Reading Arthur W. Frank’s astonishing At the Will of the Body recently has given me pause to reflect on the relationship…
Archive
Open letter to Arthur Frank (on reading At the Will of the Body)
Dear Arthur Frank I’m writing to say thank you for your extraordinary book At the Will of the Body. It is…
Murdering my darling
I have murdered my darling. Like a bird of a certain blue vintage, it is ex, dead, kaput, finished. The…
Another look at Lux’s ‘An Horatian Notion’
One of my personal, private highlights of last year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival was a Sunday morning breakfast hosted by The…
After Paris
I found two blog posts especially moving in the aftermath of last week’s attacks in Paris, both by the same…
Lifesaving Poems: Ellen Doré Watson’s ‘Be Here First’
Be Here First I don’t know my trees but I know my trees. Their angling for what has spurned them; their spitting…
Finding Sharon Olds’s The Matter of This World
The Collection The Matter of This World: New and Selected Poems (Slow Dancer, 1987) I found The Matter of…
Making Poetry Happen
Announcing the publication of Making Poetry Happen: Transforming the Poetry Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2015). Making Poetry Happen provides a valuable resource…
Influences: my first reader
My first reader was a man called Fergus. A friend of a flatmate at university, I never got to…
Lifesaving Poems: Chrissy Williams’s ‘The Burning of the Houses’
The Burning Of The Houses Tottenham is on fire and I work in an arts centre where the sky is…
Cut through
Cut through to what happens when you listen. Cut through to making it happen, listening for it, failing, then doing…
New Year letter
Dear Ant Looking forward to 2015 it’s tempting to think it will never reach the heights of 2014. Big mistake. Huge.…
Poetry highlights of 2014
I have so much to be grateful for in 2014. The year began in one of my temporary fits…
The most read Lifesaving Poems of 2014
Here are the most read Lifesaving Poems of 2014. For the first time I have been able to compare last…
Standing up to cancer?
I am not completely stupid. I know celebrity culture is here to stay. As my children frequently remind me, ‘It…
Why we need Aldeburgh
Dan O’Brien began by saying he wasn’t really a poet, but a ‘moonlighting playwright’. Selima Hill took out her glasses,…
Truce
Here is my Christmas poem for 2014. In this anniversary year of the First World War, it commemorates the unofficial…
Going Against the Flow: Ted Wragg’s last interview
I have been thinking a lot this week about the late Ted Wragg. When I joined the University of Exeter…
Lifesaving Poems 