Musical settings of pre-existing poems are so familiar in the world of classical music that we sometimes forget what strange things they are. The music in these compositions is generally supposed to express the feeling and perhaps the meaning conveyed [...]

Will you write about Duggan? the man wants to know. Why don’t you? you ask. Me? he asks, looking slightly irritated. (Claudia Rankine, Citizen). When Tim Dooley approached me about writing on the subject of poetry as witness, he was [...]

Can lyric think? I want to work towards this question of poetics by way of a related one in philosophy, whose crispest articulation I’ve yet found swims up in the course of a long, fragmentary lyric by Denise Riley: ‘It [...]