I've just realised all the things I've got planned in the next week and a half and its pretty exciting.Saturday I'm at Walsall art gallery for Laura Oldfield Ford in conversation and launching Savage Messiah. Next Wednesday its one of the most anticipated Other Room events for a while with Andrea Brady, Tim Allen and nick-e melville. Thursday […]
I picked up a copy of the Manhattan Review in Oxfam, an anglophilic American poetry magazine. The issue had a feature on Liverpool and Manchester poets for North American readers, edited by Chris McCabe and Philip Fried. The lead essay talks in depth about a Liverpool poetry scene from the 60s and 70s, The Mersey Sound et al, but struggles a little to define […]
Some weeks are like makeshift festivals in your life, adrenaline rushes, exhausted collapses, highs and lows. Hard to get perspective. And sometimes the only thing to do is to "pull yourself out of the oxygen tent" and carry on, and carry on.Starting a new project always involves a lot of work, and energy, particularly when the kick off meeting tak […]
With Valentine's Day in the middle of the week, the weekend papers are seasonally adjusted to feature poetry. Today's times had a pull out of a few love classics and the Guardian asked writers for their own favourites. I've posted a sonnet I wrote a few years ago on my author website.
Literary scenes are a bit amorphous aren't they? I'm reading Stephen Spenders "The 30s and After" and his reminisces about that pre-war decade in particular are illuminating. He admits that they were a "scene" or a "generation" but that it wasn't as if they had meetings, even though they might circulate around the […]