Poetry
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A note on formats: Free Verse – The Poetry Book Fair
Popped into the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square on 6th September to meet Robin Houghton and have a mooch around the stands at this year’s Poetry Book Fair together. We found it heartening to chat to dozens of poetry publishers from around the UK, and see evidence of a thriving scene. Poetry’s tendency to experiment with…
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‘The Nightwork’ launch, and Poetry from Telltale Press & friends
A hectic time for Robin Houghton and myself is upcoming, as Telltale Press starts its inexorable rise to poetic world domination with three showcase readings. I launch my pamphlet The Nightwork and Robin will showcase her just-published, The Great Vowel Shift – and we will be joined by some amazing poets over the three shows. The first two…
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The Nightwork
Satisfaction, vulnerability and a strange sense of shedding an old skin. It’s not every day you see your name on a new cover. I collected a box of author’s copies of The Nightwork this weekend. Thumbing through the pages looking at the poems it contained, each one arising from (though not necessarily about) a particular episode of my life. It’s…
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The Nightwork cover illustration
Just received the cover illustration by Hannah Clare for my forthcoming Telltale Press pamphlet The Nightwork. And I am really pleased with it. It is deceptively simple, but the more I look at the more I notice in it. I wish I’d actually finished neurotically finalising the selection of the poems inside it. Luckily my old friend, the excellent Canadian…
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Left unsaid, negative space and Robin Houghton
My art teacher called the space around the object being painted its countershape. This is a term that seems to have fallen out of favour, but the countershape or negative space around an object can be as beautiful as the object itself, as in the sinuous darkness around the bodies or flowers in a Robert…
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A poem finds its way
A poem is a little packet of words that makes its own way in the world and has its own story. Several years ago I was contacted by someone editing an anthology of poetry about Auschwitz, to be published in Poland, asking to include my poem Heidegger in the Forest. The poem had been published…
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How I stopped being a genius
Let me tell you that until the age of 29 I was a tortured genius.To help other people understand this, I lived in a squalid bedsit. I was also permanently unhealthy in that way typical of geniuses, and I spent my nights barking my tortured, misunderstood poetry into the smoky fug of doggerel-filled rooms. Don’t…
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Coleridge and Dejection
Re-reading T.S.Eliot’s the Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, specifically his essay about Wordsworth and Coleridge. Here Eliot makes a memorable assessment of Coleridge. …for a few years he (Coleridge) had been visited by the Muse (I know of no poet to whom this hackneyed metaphor is better applicable) and thenceforth was a…
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Festival Finnish: a Night of International Poetry
Brighton basking in the sun, and this evening The Quadrant pub had almost 40 people packed into what quickly became quite an airless and sweaty room. Luckily into this were poured the images of a cooler climate. This bilingual event gave you the opportunity to hear again just how alien Finnish sounds to English speaking…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 