Prac Crit

Matthew Sperling

Matthew Sperling is Lecturer in Literature in English from 1900 to the Present Day at University College London. He is the author of a scholarly book, Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words, and of fictions and poems which have been published in 3:AM, Best British Short Stories 2015, The Junket, The Literateur, the New Statesman, Stand and elsewhere.

‘The Ballad of R. D. Laing’ – interview by Matthew Sperling

‘The Ballad of R. D. Laing’ by Conor Carville, which is published for the first time in Prac Crit, takes a specific image as its point of departure. The poem’s speaker, browsing in a charity shop, makes the chance find of a copy of Life Before Death, the 1978 LP issued by Charisma Records, which fea...