Set aside December 12, 2008: Last weekend, walking along this beach, I wondered about all the bad poems and paintings this landscape has inspired. It's the Suffolk coast between Walberswick and Dunwich (a dangerously "poetic" place because most of it fell into the sea)*. I once sat on a judging panel for a poetry prize when, exhausted by how much was out there, we began to [...] by Lavinia Greenlaw

The plain shape of things November 30, 2008: Something stops making sense, won’t stay still, can’t be grasped, and then you come across the plain shape of it - a simple version that says ‘This is what I mean.’ Once when I was broken-hearted, I went to stay in a place where it rained every day. Each morning when I opened my door and set out along the path, I found a heart-shaped [...] by Lavinia Greenlaw

Old world November 25, 2008: 'First tell me what it was you thought you heard.' by Lavinia Greenlaw

Tune thy music to thy heart November 24, 2008: In Berlin this week, I wandered into a dark room next to this building site and found myself not in a silent disco but a silent singalong. ‘Tune thy music to thy heart,’ Thomas Campion proposed. These people sure did. (more...) by Lavinia Greenlaw

Further “poetic”s November 18, 2008: Now that there is renewed hope that action can bring about change, are we going to see a return to explicitly political art? I went to see the dance company DV8’s latest production, To Be Straight With You, which is described on their website as ‘a poetic but unflinching exploration of tolerance, intolerance, religion and sexuality.’ If [...] by Lavinia Greenlaw

Read the papers November 5, 2008: And the London Times today published a poem written by Derek Walcott for Barack Obama. The comments, largely positive, include the suggestion that the poet read the papers more often. Should he? Should we? by Lavinia Greenlaw

Black ice and rain October 31, 2008: The changes in the weather here have become less gradual, more brutal. Hailstones fall out of a blue sky. There is snow in October and then there isn’t. It is four years since the sudden death of Michael Donaghy, at the age of 50. Donaghy was an American of Irish descent, who went to the University of Chicago, where he edited The Chicago [...] by Lavinia Greenlaw

Yet share the same house October 28, 2008: from Self-misunderstood by Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaariye’ I can't understand you, curious self, nor grasp how you're both life and death,
 grabbed land and peaceful settlement,
 grudging milker that makes me full,
 sun set at evening whilst casting
 noon's shortest shadow: how can you be
 two who can't marry
 yet share the same [...] by Lavinia Greenlaw

Emily Dickinson explodes October 19, 2008: So did she or didn’t she and do we care? Travis Nichols is right to question the misguided investment made in how a poet goes about things and what they were wearing at the time, although there is sometimes something to be gained from putting the books down and going there. I lived in Amherst for five months and failed (quite unconsciously) to [...] by Lavinia Greenlaw

Silent disco October 13, 2008: Have we entered a version of silent disco in which the primary experience of the poem is as received signals rather than noise? For a poem to operate as a poem must it now be concentrated on the idea of itself, must it appear to be either the square root of poem or hardly a poem at all? What's a disco? asked my American penpal in 1974. She also [...] by Lavinia Greenlaw