The annual TS Eliot Prize Shortlist Workshop starts tomorrow morning – and what a shortlist it is!

While the world goes mad, on this coming Wednesday the 1st of May we start up our workshop group again for the summer term. This is a long-running group — it’s been through many changes of location and membership in the past fifteen years — from a pub next to Bunhill Row Dissenters’ cemetery, where…

I’m overjoyed to share with you the official web page for my new book — my first full poetry collection since 2011 — now live on the CB Editions website! Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle was only written by chance — I felt stuck, and struck a bit dumb, after lockdown, so…

Like, I suppose, every other poet who’s ever taught a class, I’ve often been asked what my number one piece of advice would be for someone wanting to improve their writing. And like every other poet who’s been asked this I’ve answered, READ. Read poetry. Never be afraid of ‘allowing influence to contaminate your style’,…

I forgot to put up my customary weekly post sharing our poem after yesterday’s Poem Talk session. We talked about this new poem by Kit Fan, which is currently shortlisted for The Moth Poetry Prize (judge: Louise Glück). Kit Fan was born and raised in Hong Kong and came to the UK at 21; he…

… with a poem a week If poetry is the revolution — if poets really are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, as Shelley said — it’s because poetry can reach into the places other, more easily ordered things can’t reach. Poetry deals with the essence of things. It speaks truth to power, and it…

It’s that time of year again: In just a month it will be time for the TS Eliot Prize – still arguably the most important prize for poetry in the UK — and I’m thrilled to say I will be delivering my TS Eliot Shortlist workshop on Zoom, over the weekend of the 14/15th January.…

It’s been a funny summer. Five or six weeks ago I bought a few new poetry collections — well, old ones mostly, including three by Peter Reading — thinking I might do the Sealey Challenge, laid down by poet Nicole Sealey, to read a book of poetry every day in August, and share some aspect…

I was very sorry to read of the death last week of the poet Peter Scupham, at age 89. I met him only once, ten years ago, but it was for a whole weekend, at the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival: like a sort of big house party with readings and dinners, run by the wonderful…