AK Blakemore reading backstage before the Spring launch of Poetry London.

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 [...]

Ben Lerner The Hatred of Poetry Fitzcarraldo, £9.99 My two-year-old daughter has a frustrating habit of asking for orange juice, then objecting to every way she might drink it. The juice is right, the cup and bottle are wrong. The juice [...]

Tom Pickard meets me at Maryport Station, Cumbria, and drives me back to his home, an old weathered terrace on a street between two pubs. On the wall behind us is a large framed photograph of the young Pickard, face-to-face [...]