This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY I was originally planning to write on two topics: whether or not writers need to read, and disconnections at a near distance. After weighing up which to take on first, I found that the two bled in to one another. When I teach poetry […]

This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. TINY LIBRARY I continue to train between Cambridge, London, Buckinghamshire and sometimes Matlock, picking up post and moving things around as I try to figure out whereabouts in the vicinity of my new job I can settle permanently, meaning in all likelihood for the […]

This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY I keep saying and thinking ‘when I’m settled in’. To living in Cambridge, that is. I use these words to defer certain expectations – this or that will happen ‘when I’m settled’. But I’m not sure what that will look or feel like. The opposite […]

This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY My resolution this year is to write in a slightly more disciplined, less sporadic manner, and to use the internet to cultivate a space for the things I write – which is to say, I mean to publish more and react less. It’s […]

This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY I’m elbow-deep in preparation for the new teaching semester, trying to work out how much I want to depart from those approaches to poetry teaching I’m familiar with. I’ll also be teaching plays and publishing, but here I’m more content to work within […]

Marble Poetry, edited by Aisling Tempany, produces both a journal and a broadsheet, as well as a number of pamphlets, all with a distinctive visual style – very impressive for a one-person operation. The theme of broadsheet #8 is animals, and features six poems, including Mandy Beattie’s charming ‘Catticus’, about an “emerald-eyed half-kitten and his […]

I have some work in the new issue of Diagram, one of my favourite US journals – extracts from two small, in-progress books that are part of the same world as Sandsnarl and Unravelanche. Prose or poetry? Both are in that weird hinterland between – I could never get them published as stories, but they […]

This is a quickfire response to ‘(Good) Person Poems’, an op-ed by Rory Waterman published by Poetry London, and I’d like to start by saying that I’m glad this piece was published. It airs a grievance that is clearly deeply felt, and shared by others in the poetry community, and it’s better that such grievances […]

Today is National Poetry Day. I don’t often manage much to coincide with it, but this year the organisers asked me for a poem on the theme of choice for their website, so I have given them Sweet Mystress, a ludokinetic poem with a few puzzles and a secret ending. It’s in pat a homage […]

I’m going to be interviewed by Jude Cowan on Resonance FM this Saturday – we’ll be talking about Sandsnarl and poem-game hybrids. Tune in at 2.30pm, 104.4 FM.