My milestone poet: Kim Moore
Just over two years ago I worked out that since April 2014, I’d published 275 posts on my own poetry site, the great fogginzo’s cobweb. I estimated that it meant I’d published about half a million words about poets and poems, and I wanted to celebrate. I wrote three posts I called Milestones which were ‘thank-yous’ to three significant poetry folk: Gaia Holmes, who gave me my first solo guest poet...
2nd January 2020
Inspirational (2)
In the last post I was writing about poets who inspired me, who gave me the aspiration to write. Poets who taught me what I needed to be writing about, and sometimes how.
There are other kinds of inspiration ... those epiphanic moments that come back fresh and sharp, new-minted memories. Images. ...
1st December 2019
Inspirational (1)
I was inspired to write this post by another blog post about … inspiration. As is so often at the moment, it was the poet Julie Mellor. You really should follow her blog. Here’s the link. I want to q...
24th November 2019
The forgotten ones
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Traditionally the world goes silent. The traffic stops. There may be salvos from field guns. Traditionally, the great and the good stand so...
9th November 2019
Notes from a small island (3)
We’ll back home by the time you read this; still, I’m enjoying myself too much to stop. About five years ago, Effie’s daughters moved back to Skye, and the holiday cottage was needed as a family home....
4th November 2019
Notes from a small island (2)
We’ve been going to the Isle of Skye for 20-odd years, renting a bungalow from Norman and Effie Macpherson in the crofting valley of Achnacloich on the Sleat peninsula. Norman was a shepherd all his w...
27th October 2019
Notes from a small island (1)
For 30 years or more, we’ve been coming to the Isle of Skye at the end of October. Thirty years ago you could more or less rely on frosty nights and snow on the Cuillin. The world is warming, and thes...
20th October 2019
Thinking about extinctions: 'This Tilting Earth', by Jane Lovell
The other day, I came across an interview with the poet Kim Moore in which she says in response to the question: What does poetry mean to you?
“This is a hard question! I’ve just had a baby, so my ...
14th October 2019
A collection that matters: Clare Shaw's 'Flood'
About three years ago, Clare did something I find unnerving even now. She sent me the manuscript of the new collection she’d been putting together (it was provisionally called Floodtown) and asked me ...
6th October 2019
Two pamphlets: Victoria Gatehouse and John-Paul Burns
I read this on Julie Mellor’s poetry blog last week: “I aim to post something once a week on my blog but last weekend I skipped it. Maybe I didn't have anything to say. Maybe I didn't have the energy ...
29th September 2019
A loss you can't imagine: young men and suicide
1992. Only a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, our son David died in a fall from the top floor of a high-rise block of flats behind the Merrion Centre in Leeds. I see it from the motorway eve...
15th September 2019
Pamphlets, collections, and a polished gem: Christy Ducker
Every time I go to an open mic or a poetry reading, like as not I’ll come home with at least one (or more) pamphlets (or chapbooks … more of that later). More likely than to come home with a new colle...
10th September 2019
Bridges and troubled waters: Graínne Tobin (1)
I’ve reached a point where I can hardly bear to listen to or watch news programmes, when politicians lie effortlessly and without shame, and when total strangers spew bile at each other on what we cal...
1st September 2019
The past, and other countries: Gráinne Tobin (2)
It’s been hard to concentrate, these last few days. It’s hard to think about poetry when you’re consumed with rage and frustration in a world where truth is an endangered species, and the management o...
1st September 2019
Confessions of a tripe addict
Lately I’ve been bingeing on Netflix and catch-up and box sets. The Killing, The Bridge, Borgen, Spiral, True Detective, The Wire, House of Cards (the American one); I’ve been reading comfort blanket ...
11th August 2019
Poetry that really matters: Ann Gray (part two)
Tell me a story, Pew.
What story, child?
One that begins again.
That’s the story of life.
But is it the story of my life?
Only if you tell it.
I was a bit late starting to write...
5th August 2019
Poetry that really matters: Ann Gray (part one)
Some weeks I despair of knowing how, and where to start. First-line nerves kick in, particularly when I worry that I won’t do justice to the guest poet. I’ve felt it particularly acutely these last f...
29th July 2019
In praise of poetry anthologies
I’m constantly reminded that I know a lot less about poetry (and everything else, too) than I’d like. At the same time, I’m wary of the business of keeping up with everyone else who’s busily ‘keeping ...
22nd July 2019
My kind of poetry: six new poems from David Constantine
Well, I hope my recent post sent you off to buy David Constantine’s Collected Poems, and maybe his prose work, too, and possibly the published lectures. At the very least I hope it got you wanting mor...
15th July 2019
My kind of poetry: David Constantine
I’m feeling something of a fraud, having recently read the latest spat about the Oxford poetry professorship concerning one Todd Swift. I’ve never heard of him. It reminds me yet again that I know nex...
15th July 2019
Writing poems in the sleep of reason
I remember one of my uncles, a lifelong trades unionist and old-style Labour man. He was an interesting man; he completed his Open University degree when he was 80. He once told me that the cleverest ...
