Bart Westgeest

Lærer Urup (1906) Jakob Knudsen Edition: Gyldendal 1949 Language: Danish The stone on the picture can be found on the grounds of Rødding Højskole. It bears a text referring to Jakob Knudsen as his father was a teacher on this school and Jakob therefore born there. When I came across it on the internet I had never heard of [...]

I recently visited Vejle Kunstmuseum again. My previous visit had been some years ago, when it still was just one building, the old library. At that time there wasn’t too much space but I nevertheless liked the atmosphere and thought it had been a nice visit. Sometimes you get more out of a small museum than [...]

Det er i livet nu engang sådan at der i allerhøjeste grad ikke findes lykken som vi mener at den burde se ud. A thought that came up while reading the book (unfortunately in danish). Someone said somewhere that Emants writes rather scientific and perhaps even cold, and Liefdeleven (1916) by Marcellus Emants [...]

I spent some time discovering LibraryThing. It was a pleasant surprised to notice how serious the site appears to be. It seems to attract older people who don’t mind some social activity but prefer to do so “without meeting people”. It basically is a good site to make a list of the books you own and [...]

I noticed a pattern in a whirl of thoughts and finds the last days. I had just finished a story from an old book that I took from the shelves a couple of days ago. The book from 1886 is the 7th edition of the Prose of E.J. Potgieter (1808 -1875). I read the story [...]

I can understand why Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones” is a bestseller. It is a inspiring book with a mission: To get people to write as a habit in an honest and spontaneous way. She advocates the practice of freewriting – that is to sit down and start filling up that white paper. Don’t [...]

I read in the The Writer’s Handbook 2008 the article The Globalisation of Poetry by Chris Hamilton-Emery about the world of poetry but found it confusing as a lot of articles can be these days when dealing with the new situation after the internet got as popular as it is now. The writer seemed to [...]

I am slowly going through a book published in Sneek (of all places) in 1887 called: “A Casket of Jewels – selected from poets of the nineteenth century” by E. J. Irving. It contains a small selection of Poems by 42 English and American Poets. As I know virtually nothing of  English or American literature [...]

I read a handful of poems yesterday and liked two by C. G. Rossetti (1830-94). Easy to spot that she had something to do with the pre-raphaelite movement. In the poem Dreamland the same themes are apparent as in some of the paintings by this movement. DREAM-LAND. Where sunless rivers weep Their waves into the deep, She sleeps a [...]

I profoundly disagree with those who equate ‘literary’ with ’serious’ – unless ’serious’ encompasses ‘po-faced’, ‘dull’, ‘indigestible’. Anyone who does anything that seems easy or light or which actually entertains people always tends to get overlooked – apart from by the reading public, the only people who really matter. I reserve the right to write [...]