Someone who knew of my admiration for Clive James pointed me to an interesting piece in the Independent from a few weeks back in which Johann Hari talks up James's poetry. It's nice to see him getting some recognition, especially at a time when most modern poets seem content to knock off early drafts and call them free verse.

Here is one of his I ( Read more... )

I Facebooked Vicky Coren about her article last week, and she wrote me the nicest, sweetest, friendliest message back. The inter-highway is just great sometimes!

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I think I've decided to turn down the French job. I can't afford to relocate on the salary they're offering me and expect to see anything of Hannah. There are other ( Read more... )

Nowhere, nowhen, no thing ( Read more... )

It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.
        -Ludwig Feuerbach

Mortals deem that gods are begotten as they are, and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form . . . yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works ( Read more... )

I plan to post every day this week.  Well, I missed yesterday - but every day from now on!  For today, here is a poem.  Following my experiences with Rilke, documented somewhere below, I am reading Goethe now.  He kicks ARSE.  This is one of his early ones, I fell in love with it pretty much as soon as I saw that it's called Wandrers Nachtlied 2 ( ( Read more... )

I
Shark's-teeth mountains chew
light like molasses.  They show
some private sunset.

II
Forgotten guns cling
to the cliffs.  Silence of sky
and furze.  Graffiti.

III
Quick swallows witter.
The red-ripe sun relishes
its slow westering.

IV
Spanish cannons aim
out at this evening's ocean
and back through the years.

V
The long day shucks off
its golden ( Read more... )

1. The Bishop of Lincoln is obsessed with my girlfriend's breasts. (Now how's that for a sentence you don't get to read every day.) He has told more than one erstwhile colleage at the Beeb about this interest, in unnecessary detail. ‘Last time she interviewed me,’ the right reverend apparently said, ‘I spent the whole time staring at her ( Read more... )

The next best thing to reading something wonderful is reading something truly awful - so awful it seems to crystallise everything you want to do in terms of what it isn't. I recently came across this little gem of a poem, by Jack Gilbert. I hate it.

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies ( Read more... )

A man lives down this alley - he's been there for weeks ( Read more... )