23rd June 2019
My kind of poetry: Char March
This will be the third, and for a time, the last of my northwords poetry posts. It comes with a kind of synergy or symmetry, in that while last week’s poet, David Underdown, travelled north from Manch...
16th June 2019
My kind of poetry: David Underdown
Last week I decided not to comment much on the poems Bob Beagrie shared with us; I wanted to them to be heard, and work on the reader, for their music, the texture of the language. I’m just hoping tha...
9th June 2019
My kind of poetry: Bob Beagrie
I like to toy with a notion that I came across years ago. I don’t know the source. I have a suspicion it could have been David Crystal; basically, it’s that if the accidents of history had taken a dif...
4th June 2019
My kind of poetry: Carole Bromley
I was trying to decide between three possible posts for this Sunday, when my mind was made up for me by two things. On Wednesday I had a great time as a support reader at Seven Arts in Chapel Allerton...
27th May 2019
Let me count the ways: the things that lists can do
I shall start a tad self-indulgently. Last Monday I was running an open mic at the Puzzle Poets Live in Sowerby Bridge. It was a special night with a guest poet of rare talent ... Peter Riley, the fir...
21st May 2019
My kind of poetry: Gaia Holmes
Gaia Holmes's third collection was recently longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje prize. That’s all the prompt I need to revisit things I’ve written about her in the past, and to urge you to rush out and bu...
12th May 2019
Poetry workshops, the ins and outs: line breaks
This will be a slightly edited version of a post I wrote some time ago. I hope it’ll be useful.
There should be a reason why every line ends where it does.
Think about this handwritten letter, b...
6th May 2019
My kind of poetry: Yvonne Reddick
We can get used to all sorts of fashions and default settings in poetry, getting comfortable with psalms, and sestinas, and free verse, and minimalism, and stanzaic bits of ekphrasis and sonnets, and ...
29th April 2019
Blank notebook pages and first-line nerves
A sort of mea culpa to start with on this ridiculously lovely Easter Sunday. I’m pretty sure I promised you a guest poet today, and I have her poems and her back-stories all lined up. But the fact is ...
21st April 2019
Poetry workshops: asking for advice about your poems
Just to be clear; in this context, it’s not one where you write new work from prompts or whatever. I mean workshops where you take a poem that’s unfinished or unsatisfying in some way, in the hope tha...
14th April 2019
Poetry, place and identity: Elisabeth Sennitt Clough
Some politicians are inescapably linked to things they said, often without thinking, or because they were poorly advised. Or plain stupid. JFK could never shake off the ‘ich bin ein Berliner’ thing, h...
11th April 2019
The ins and outs of poetry workshops: residential courses
Over the last three or four years I’ve shared various thoughts about writers’ workshops of various shapes and sizes: from groups of like-minded friends who meet regularly in pubs to listen to and advi...
31st March 2019
The company of poets: why listening and learning provides that buzz
I came back to Ted Hughes’ Season songs today, as I do on a day like this, with
the earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
out into the sun,
after the frightful operation
...
25th March 2019
Staying alive: me and Mr MacCaig
There’s a sequence in one of Eddie Izzard’s shows where he’s riffing on supermarket shopping. At some point he remarks that if an old lady bumps you with her shopping trolley (which, by the way, will ...
17th March 2019
Readings and open mics: a beginner's guide
Extraordinary to be sitting in the sun, in a T-shirt, watching blackbirds nest-building in the hawthorn. This time last year it was snowing. A poet friend of mine, Zoe Walkington, says poetry is a win...
10th March 2019
In it to win it: a guide to success in poetry competitions
Let’s get something out of the way right from the beginning. The odds of your winning a poetry competition are dramatically increased if you enter. Simultaneously, so are the chances of losing, but no...
4th March 2019
A northern voice: accent, rhythm, and texture
Sometimes I think I like the names of the northern Dales as much as the hills and the valleys themselves. Wharfedale, Ribblesdale, Nidderdale, Swaledale, Langstrothdale, and this one, Arkengarthdale, ...
24th February 2019
Ted Hughes, eco-criticism and the common reader
“What do I want in a critic of poetry? I am a slow and basic reader: clarity, first of all. Everything else, the enthusiasm, the insight, even little bits of esoteric knowledge, can all come later. I ...
19th February 2019
Whose life is it, anyway? Writing poetry about real people
A couple of years ago, I was writing in my own blog, the great fogginzo’s cobweb, about the way I had found myself conflicted about learning things about my granddad’s life that that didn’t fit with p...
10th February 2019
Knowing your place: locating the poetry of landscape
Poetry and ‘landscape’. This lodged in my mind last week, probably because I’ve just finished an essay/review/guest blog post which has taken me, one way or another, more than nine months to write. It...
4th February 2019
Overlooked poets, open mics ... and how a blog got its name
I started blogging around the same time as my friend and co-organiser of Puzzle Poets Live, Bob Horne, set up his poetry publishing venture Calder Valley Poetry. We both support the same poetry events...
28th January 2019
