Jean Toomer's Cane adapted, Bloomsday, Alison Brackenbury, Museums in lockdown
Jean Toomer's Cane adapted, Bloomsday in Dublin, poetry from Alison Brackenbury, Museums during lockdown
In 1923, African American author Jean Toomer published the novel Cane. It wasn’t a best seller at the time but is now held as a modernist classic and a central work of The Harlem Renaissance. A new radio adaptation is to be broadcast on Radio 4. We speak to playwright Janice Okoh and score composer, soul singer Carleen Anderson.
Today is Bloomsday, when Dubliners celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses, the novel about Irish newspaper advertising salesman Leopold Bloom wandering round the city. As Ireland is emerging from lockdown events are moving online and for Zoomsday actor Seán Doyle is MC-ing a Joycean Punk Cabaret with an alternative presentation of extracts, songs, poems as well as Joyce’s saucier love letters. Seán joins us from Dublin just before the event begins.
Lockdown came quickly and affected arts organisations around the country with barely any warning. Venues closed their doors and hung up the “closed until further notice” signs. But what’s happening behind the closed doors? We speak to Joanna Meacock from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow and Anna Renton from Penlee House in Penzance.
For one week only Alison Brackenbury is Front Row’s poet in residence. The colsure of museums during Coronavirus has inspired Alison to write new poems about some of those she has visited. Every day this week we will be hearing one of her Museums Unlocked poems. In today’s Alison takes us to Aghanistan via a painting in the Museum of Somerset in Taunton Castle.
Presenter: John Wilson
Producer: Julian May
Studio Manager: John Boland
Last on
Museums under Lockdown

School is Out, 1889
Oil on Canvas, 105 x 119 cm
, Glasgow
Carleen Anderson
Alison Brackenbury

by Elizabeth Butler
Credit: Tate
Alison Brackenbury, Poet in Residence at Front Row this week, reflects on how she came to write herMuseum Unlockedpoems, one of which she will be introducing and reading each evening.
The horse's mouth
Her blistered
muzzle skims dry ground.
Tongue lolls
past bit. Cracked hooves have found
the baked path
to the fort.
The rider’s
leather palms grip round
his
pommel. He has dropped the reins.
Scarlet sash
swings, silk’s battered skeins.
One red eye
rolls, his dead pile plains.
One man, not
caught.
The men who
clatter through the gate
are also
mounted, smart and straight.
The General’s
grey, in fear,
or puzzlement,
lets fine head tilt.
The rider in
the red skull cap,
rough Afghan
sheepskin on his back,
does not part
lips. Though his voice cracks
they will not
hear.
To shaded
rooms, on a tape’s loop
a young voice
from the present troop
speaks level,
calm, on course:
‘For me, it’s
Queen and Country!’ Scoop
the sagging
man. How, in such heat,
can Queen or
country beat retreat?
Ask
Generals. Ask recruits’ torn feet.
Now ask the
horse.
Bloomsday Festival

Photo credit: Bloomsday Festival
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