Category: Notes
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A year in (not) publishing
Like more people than you would imagine, I once had a spreadsheet keeping track of the poems I had written, where I had submitted them, and the results. I rarely look at it now. I have not published many poems recently, either. Partly this is just life. Letting go of a poem – researching magazines…
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Are we being educated here?
In one of the lectures he gave while Oxford Professor of Poetry – on ‘clarity and obscurity’ – the now Poet Laureate Simon Armitage recalled attending a poetry reading with a non-poet friend (all the lectures are available to listen to here). After the reading, the friend asks Armitage about the mini-introductions the readers had…
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Tweeting Ourselves to Death
I was once part of a large, discussion-based event for secondary school students, where the organisers (I was one of them) tasked the participants with discussing whether social media was bad or good for the world. The arguments they came up with were, as you might expect, varied and nuanced, and, when they drafted them,…
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Throwing it all away
The other day the philosopher Julian Baggini wrote an article which annoyed a lot of people on the internet. The title – ‘Why is it so hard to get rid of our books?’ – probably didn’t help, nor did the screenshot circulating on Twitter, where Baggini wondered whether ‘the main reason to keep a house…
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Making Nothing Happen
It was probably inevitable that the two most famous quotes about poetry’s purpose, Shelley’s ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ and W. H. Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ would be so contradictory: poetry is a house with many rooms. David O’Hanlon-Alexandra’s ‘New Defences of Poetry’ project, now available on its own website here,…
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T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form
Review: T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, Anthony Julius, 1995 The great strength of Anthony Julius’s study of T. S. Eliot’s literary Jew-baiting is also, in a way, its weakness. Julius does not linger on the poet’s motivations, his influences, his reception or even his later work but instead focuses, almost to the point…
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The Memory Police
Like all ordinary people I worry I don’t a thorough enough record of the books I read. I do not know when I started having these compulsions: I have not always been like this and the truth is the worry is never motivating enough to sustain any commitment to one method. Instead, every now and…
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Poets Dropping from the Sky
I have a very admiring review of Peter Didsbury’s new collection A Fire Shared in the new issue of the (excellent) Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, which you can get here. When writing any kind of criticism, people often talk about poets like they drop from the sky, so I think some openness about how we…
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