Vera's website - authorverastasny.com Order Vera's book 'Being Heard: Healing the Voices of Trauma - A Collection of Writings (not an affiliate link) Welcome back to podcast poetry live. I heard about Vera Stasny from a close friend and business partner of mine, Laine K. Laine interviewed her long-time friend Vera on her youtube channel Laine’s Dom…

A poem by Pascale Petit called Treesitter started it - led me to explore what someone called Julia Butterfly Hill, experienced and achieved. She lived in a Redwood tree, 200 feet high, for 738 days. The corporations tried to shake her out of that tree, but she was way too powerful for that. That was a revelation for me. How Pascale Petit was able t…

'I hope if Edward is 'looking down' he won't be offended by my possibly irreverent use of his creation.' The painting was actually unfinished when he died in 1898, and currently hangs in the V&A museum in Kensington, having been given it by his wife, Lady Burne-Jones, in 1909. The painting is itself based on a poem as this extract from the V&A webs…

Back in the eighties I spent a while on the streets, homeless and out of my head. Part of that time was on the Whitechapel Road in East London. Despite the circumstances, and amongst the dark memories, I still have a few light ones. I used to love hearing the call to prayer from the local Mosque. I had never been religious back then but that sound,…

This is from one of those memories that never seem to fade. It's about the time my mother miscarried, my response to witnessing the aftermath,, and its effect on me as a seven-year-old.

Welcome to my reading of a poem that I wrote about aspects of the vision quest I undertook in early summer. The whole process took 12 days, but the period I wrote about is called the Solo, which involves four days and nights alone in the wilderness, with no food, but adequate water. Just you (or in this case me) and nature. Nature turned out to be …

Banged up for eternity!

Artwork: a royalty-free stock image I used as it highlights in a humorous way the futility and irony that come up in conflict situations. Large view) In the theatre of war the script often calls for serviceman to be visible but do nothing. Sometimes it's just a case of being at a location in order to make a statement on behalf of the puppet masters…

Musical idents - Italian music found on archive.org) I was told by a friend of mine, Ed, from the US that his niece, Jenna, is an avid poet. Never one to miss an opportunity to discover poetic talent I asked Ed if Jenna would mind showing me some of her work with a view to presenting it here on Podcast Poetry Live, if it was quality poetry of cours…

It’s with great pleasure that I present the work of Gil Hedley - poet, somanaut (inner-space explorer), human anatomy expert, healer, and man of many other skills and talents. Gil gave me permission to bring some of his beautifully written, stimulating, and thought provoking poems to Podcast Poetry Live. To give you an idea of this literary artist …

Around 40 years ago an injury left me unconscious for three days and nights. It was a pivotal time in my life and my perceptions of what took place during that time of unconsciousness are still vivid as memory. This poem is a brief summary of what took place in which turned out to be a fork in the road of my journey in this supposedly 3D world.…

There is a scene in Asylum, a movie from 2005, that struck me in so many ways that I hit the rewind button perhaps hundreds of times over the years (perhaps indicative of my own issues upstairs) - Stella has either lost the plot completely, or achieved enlightenment. I sway to the latter. The release of all attachment. So much so that she watches h…

The poem harks back to the time I was staying at a rehab in Bow, East London. I went out for a typically aimless walk and found myself in one of the many railway arches in London (and the rest of the UK) It turned out to be an incredible experience, more so, I think, because it was unexpected. It was like slipping into an alternative reality. A tru…