Lifesaving Poems: Michael Laskey’s ‘Bike’

It was a huge privilege to share poems in workshops I gave at the Greenbelt festival last weekend. Here is … More

Lifesaving Poems: Ann Gray’s ‘mercifully ordain that we may become aged together’

It was such a privilege to read from the cornucopia of talent assembled in Lifesaving Poems at the Greenbelt Festival over … More

To celebrate the appearance of my dear friend Christopher Southgate at this year’s Greenbelt Festival, I am republishing my Lifesaving … More

Here is a list of the found poems I have been posting over the summer, including older posts from last … More

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect … More

When poets discover that their words refer only to other words and not to reality which must be described as … More

‘An amazing stillness this morning. A sense of impending exhaustion in the air. There was one robin as I went … More

A breath of our mouth Becomes the portrait of the world, The type of our thoughts And our feelings … More

Young poets Who don’t think of themselves As apprentices Are notorious For resisting influences. They’ve experienced The first stages Of … More

Consider what value, What meaning Is enclosed even In the smallest Of our daily habits, In the hundred possessions Which … More

Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone noticing. One evening in August you have an errand … More

In the last year, another government initiative has created a compulsory part of the curriculum: learning poetry by heart … More

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

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

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

‘Aren’t you going get the phone?’ I say. ‘It won’t be for me.’ With a little groan the book … More

The adventures of the book have now clocked up fifty blog posts. Here is a list of all of them, … More

In the summer of 1986, when he was poetry editor of New Statesman and not long after Writing Home had … More