My thanks to Rupert and Nick for posting my poem at International Times today.

You can read the poem here: https://internationaltimes.it/having-to-concur/

Wonderful to have a poem up on this ‘free-verse/experimental/off-beat’ poetry site. With thanks to Jonathan.

Read the poem here: https://fixatorpress.home.blog/2025/09/19/ambush-by-mike-ferguson/

(image by Rupert Loydell)

A Mother

I forget
how my friends

will still have
their mothers.

They visit
or even talk

from a distance
still here.

There is so
much technology

too.
I imagine

catching the train
or airplane

or even driving –
though I am not sure

why there
must be a

journey: it
just seems

there is somewhere
to travel to meet.

(20 years, and I think of and miss her these days more than ever – me now only 7 years younger than when she passed)

I have a TextArt piece with an artist/writer commentary in this important edition.

You can pre-order here: https://humanrightsartmovement.org/americas-slide-toward-authoritarianism-book

My thanks to Rupert and Nick for posting my poem on IT today. You can read the poem here: https://internationaltimes.it/a-level-of-obscurity/

(Searching this morning for writing of mine, I came across this piece prepared for a possible publication in 2022 from those writing about people who had influenced their lives. I wrote about Ann Wordsworth, my tutor at Oxford in 1979/80, but the recollection and thankfulness wasn’t accepted. I am posting it here now, surprised I hadn’t already done so...)

I’d have the red, the same she has to drink with me in that sunroom of her Oxford home reading another weekly essay aloud, that one about Lawrence’s requirement for non-frictional sex, but I didn’t need alcohol to talk about this – not a novice kid – and we were being Freudian after all, understanding as well why there’s the surprise of a ghost in Villette, knowing already how the burning stubble wasn’t like the remains I ignited on a farm three full years before such studying, and how still, part-time, I’d torch fields inside protective rings of their ploughed surrounds. Ann listened attentively to the agricultural asides, my attempts to be poetic, explaining a struggle of someone close and their malady – it was just the essays she would disrupt me at, quick to hear an error or infelicity, or an idea she knew she had taught but praised me on. In arranging my special place at a talk by Derrida, Ann wasn’t to know the lifelong anecdote I could never deconstruct but have to tell as it is: my being the only one there who didn’t speak French. Yet it wasn’t him or the others like Barthes and Lacan who I would begin to understand because of her persistence, but from the insistence to explore beyond. Perusing alone now the essays I’ve kept, they are another kind of significance past what hasn’t all been retained, and I still hear her voice and see in written notes made after listening to mine the thoughtful though radical push to differences in reading and teaching and rupturing the signs.

(Ann Wordswoth passed in 2013: a wonderful obituary of her can be read here: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/sep/22/ann-wordsworth-obituary)

Since posting the above, I found a selection of tributes from a collection ‘On Ann Wordsworth: Some Reflections and Reminiscences’ (Oxford Literary Review, Vol 38, No2, Nov 2016) and here is the fond memory from Harold Bloom:

‘It is emotionally difficult for me to elegize Ann Wordsworth whom I
loved. Almost every morning as I sit at breakfast a few weeks away from
my eighty-sixth birthday I recall breakfasts with Ann and her stalwart
sons Thomas, Charlie, Henry, and Sam. Both Ann and I allowed
ourselves a dram of Highland malt, a bottle of which invariably stood
on the table. An hour ago I had my morning dram and drank it to the
memory of Ann Wordsworth.

My interest in Ann commenced when I read one of her essays. I
crossed over to Oxford from New Haven and spent as much time with
her as possible. We discussed poetry rather than criticism and enjoyed
reciting poems to one another. I suppose I fell in love with her as she
recited, a passion that has endured into my old age. Ann belonged to
the Oral Tradition. She was a wise woman and a profound student of
the great poets. I learned by listening to her.

Approaching eighty-six I will soon begin my sixty-second
consecutive full-time year teaching at Yale. Because of infirmities I now
meet my discussion groups in the living room of my house. One group
is always on Shakespeare, while the other centers on Poetic Influence.
I rarely teach a class without experiencing the aura that somehow Ann
Wordsworth is with me.

Though Ann’s essays and reviews still move me, they cannot catch
the inflection and full insight of her discourse. She renewed my own
conviction that poetry is an art that will not abandon the self to
language. For me Ann is an image of the human that reads, loves,
speaks, and does not falter in its drive towards a transcendence that
firmly adheres to the soil and the weather.

Many of our conversations concerned the legacy of Sigmund Freud.
Like myself Ann rightly regarded Freud as a poet of the mind in the act
of finding what might suffice to keep us from falling into ideologies. I
abandoned an all-but-finished book on Freud some years ago because
I began to see him as a translation of Shakespeare into prose. Ann did
not agree with me but that scarcely mattered. In the end all I wanted
to do was to sit and gaze at her and be charmed by the lucidity and
warmth of her way of talking.

I would say more if I could but find I am too bewildered by the
poignance of losing her. All who had the privilege of her company
probably feel the same. I can only conclude by saying that I loved her
and will love her until I depart.’
Harold Bloom

My thanks to David Estringel for posting these poems, from a full Caboose collection. I hope to get this out there at some stage, but it takes a while to arrive…

Read these poems here: https://www.bloodhoneylit.com/poetry/ferguson-four-poems

On this day in 1966, The Beatles were pelted with rotten fruit and firecrackers during a concert at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, Tennessee, while the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated outside the show and burned records.

On this day in 1967, The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” single went to #1 in the USA.

Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn
How to play the game
It’s easy

Nothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn
How to be you in time
It’s easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
Nothing you can know that isn’t known
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown
There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where
You’re meant to be
It’s easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
All you need is love (all together now!)
All you need is love (everybody!)
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)

(Love is all you need)
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
Yesterday (love is all you need)
Oh (love is all you need)
(Love is all you need)
(Love is all you need)

Songwriters: Paul McCartney / John Lennon

All You Need Is Love lyrics © Sony/atv Tunes Llc, Shapiro Bernstein & Co Inc, Mpl Communications Inc