This morning I enjoyed this response to James Dyson’s dismissal of poetry… Here’s the article in Saturday’s Independent that inspired it. ‘What’s the use of poetry’ seems to be a…
I came across this article recently, in Anon magazine, setting out the opinions of three writers as to whether anonymous submissions to magazines were a good idea. I rather like…
Our last workshop of the year with Mimi Khalvati on Saturday, and the subjects of vowel sounds and form were big topics. Here’s an extract from my notes, on the…
First lines. Ack! It’s worse than a job interview. You have 2 seconds to make an impression. Or something like that. Do you find yourself going back to the first…
What a great week. An excellent Bonfire Night, President Obama re-elected, and then I get an email with the subject line ‘Congratulations from Poetry News‘ and find my ‘absent’ themed…
Poet friend of mine and soon-to-be-blogger Jo Grigg mentioned she had been reading The Best British Poetry 2012 so I invited her to write about it here. It is Jo’s first…
Children love having birthdays. I quite enjoyed them myself until I got to about 30, then I went through a period of getting a bit grumpy about the whole birthday…
Here’s a thing. Poetry presses and magazines exist on a shoestring. Sometimes half a shoestring. I’m sure we’d all love to support them by subscribing to them all, but it…
