Be Here First I don’t know my trees but I know my trees. Their angling for what has spurned them; their spitting…
Archive
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…
‘When I read poetry’: in memory of Mark Strand
I am sad because the great American poet Mark Strand has died. Among the tributes to him in the last…
The Four of Us (a new poem)
I am delighted to have The Four of Us, a new poem, in London Grip New Poetry, which you can find…
The woman at the workshop
I am at a thing. Not a famous thing, but an important one nevertheless. People are there, people you and…
The new poem
The poem and I are best friends. For ever. We hold hands in public and spend every spare minute with…
Mostly all the time nearly everything
Everyone who enters the stage begins by saying thank you * That silence * Mostly nearly all the time *…
