‘A taste for the poetry of William Empson may always have to be queer one’, or so spoke my thoughts as I get to cataloguing my few books (alas the critical texts – even the wondrous Milton’s God disappeared under an earlier cull, a misadvised one, of my library). Empson felt poetry was about emotion … More The queer poetry of William Empson
In an earlier blog post (see it at this link if you wish) about Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s Strange Beach, I ended it with a promise, or is it a threat, that: ‘I want to return to them. Maybe I will, for I have more to say of the brilliant things in Andrew McMillan’s book blurb on … More ‘The poetic phrase is constantly thinking, is forever rebuilt and remade on the shifting sands of language’. Rethinking new poetry, including Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s ‘Strange Beach’ again, and now Yomi Sode’s ‘Manorism’ [2025].
Before you turn off completely in fear that the poem I found was actually found inside me and written out in my usual sadly mechanical verse style, I need to say that this poem, typed (clearly on a typewriter) and on flimsy looking but actually quite tough semi-transparent parchment paper (or at least this is … More Today I found a poem.
The poet is visiting Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh on 11th March 7 p.m. I have enjoyed very much reading the debut volume of poetry by a new queer Black poet, Oluwayseun Olayiwola, called Strange Beach. For this blog, perhaps the first of two, I will concentrate on one poem because it centres on a compliment … More ‘I eat his friends’ / applause’: a poem on ‘a compliment’, perhaps: Oluwayseun Olayiwola’s ‘There is Nothing Like That Black Voice’
The model of behavioural change promoted by Prochaska and DiClemente to describe the usual process of escaping addiction provides the best model of how success occurs and is more durable in nature. It applies to any human behavioural task and suggests that only when serial occurrences of apparent failure in the task occur (failures which … More Lapse and the Upward Spiral of Change, sometimes!
The ‘intentional fallacy’ was proposed by Wimsatt and Beardsley in 1954 in The Verbal Icon. It suggested that no work of art, especially a literary one, should be read with an assumption that the author’s ‘intention’ with regard to the poem’s meaning or function as discourse should or indeed can be made. Yet scholarship remained … More Being ‘other than the things I touch’
They say retirement’s a time for leisureBut not necessarily for pleasure. The little iambic couplet I composed, with obligatory soft and feminine rhymes (don’t blame me though for the sexist nomenclature of the discourse of poetic technique where double rhymes are named both feminine and weak), for this sad blog is meant to look at … More “They say retirement’s a time for leisure / But not necessarily for pleasure”.
Joseph Addison Anyone who attempts this question will soon get caught in a trap, for the first word of their answer will be their downfall: ‘I am most proud of …….’, they start and then describe a quality of their personality or appearance in the world, or perhaps some past action undertaken that they feel … More The living deadness of the static ‘I’ infects our pride in self.
The Forward Poetry Prize is probably the most prodigious of prizes for a working poet and I have followed the short list for best collection with joy , mounting interest and some intense feeling generated by superb works of which I could not predict the winner (see my blog at this link) for I enjoyed … More Forward Poetry Prize fills the stage with meaning, truth, beauty and not a little fun.
‘how dare I love you here in the evidence of evil’: some thoughts about Sioux Falls in Danez Smith (2024: page 81) Bluff London, Chatto & Windus. This blog is a preliminary in a mini-project to prepare myself to hear Danez Smith reading from Bluff at the London Literary Festival at The Southbank Centre at 3.15 … More ‘how dare I love you here in the evidence of evil’: some thoughts about ‘Sioux Falls’ in Danez Smith (2024) ‘Bluff’.
Sometimes, it seems that all away do runSometimes, it seems that all away do runand I alone from them do stalk, feeling colossal in my rightness, though aloneperhaps forever – turning in my mindbeing abandoned as gifts held aloftto send me elsewhere – to another sphereof dominion, some place in which I’llstill reign, again held … More ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ : Abandonment is a colossally mistaken feeling.
Finding the expression you want of the ‘wonder at sheer being’ when the man you love comes to bed in his ‘pijamas de ciervos‘. Reflecting on a moment from Garth Greenwell’s (2024) Small Rain. In the picture above various retailers appropriate expressions of joy in a young man in order to sell deer pyjamas, or … More Finding the expression you want of the ‘wonder at sheer being’ when the man you love comes to bed in his ‘pijamas de ciervos’. Reflecting on a moment from Garth Greenwell’s (2024) ‘Small Rain’.
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