When you commute to work or make your way home, it is always such pleasure to spot and read, in your part of the train carriage, poems that crop up unexpectedly in the Underground. This year being the 150th anniversary…
Poetry: at first it’s all around us, in nursery rhymes, ‘children’s poems’, at primary school, even in some form on children’s television. We learn to speak in rhyme, which is patterned language, and it makes up our earliest games. It’s…
Sometimes people ask of a particular poem: Did it have to be written? Is this a necessary poem? They are wondering if there was sufficient pressure for the poem to become meaningful in the assumption that validity is based on…
The post will soon bring me a fat package of poems, long promised, the programme of reading and judging them marked in my diary in advance. Every poem will carry its author’s hope of success, every page a glimpse of…
One evening, the bell rang Softly around the port. Is that poetry? If it is (highly debatable!), it has little poetic quality. It reads like prose cut up into lines. Somehow, it has a prose rhythm, and there’s little attention…
I’d like to say a few words about a subject I don’t often see explored in writing on contemporary poetry, in the hope that perhaps some of the sentiments expressed will chime with others. This year I was lucky enough…
Last month was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Imagism. In September 1912 Ezra Pound was in the British Museum tearoom with Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), a girlfriend from his University of Pennsylvania days, and her English fiancé, Richard Aldington. …
In January 2012 I was notified that I had won the Judge’s Prize in the Magma competition 2011 judged by George Szirtes. The winning poem was “Hummingbird”. It was the first major competition I had won and, being a relative…
Where do you write your poems? We’re fascinated by the places where poetry happens, the idea that inspiration might not just be a moment-in-time but in a moment-in-place. The Guardian’s regular feature on is popular for just that reason: there’s…
The latter half of my youth revolved around hoops, orbiting wide rings, listening out for the net’s swish, attempting to make more fluid, more instinctive, ‘mo’ butter’ the complex body geometry of knowing instinctively how far you are from the…
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