Dai George Should a poem be thought of as a friend? Obviously poets can be friends, and I’d guess that few people, if any, would lobby for an alternative reality …
Editorial: Cathedral Thinking
Martha Sprackland One day a man of the people said to Zen Master Ikkyū: ‘Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?’ Ikkyū immediately took his …
Editorial: Dead Ringers
Who Is The Poet? Emily Dickinson referred to herself as a ‘supposed person’. In Negotiating with the Dead Margaret Atwood describes her own ‘slippery double’ as a kind of secret agent, different …
On the affirmative: Editorial by Ahren Warner
I was reminded, recently, of something I blurted out, years ago, at a ‘roundtable’ on the shady business of poetry publishing. Apparently, barely into the job at Poetry London, I …
Editorial: Our rubble-strewn hearts
In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart recounts a strange haunting. It concerns one of Nicholas Abraham’s psychoanalytic patients: an amateur geologist and entomologist, who spends his …
Fake News
Scandinavian folklore has made us familiar with a particular form of monster. Unlike the beast-humans in Grimm or classical mythology, a troll can scarcely be distinguished in appearance from an …
Free running
A student at the Poetry School (whose day job is as a magazine journalist) recently remarked to me that her interest in poetry came from it being a form of …
A new empathy
In Poésie et photographie – perhaps his last major essay before his death in July this year – Yves Bonnefoy turned to explore ‘the impact of the first photographs on …
Pointing the way
In considering some of the challenges of teaching a poetry course to undergraduates, the American poet Robert Hass calls to mind a haiku by the nineteenth century poet Kobayashi Issa: …
Yes, I can
In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue there was a …
What is Poetry?
‘… I am a dictation, pronounces poetry, learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me, look at me, dictated dictation, right before your …
Non-Poetry at Poetry London
Six years ago a leading poetry publisher asked me if any of the editors ‘owned’ Poetry London. At the time I was taken aback by the question, which felt somehow intrusive …
Deaths and Entrances
Along with its wider mood of remembrance, 2014 offered the opportunity to reconsider the work of two poets, born days apart a hundred years earlier. My parents had grown up …
Implements in their places
‘This is where we knelt on walnut leaves in the town of the word’, writes Carolyn Forché in On the Island of Theologos, the last of five extraordinary poems by Forché that …
Competition 2014: Judge’s Report – Michael Symmons Roberts
Such is the reputation of Poetry London, and its poetry competition, that I knew the standard would be high and my choices would be tough. I had the privilege of judging this competition …
The quick and the dead
Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring is set at that moment in Moscow when the change of seasons is marked by a quickening sense of liquefying movement: the melting of …
The Odd Couple
The most unexpected, and as it turned out inspiring, book I read last year was Airmail (Bloodaxe, 2013), a collection of letters between the American poet Robert Bly and the Swedish Nobel …
Instruments of the imagination
In a recent feature in the FT, a journalist quotes the painter Frank Auerbach as saying ‘some people are natural draughtsmen. I sometimes feel sorry for them – you have to work through …
Competition 2013: Judge’s Report – Pascale Petit
Judging the Poetry London competition was like going on a journey. Sometimes I recognised the terrain; often it was over-familiar. Then suddenly I’d get a jolt and wonder where I …
Poetry London says farewell to Colette Bryce
In a recent collection of essays Al Alvarez (adept at poker and extreme sport, and advocate in 1966 of new American poets ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’) describes the writer alone …
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