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…
Jon: More than ever, it seems Frank Kuppner is the Douglas Adams of poetry; his short, questing stanzas in The Same Life Twice take on God, time and the Universe but are shot through with droll self-deprecation and bathos, not…
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…
Alec Finlay writes mainly short, fragile poems, using lineation to draw attention to the felicities and poky bits of language, leaving things unadorned, cutting away everything but the nub. More than anything he seems to be interested in people speaking…
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. …
The Rapture, Tim Cumming’s first book since 2004’s The Rumour, is divided into three sections: Chapel of Carbon, Improvisations and First Music. The short poems in the first section find portents in everyday occurrences. Cumming is also a film-maker and…
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…
In his essay concluding Jade Ladder, Brian Holton discusses the trials, tribulations, negotiations and compromises involved in translating Chinese poetry into English. Some of Yang Lian and Qin Xiaoyu’s first choices were shelved, he writes, “because the joke just wasn’t…
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