Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2026
Wherever It Pleases, poems by Richard W Halperin.
Wherever It Pleases
‘. . . The wind blows wherever it pleases. You
hear its sounds but you cannot tell where
it comes from or where it goes.’
– John 3:8
Poetry, too. No one, least of all poets,
knows where poetry comes from or
where it goes. Sometimes poets
themselves get blown off cliffs, off ships.
Wind is anarchic, poetry as well –
property is theft. Anything Baudelaire
notices is anarchic.
Wind cleans. ´It’s a bright evil world,’
says the very Irish narrator of Welles’s
The Lady from Shanghai – platinum
blonde Rita Hayworth brilliant in white
and speaking Chinese into telephones –
which ends in a hall of mirrors.
In The Winter’s Tale, nothing stays
the same, and that without transition.
Near play’s end Queen Hermione,
vilified unjustly and thought dead
for a generation, is resurrected.
Easy-peasy, although music helps.
I have no idea why Stevenson put
‘The Swing’ in A Child’s Garden of
Verses. A terrifying poem. Swings go
wherever they please.
Language Close to The Word
T.S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party.
I have read it innumerable times.
Is it seldom done because it requires
a perfect cast and perfect production,
as in Edinburgh in 1949? I do not know.
Each time I read it, I am all the parts,
which does something to me.
Language which takes my breath away
and makes me realise I do not know
what breath is. He aims higher than
Milton and, ping, hits it.
Dresses by Dior for the ladies,
a catered trolley of cocktails,
a psychiatrist who may not be
a psychiatrist, a person who
can hear the sound of bats
whose family has to send him
to an island where there are
no bats, a young woman in the
first two Acts who in the last Act
is reported to have been crucified
near an anthill on an island
(not the island where there are
no bats) – all dramatise love.
I had to be old to realise this.
I realised it yesterday.
‘Peter, take and eat’ says God
in Acts as Peter dreams that a net
in lowered from heaven with every
living thing in the world in it.
The Cocktail Party. Crisps and
Dior dresses. Language can
do that.
Grovers Corners Mind of God
If anything has been left out of
Our Town, I do not know what it
can be.
A kitchen. Implied streets and farms.
a graveyard on a hill. Early on,
a letter which a minister has sent
to a young girl. She shows it
to another young girl who reads
the envelope, not the letter, outloud.
The play is about what is written
on the envelope.
Any high school can put on
Our Town and many have.
Any audience can come to see it,
and many have. Several great
film and stage actors, at the end
of their careers, have wanted
to play the Stage Manager
who narrates, and a few have.
At the end of Act One, the
Stage Manager tells the audience
that they can go out now
and have a smoke if they like,
and some do, surprised that
the street is still there.
Vogel als Prophet
I write this as a flurry of things
is flurrying: a letter from a cousin
in the USA ‘good to see Barack
and Michelle Obama again at
the dedication of the Chicago
Presidential Center, it brings hope
back into the picture’ –
a CD of Tobias Koch playing
Robert and Clara Schumann pieces
on an 1852 Érard pianoforte,
including Vogel als Prophet
which is the purity of an
unheard bird heard –
a dinner last night with
another couple, Canadian,
whose work is also constructive –
my own recalcitrant body and
the fact that the author of
The Cloud of Unknowing,
thinking the sun and the moon
are only bodies, says in his
Chapter 62 that the sun and the
moon are worth far less attention
than anyone’s soul because the soul
is you and God direct –
the great soprano Lillian Nordica
whose voice was said to be
more powerful than Flagstad’s
who advises singers in her memoirs:
if you feel like putting on and
taking off your scarf a hundred times
during an evening to protect
your throat, do it despite what
The Great They think because
The Great They don’t have to sing.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher (five collections) and by Lapwing/Ballyhalbert (twenty shorter collections). The most recent Salmon, November 2025, All the Tattered Stars: Selected & New Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods, includes ‘Now, Mother, What’s the Matter?’ which was The Poem of the Week in The Guardian, January 19. The two most recent Lapwings, June 2026, are Silk Threads and Some Walk with Sticks; many poems in these first appeared in Live Encounter Poetry & Writing.