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Showing posts from May, 2015

Call to the College

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The Bardic Chair is now on display in Glastonbury Library, along with the Tim Sebastian Memorial Trophy currently held by my colleague Steve Leighton. They've already been generating a bit of interest - if you're in the area please come and see them too.  In the coming days and weeks I'll be adding information about the Chair to the display boards around it. I am asking all members of Gorsedh Ynys Witrin to bring a piece of writing for display along with the chair. This can be information about Bardism, or even better your own creative work. If the boards get full up I intend to keep refreshing them with newer work, so if pieces need to come off to make room, I will put a folder there that those can be archived in. Everyone who has been initiated into our Bardic College (you'll know if you have - the annual ceremony at the foot of the Tor) is welcome to bring or send me work at the Library to be pinned around the chair; including all past recipients of the Tim Sebasti...

Bardic Diary: 19th - 24th May

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So. Last Tuesday I finally managed that thing I've been trying for six years, and became the 'Bard of Glastonbury'. Or, to use my formal title, the 10th Chaired Bard of Ynys Witrin . I am greatly honoured and also excited to have attained this title in the town where I have lived since I was born (and where my ancestors have lived for at least hundreds of years); let alone in a place with such a rich and important place in history. I mean to publish an ongoing diary of my time as the Bard, here on my writing blog. If you'd like to follow updates, please subscribe to the blog (I think that 'Google Friend Connect' button, top right, will do it). Tuesday May 19th The night I won - here's the piece I won with . My fourth attempt. I'm glad I didn't get it on the first go. I've learned more, and there are more people around to help me. Lisa Ceneri aka ' Raw Poet ' took the crown - I hadn't met Lisa before the trials but I've alread...

Twilight of the Gods

written to contest the Bardic Chair of Glastonbury in the Ynys Witrin Open Gorsedd 2015. With this piece I became the 10th Bard of Glastonbury... (I should add it was written to be performed, and performed in two halves at that, but people have flattered me by asking to see it, so here goes): - Way out to the West, in his jewel-splendoured evening boat, Ra had turned from a falcon to a ram, and become Atum. And the top of his ram horns had just gone below the horizon, as the reddened sun-disc he carried on them began the final part of its nightly descent into the Underworld. Venus, as she nearly always was, was the first to appear - at first as a bright spot on the horizon, then nearer, and brighter, and brighter, and nearer, and brighter, and nearer, and nearer, until she alighted on the deck, running, barefoot, her full-muscled legs going past each other and slowing fast, as if she’d just come off a swing. She re-ordered the setting of the tables, just slightly. Layin...