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 brush and wrote the word ‘Attention’. ‘Is that all?’ asked [...]

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 from the literal, factual self who exists when ‘no writing [...]

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 had made the case rather forcefully that, as an editor, [...]

Judging a poetry competition is like putting your ear to a seashell to hear what the sea has to say: a strange, choric and slightly unreal experience, a multitude of voices rising up and washing over you from out of [...]

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 weekend hikes breaking rocks and catching butterflies. Through these pastimes, [...]

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 ordinary human being; he is perhaps only a little stocky, [...]

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 extreme writing. The analogy, I supposed, was to extreme sports [...]

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 the experience of the world, and the conduct of existence, [...]

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:         The man pulling radishes Pointed the [...]

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 woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard [...]

I came to the judging for the Poetry London Competition still somewhat reeling from judging the (unfiltered) National Poetry Competition. Not that I hadn’t found some keepers and gems in that process – just that there were times in the [...]

‘… 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 eyes: soundtrack, wake, trail of light, photograph of the feast [...]

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 and irrelevant. Since then events have intervened, marking the deepest [...]

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 in Swansea, Dylan Thomas’s ‘ugly lovely town’, during the same [...]

‘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 you can read in this issue of Poetry London. Elsewhere, [...]

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 once before, when Kathryn Simmonds won with ‘Sunday at the [...]