The Year of Living Deeply 3: Mark Strand’s Weather of Words

When I first read and began thinking about The Year of Living Deeply one of my instant reactions concerned the impact … More

In Praise of Rupert

  Rupert Loydell is shouting at the countryside. I have got up at sparrow-fart to drive him to the Blandford … More

Some found poems

Recently I have featured prose writing by various writers, reshaping them in the form of found poems. Annie Dillard on … More

What it’s like to be human, by Mark Strand

  If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we’d live in … More

Mark Strand on reading poetry -a found poem

Sometimes poems aren’t literal representations of anything. Sometimes a poem just exists as something else in the universe that you … More

When I read poetry -by Mark Strand

When I read                           poetry              I want … More

Because failure is assured

Recently I have been reading the exquisite prose of Janna Malamud Smith, in her book-length meditation on creativity: An Absorbing Errand: … More

‘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 … More

Lifesaving poems of summer

Now that we have finally had one in the UK, I found myself wondering recently how many of my Lifesaving Poems choices … More

When poets don’t appear

I have been thinking a lot recently about the career trajectory of poets, including my own, whose work briefly becomes visible … More

Lifesaving Poems: Deryn Rees-Jones’s ‘What It’s Like To Be Alive’

Last week I read Antony Dunn‘s marvellous essay about his poetics, ‘To Tell You the Truth’ (from In Their Own … More

Lifesaving Poems: Mark Strand’s ‘A Morning’

I fell in love with the poetry of Mark Strand via the enthusiasm of Rupert Loydell sometime in the late … More

Lifesaving Poems

I was struck by a remark of Seamus Heaney in an interview he gave some years ago now. He was … More