Maybe it’s because I grew up with a mother prone to spectacular conversational non-sequiturs. With a forensic fascination, I’d try to recover the occulted steps in her internal reasoning process, which could segue from ‘what’s for dinner tonight’ to ‘gun crime in Rio’ without passing Go. Whatever th...
Deep in the winter of 2016, Jorie Graham welcomed me into her Harvard office for the first time in ten years. ‘Do you still remember all this?’ she asked, gesturing around the room. I took in the framed poem of Seamus Heaney’s on the wall, the stapled pile of student work she was in the act of scoop...
In 2012, The New York Times called Stephen Burt ‘one of the most influential poetry critics of his generation.’ But if you don’t already know his poems, I hope this feature will convince you that you should. The same newspaper profile quotes Burt’s mother, Sandra, recalling how in third grade the fu...
I first came across Maureen N. McLane as the author of My Poets (2012), a hybrid of memoir and critical essay in the experimental vein of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985). I fell in love with its candour and wicked wit, its humane gaze and unabashed complexity. A finalist for the 2012 National...
Reading ‘Tuscan Sequence’, I thought about that passage in Simone Weil – the one where she describes two prisoners held in adjoining cells. Over their long and solitary confinement they develop a language of knocks and taps on the wall. ‘The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their m...
Leon Battista Alberti, the celebrated quattrocento art theorist, opened his treatise On Sculpture by musing how primaeval art had probably originated in mankind's habit of spotting accidental resemblances between things – the same mechanism of the imagination by which we see a cloud shaped like a wh...
In the following interview, I spoke with Vidyan Ravinthiran about his poem ‘Jump-cuts’, taken from his first collection, Grun-tu-molani, which came out from Bloodaxe in March 2014. Looking at three different versions of the poem – the earliest of which first appeared in a pamphlet of 2008 – Vidyan a...
What follows is a conversation between myself and Kate Potts about her poem ‘Stray Dog’, part of a new series she’s been working on since the publication of her first book. We met a few weeks ago, first in a King’s Cross cafe and then back at mine after we realized my freshly unwrapped dictaphone wa...
‘I’ve given up on prayer these days’, wrote Andrea Brady in a 2010 interview: ‘poetry may still fulfil a similar function, a space for reflection, penance, adoration, moved by inspiration or set form’. Born in Philadelphia in 1974, Brady studied at Columbia University and then at Cambridge. She is o...
On a darkening autumnal afternoon last year, I met with Dai George to talk about ‘Mergers and Acquisitions’, a poem of his set in an altogether more summery London. The interview took place just after his first collection, The Claims Office, came out from Seren in 2013. Our conversation touched on s...