After President Biden’s farewell debate I had a problem. It was evident that Donald Trump would win. I fantasised that he would offer me the post of Poet Laureate, and I wondered if I would accept. Washington DC is hot …
Will Trump make me Poet Laureate?
After President Biden’s farewell debate, I had a problem. It was evident that Donald Trump would win. I fantasised that he would offer me the post of Poet Laureate, and I wondered if I would accept. After all, Washington D.C. …
John Betjeman had the last laugh
“Any fool can make money these days”, says Colonel Cargill in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, “and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money.” “T. S. Eliot”, ex-P.F.C. …
Why chicks still dig Byronic heroes
Two centuries after his death, Byron is still — like Madonna, Napoleon and Chewbacca — a member of the one-name-only club, even if he’s forced to share it with a hamburger chain. At the time, his death at the age …
Why chicks still dig Byronic heroes
Two centuries after his death, Byron is still — like Madonna, Napoleon and Chewbacca — a member of the one-name-only club, even if he’s forced to share it with a hamburger chain. At the time, his death at the age …
George Michael’s longing for oblivion
A rumour was born the last time my group Decius were out on the road.
If you linger long enough in Berghain’s Panorama bar, if you remain until Monday morning when the sun is back up, occasionally they’ll open the …
Was New Atheism a mistake?
Richard Dawkins is best known for his controversial advocacy of atheism, especially in The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006). But could the pugnacious evolutionary biologist have a romantic side? His new podcast, The Poetry of Reality, suggests …
Is anyone at home in Northern Ireland?
A few months ago, driven by some romantic impulse, I moved my family into a derelict farmhouse on a steep and remote Ulster hillside, recreating a rural Irish lifestyle my maternal grandparents eagerly fled at the first possible opportunity. Visiting …
Poetry has lost its violence
Jerome Rothenberg, aged 91, has made immeasurable contributions to American poetry over the past seven decades. Born in New York in 1931, he first came onto the scene in 1959 with New Young German Poets, the unintended fruit of his …
Why Occultists don’t believe in progress
Reflecting on his life amid the rising discords of a turbulent era in his poem “All Souls’ Night: An Epilogue” (1920), William Butler Yeats wrote:
I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, …
John Milton’s free speech crusade
For John Milton, death was not the end of his troubles. He spent his final years blind and disgraced, in continual fear of execution by the state. As a fervent republican who had written tracts defending regicide, the restoration of …
Philip Larkin was a filthy genius
If literary reputations can be likened to a stock market, fluctuating on the tides of taste and time, Philip Larkin crashed in 1991. Until then he had been a strong buy, the unofficial post-war laureate, more synonymous with his time …
Black kids should study Larkin
On a Friday morning in March 2020, I entered a secondary school for the first time since I had left for university. I was there for an interview. The opening was for a tutor, not a teacher: instead of handling …
You can’t cancel poetry
The last copies of England, Poems from a School are piled up on my kitchen table along with heaps of all my other Picador books going back to 1996. Dozens of them — too many to store, but I felt …