Making Poetry Matter

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

Lifesaving Poems: Kathleen Jamie’s ‘The Way We Live’

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

Below is a summary of some recent research on progress in pupils’ poetry writing and teachers’ metaphors of poetry writing … More

The Picnic It is the picnic with Ruth in the spring. Ruth was third on my list of seven girls … More

Photo: Derek Adams Some writers influence you through the pull of their imagination on your work, opening up new worlds … More