In my day job (scholarly journals publishing) I spend a lot of time wrestling with the possibilities and challenges of digital technology. I don’t mean the basic migration of readers from print copies to online versions of the same material, but the ways in which digital technology is transforming how people read and what they publish. Continue reading →

When I first started reading and writing poetry in the early 1990s Basil Bunting was hard to stumble across. Anthologies like The Faber Book of Modern Verse included extracts from Briggflatts, and in Croydon public library I once found a scuffed volume containing the whole thing; there was a wonderful essay in Thom Gunn’s Shelf Life; but mostly it was as if Bunting – then only eight years dead – had been airbrushed out of the picture. Continue reading →

On Friday my wife and I took advantage of the Ashmolean’s late-night opening for the final week of the Francis Bacon / Henry Moore exhibition. The evening slot allowed us to miss the daytime crowds and enjoy dinner in the restaurant afterwards (giving some much-needed time to digest what we’d just seen). The exhibition itself was excellent. Continue reading →

Twelve years ago, the enviably-talented Nick Maitland suggested collaborating on a project: a sequence of poems (mine) and paintings (Nick’s) would co-evolve over a number of months, with drafts and sketches bouncing off one another. Half the fun would be plunging in without a clear plan and seeing where the thing took us. But we struggled to find the right starting point and nothing came of it.  Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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).

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On Tuesday 22nd October a fantastic line-up of poets will be reading at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. The evening has been designed to appeal not only to poetry regulars but also to people who’ve never been to a poetry reading before – so if you’re even half-tempted by the opportunity to hear some of the best contemporary poets (while enjoying a drink or two), please come along. Continue reading →

This weekend it’s been hard to avoid comparisons between Seamus Heaney (who sadly died on Friday) and WB Yeats. Both were Irish poets who won the Nobel Prize for Literature; both were well-known beyond the autolytic world of contemporary poetry; and both cast a long shadow over the writers who came after them. Continue reading →