I’ve resisted buying Geoffrey Hill’s Broken Hierarchies, having been tipped off that Hill’s near-lookalike Santa Claus might be bringing me a copy in a couple of weeks’ time. Meanwhile the 1985 Collected Poems has again taken up residence on my bedside table (not the treasured, battered copy I carried around like a prayerbook in the mid-late ’90s, but a replacement battered copy bought second hand a couple of years ago). And so I happened to be immersed in Geoffrey Hill when I read Claire Trévien’s excellent Poetry School blog post on poetic tourism. Continue reading
Author Archives: Gareth Prior
POEM Magazine 1.3
Working for an American company I’ve spent a depressing amount of time 38,000 feet above the Atlantic, shuttling back and forth to New York and Boston. Regular travel can’t help but emphasize the increasingly global nature of many cultural disciplines: the same films and TV dramas are advertised in Times Square as in central London; successful novels can migrate across the Atlantic in both directions; subsets of theatre, dance, music and painting are engaged in a complex cross-timezone dialogue; architecture and fashion have long since become stateless global disciplines. The unfortunate exception is poetry. Continue reading
Sasha Dugdale & Olivia McCannon at Woodstock
Last night I got to hear two of my favourite poets for the first time, reading alongside the excellent David Constantine at the Woodstock Poetry Festival. When you first hear someone whose work you really admire there’s always a nagging worry. What if they blurt out their lines like chopped up prose or chant them like Yeats at a séance? What if their delivery is rushed or broken or just plain bad?
In this case the what-ifs were unfounded. Continue reading
The Bounty of Derwent
I’ve spent much of the past two weeks happily immersed in a bag-full of books from the Derwent Poetry Festival (alternating with Richard Burton’s excellent biography of Basil Bunting, of which more in a future post).
(some of my Derwent purchases)
There’s so much good stuff here to enthuse about, but I can’t resist another opportunity to fly the flag for pamphlet publishing. Continue reading
Understanding Poetry #6: Rhyme
In the popular consciousness rhyme and poetry are bound together. “I’m a poet / And I don’t know it.” No matter that English poetry managed without rhyme for centuries, that Milton argued against it in the preface to Paradise Lost, or that our best-know poet wrote most of his lines in blank verse: proper poetry rhymes, and it’s only new-fangled modern stuff that fails to. Continue reading
2013 Derwent Poetry Festival
Over the past two days poets and poetry-lovers from around the British Isles and beyond have converged on Masson Mills for the 2013 Derwent Poetry Festival. The converted mill on the banks of the river Derwent is an ideal venue for a poetry festival: spacious, scenic and unpretentious – perfect for Templar Poetry’s excellent line-up. Continue reading
Secular Magic: Polly Atkin
The back cover of Polly Atkin’s Shadow Dispatches lists eleven competitions she has variously won, placed in or been shortlisted for – and that’s not counting the Mslexia pamphlet competition in which Shadow Dispatches itself scooped first prize. In all, an impressive twelve awards referenced on one book cover. Although this isn’t a guarantee that the poems inside will be good (some of the poems that win competitions are wonderful; others are wonderfully well-adapted to winning competitions), it does raise serious expectations. And Atkin doesn’t disappoint. Continue reading
Through a Lens, Brightly
Now that this week’s Jericho Tavern extravaganza is over and I have a lull before next week’s Derwent Poetry Festival, I wanted to take the opportunity to catch up on a couple of belated posts.
A few weeks ago Matthew Stewart released a film version of Tasting Notes, his short pamphlet of wine-poems. Continue reading
Heard Melodies
I’ve written before about poetry as an art made from sound, and much of the past few days has been alive with the sound of poems. Continue reading
Next week’s poetry reading
I’ve spent the weekend re-visiting the most recent collections by the six poets who’ll be reading next week in Oxford, on Tuesday 22nd October at the Jericho Tavern (full details here).
