May Day weekend. In the modern Britain, it’s just ‘Early May Bank Holiday’, but the date marks the ancient festival of spring, long pre-dating Easter as a celebration of renewal, the mysteries of birth and life and fertility. When I was little we danced around a Maypole at school. We practiced for about a week,…

I don’t often use this space to write about my own work, but after all, this website is about my own work. It’s about my work in editing, teaching, and writing — and amazingly, I have been writing again recently. It feels great, like not being a fraud any more. Because really, who can be…

What a week. Once again in the space of only seven months it’s been a soup of heartbreak, rage and helplessness. There’s not much that a little poetry-reading group can do to participate in any kind of resistance against the force of evil — except to read poems. So let’s do just that. The next…

For eight years I ran an annual one-day workshop on the whole TS Eliot shortlist of ten books. It started as a fun idea and in the end it was an annual eye-opener: eye-opening, thought-provoking, serious and sometimes raucous. Meeting on the day before the big TS Eliot Prize reading at the Southbank every year,…

Break of Day in the Trenches The darkness crumbles away.It is the same old druid Time as ever,Only a live thing leaps my hand,A queer sardonic rat,As I pull the parapet’s poppyTo stick behind my ear.Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knewYour cosmopolitan sympathies.Now you have touched this English handYou will do the…

It’s Bonfire Night! But, you know, I think poetry every day puts a bomb under received ways of thinking, obliviousness, lazy emotionality. What’s more revolutionary than a really good poem? The next mini-term of Thursday lunchtime poem readings begins in six days. These are becoming a fixture now and I miss them in the two…

Happy National Poetry Day! On this day when a US federal judge has suspended enforcement of the new anti-abortion law in Texas, the theme of NPD, serendipitously, is CHOICE. Here’s a poem I wrote in the week after that law was passed, as part of an extended sequence in conversation with lines from the American…

It’s Back to School time! The first class to resurrect itself in this season of fruitfulness is going to be the Thursday lunch-hour special, the Close Reading session. It starts next week, on the 16th, and runs for six weeks (though we’ll be skipping the 14th because we have a very exciting but low-key family…