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 …
