-owned pub that hosts a series of events, called 'More than a Pub'. During the pandemic, the events have moved online and have been re-titled 'Even More than a Pub'.  The workshop went better than we had expected; it was great to be able to use the 'chat' function on Zoom to get people to record their ideas, and then to follow up on these and make links between them. There were some detailed ideas about the use, definition and import of the term 'scaffolding' itself from artists, masons and carpenters - lending a truly interdisciplinary flavour to the proceedings. You can read all about the event, including a link to Heaney's poem, and can acess a recording of the workshop itself here.
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'The Hand that Mocked them, and the Heart that Fed'

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 This is Jane's response to 'Ozymandias', based on that rather difficult line in the poem: 'The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed'. Who is 'them'? Whose 'heart' fed 'whom'? Does 'Ozymandias' have a 'heart' after all?  Jane calls this an 'apocalyptic and dystopian "collage"'. But there is beauty in the shattered fragments, and in what lies beneath the water's surface.
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What we can learn from 'Ozymandias'

In an extract from his book The Covid Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again , published over the summer in the Sunday Times Magazine , Richard Horton notes that: 'Our museums are filled with the relics of ancient peoples who once thought their societies were stable and robust. The fragility of our civilisations has been brought into start relief by Covid-19'. The reference to museums brought me straight back to one of my favourite sonnets, 'Ozymandias', which P.B. Shelley wrote in 1818 in competition with his friend Horace Smith, who composed a poem of the same name. Both poems were written (in part) in response to the news that the British Museum had acquired a fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the thirteenth century BCE. But the title, 'Ozymandias', also referred to a passage from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus , which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: "King of Ki
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'Structure shapes and re-shapes itself'

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In this uncertain moment, we are constantly looking for structures that ground us and make us feel secure. Planning feels odd, arbitrary, but we know we need to do it (even if we end up having to cancel that trip after all!). Poems can feel ethereal, weightless, groundless even - but some poems try to do the opposite: to assert themselves as foundations for the way we think about life and the way we live. The blog post ' 9 Poems about Architecture' takes this idea even further, so that the structures of the everyday world play with the structures of the poems themselves. In Rema Mohan's 'A Work in Progress' we're not sure whether the structure that 'shapes and re-shapes itself' is the building work the poem describes, or the poem that is being built through its discussion of this same act of construction. Meanwhile, some of the other poems on the page are laid out like foundation stones, to evoke the act of building - and the hope that goes into constru
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