Lifesaving Poems: Ted Hughes’s ‘Wind’

Wind This house has been far out at sea all night,The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,Winds stampeding the … More

Lifesaving Poems: Ann Sansom’s ‘Instructor’

Ann Sansom is one of my all-time favourite people, poets or normal, ever. I count myself fortunate to have worked … More

When I speak to trainee primary school teachers about their views of poetry I am often struck by their divergent … More

I wrote yesterday about pitching poems in the classroom which are aimed not at the crowd but perhaps one … More

Who? Who is that child I see wandering, wandering down by the side of the quivering stream? Why does … More

I count myself lucky to have been taught by a team of English teachers who I have no doubt … More

It was the best of times. Jean Sprackland and I were tutoring the dream group at Totleigh Barton for a … More

It was the best of times. Jean Sprackland and I were tutoring a poetry course at Totleigh Barton, the Arvon … More

I think my first bout of Poetry Exhaustion occurred sometime after my A levels. Our English paper was quite advanced for its … More

I was lucky. I was taught English in one of those classrooms with complete sets of A Taste of Honey, … More

One year I decided that I would decorate one of my teaching rooms with my collection of Poems on the … More

In 2007 Sue Dymoke, Andrew Lambirth and I got together and decided we were going to apply to the ESRC … More

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

Apart from e e cummings and the genius Anon, one of my chief discoveries in the Voices and Junior Voices series that I … More

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

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

I first came across ‘Birth of the Foal’ at the recommendation of the great Cliff Yates. He told me he’d been … More

I have just come back from the Greenbelt Festival where I was delighted to give a talk about writing poetry … More