The following questions have escaped the Creative Writing courses which gave them life then left them lying uselessly on the floor, and each one now urgently demands to be answered by everyone everywhere who claims any interest in poetry whatsoever, in no more than five hundred words and no fewer than fifty. Lives depend on this, along with your share of £15.26 prize money. Email answers to poetryliberal@pooroldpoetry.com.

1. Why do we ask what poetry ‘is’?
2. Is poetry supposed to help?
3. Who is poetry for?
4. What happens to the language of the past?
5. Is poetry lost?
6. Does it hurt you to write poetry? If not, why not?
7. Are you willing to be hurt by the poetry of others? If not, why not?
8. Can poetry reach outside ideology?
9. What has poetry in common with archaeology?
10. What do you know about language and memory?
11. Can you love a poem that says what…

A few days ago, a sequence of poems entitled ‘Welfare Handbook’ by Sasha Dugdale appeared in Mal, the online journal of sexuality and erotics. Its subject matter is difficult: the artist Eric Gill, a culturally significant figure who created many celebrated works and developed the Gill Sans typeface, but also a sexual predator who among other things abused his daughters (I won’t discuss his art and crimes here, they can all be found elsewhere online). Dugdale recognises the difficulty of tackling Gill but she has faced it down to produce a remarkable and, I think, important work which highlights some of the ways in which poetry can respond in measured and careful, but no less fierce – and proud – tones to subject matter that could all-too-easily be washed over with angry denunciations or indignant defences.
I would recommend reading the sequence carefully multiple times before continuing.

I recently met up with Elisabeth Sennitt Clough at The Cambridge Blue on Gwydir Street for a chat before her CB1 reading around the corner at The Blue Moon on Norfolk Street. She read alongside the unique and wonderful John Lyons, who I will make the subject of a separate post.
Liz has been a friend since we completed our online MAs at Manchester Metropolitan University together. She has over the last few years won and come highly placed in several competitions, been published in countless magazines and been named a Poetry Society Recommendation for the most recent of her two full collections At or Below Sea Level.
It was an informal sort of interview and I didn’t want to risk creating a stilted atmosphere by recording what we were saying. We agreed that we would just chat and I would pass my write-up by her before I…

The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, edited by The Sunday Times poetry critic and Senior Lecturer at UAE Jeremy Noel-Tod, has already been reviewed several times, both positively and negatively, and I’m not going to add to them here; but I would like to pick up a few points made in those reviews – particularly the negative ones – which I find interesting for various reasons relating to my own attempts to grapple with the prose poem as a form.
Kate Kellaway in The Guardian, while her adjective choices are sometimes a little breathless (“stupendous”, ”exhilarating”), makes some good points and she notes correctly that “the prose poem has always been a liberating space”, a nice phrase that sums up the general feeling of Noel-Tod’s introduction. The Telegraph and The Times reviews are behind paywalls, but they must also be positive as they awarded the anthology five…

This blogpost comes from reaction to Kim Moore’s poem ‘I Let a Man’, which was published in The New Statesman in March, and which elicited a surprisingly strong comment on Twitter from a male writer who called the poem “horrible, unpleasant”, and appeared to accuse it of objectifying men, then later of being part of a “liberal backlash against men” which “seeks to denigrate and reduce them at every turn” and which if taken to an extreme “will result in the annihilation of men”, the critic then referenced the SCUM Manifesto of radical feminist and would-be Warhol assassin Valerie Solana.

What horrors were awaiting within, I wondered as I clicked with a quivering finger on the New Statesman website. Never having read Moore’s work (I subsequently have) I didn’t really know what to expect but I had read interviews with the poet online, and I found it hard to believe…

I only made it to two sessions at Poetry in Aldeburgh last weekend, but I was extremely glad to have seen and heard what I did. The ones I saw were ‘The National Poetry Competition at 40’ and ‘A Cambridge Quartet of First Collections’, the first of which featured readings by Dom Bury, Yvonne Reddick, Philip Gross and Liz Berry; and the second Adam Crothers, Rebecca Watts, Alex Wong and Claudine Toutoungi. I was struck by how differently all the poets read their work and how I as a listener got caught up far more in the sound of their voices and the movement of their hands, the expressions on their faces, than on the actual content of their poems.

This is what I wrote up from my notes on the poets:

Dom Bury is of the Poet Voice school of reading, leaning towards the austere and liturgical, there is…