My pleasure in Ruth Padel's accession to the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry was premature. It seems that she was the person who set the smear campaign against Derek Walcott into motion. In a statement to media last night, she had the following to say: I genuinely believe that I did nothing intentional that …
Revision and rubbish
I finished Poem, Revised the other day, and it was every bit as good as I'd hoped. There's one poet in particular that I'd like to quote: Deena Linett. Not because her revision was especially illuminating – we got the final version of the poem plus a lot of notes from early pre-drafts, along with …
Ruth Padel, Oxford Professor of Poetry
Hooray hooray for the month of May! Another first – Oxford University have finally elected a woman as Professor of Poetry! Ruth Padel, great-great-grandaughter of Charles Darwin (and cousin of my fellow Glamorganite, Emma Darwin). Her election comes somewhat soured by the late withdrawal of Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott, but you can read about that …
poem seed – The Accident
By a convoluted process of link-surfing, I recently ran into a Les Murray poem – The Mare Out on the Road – that I first came across a couple of years ago in The Biplane Houses (Black Ink, 2006). It's an interesting poem for a lot of reasons. Structure for one – sort of "pantoum meets fugue, …
Some favourite Poetry How-To books
At the request of some of my CPIT students, I thought I'd post a brief listing of some of my favourite poetry How-To books. If you have a favourite that's not on my list, please tell me about it in the comments! (There is no such thing as too many books.) One of my absolute favourites is …
A Dark Feathered Art 