Why I miss Robert Rehder

It is odd to speak of missing someone you never met, but this is how I feel about the American … 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

I wrote recently about poets who disappear from view, specifically Susannah Amoore, from Faber’s Poetry Introduction 6. My point is far … More

Yesterday I wrote here about poets disappearing. Partly this came to mind via news of Salt’s decision to discontinue publishing … More

Sometimes you do not get a poem, or what a poet is up to, straight away. In the case of … More

I I first came across e e cummings’s ‘in Just’ in an anthology, Wordscapes, edited by Barry Maybury (OUP, 1971). … More

I first encountered Siân Hughes‘s poems sitting around a table with some talented teenage poets at the Arvon Foundation‘s writing … More

As I say in my previous blog post, I owe my knowledge of ‘8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970’ to the … More

The funniest thing you will ever read about Elizabeth Bishop (or teaching, or anything else) is Mark Halliday‘s essay Moose … More

Like a lot of people I first came across Carol Ann Duffy‘s ‘Words, Wide Night’ as a Poems on the … More

August Kleinzahler, 2004 International Griffin Poetry Prize Winner, Opens the 2005 Awards Ceremony My reader is immune to fashion or … More

Norman MacCaig’s ‘Aunt Julia’ was the first poem I remember reading which made me think ‘I need to do this’. … More

I began writing the Lifesaving Poems series of blog posts in May 2010. The idea was to celebrate the poems that I … More