spoken word

Audio

The Unknown Citizen and Refugee Blues

First published in 1939 and appearing in his collection Another Time (1940), ‘The Unknown Citizen’ by W.H. Auden can still be considered relevant and stark in its satirical treatment of the ‘ideal’ member of modern society – the acceptable, unobtrusively conformist citizen.

 

 

The collection also includes, among other notable and well known pieces, ‘Funeral Blues’, ‘Spain 1937’ and this, read by Sheila Hancock for Holocaust Memorial Day 2017. Again, as moving and as relevant as it was nearly 80 years ago.

 

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The culinary nest of delight

I was going to write a poem

but where do you start to depart

from fact to Facebook fiction

from the fact that your kitchen

deviates from the public depiction

of a culinary nest of delight

rather it resembles scrambled

celebrity scroungers of the night

with the delicate aroma

of napalm in the morning