Note: this post is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin. A post-January update covering the start of this year and the end of the last one. Dive, dive! My first publication of the year is a short essay called ‘Next time you dive’ (or How to play a poem), published online in The Friday Poem. It’s a follow-up […]

Here’s a rare sight indeed: a discussion of poetic form and its effects (or lack of them) on Twitter/X: It’s a source of frustration to me that you’re only likely to see such exchanges in the wake of a spat or controversy, as in this case. I don’t agree that social media, as a forum, […]

I’m using this poem in an MA class this week – offering it, perhaps unfairly, as the archetypal literary sequence in miniature. I don’t think that’s what it set out to be; the title is punning on ‘quince’ and the whole thing is obviously an extension of that joke (15 lines in total; ‘quince’ is […]

Note: this post is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin. The year’s nearly done, so here is the first of two planned posts picking out some highlights from all that I haven’t found time to blog about over the last six months. Creels and rockpools Although I’ve made a start on countless digital ‘ludokinetic’ poems, hardly […]

This post is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin. Part one of a mega February-to-May catch-up. Saucy Seaside Postcards I’ve published a large number of poems over the last decade which have never been collected into one single-author volume. Some are part of Sidekick anthologies and very happily nested there, while others are intended for future books […]

I’m reading alongside Astrid Alben, Rose Gibbs, Sophie Herxheimer and Lucy Mercer at Burley Fisher Books in Haggerston this Thursday. Tickets are £5 and can be ordered from here. I’ll be reading a few poems from Sandsnarl, but also from a new work-in-progress which happens to be set in the same universe, in a hotel […]

I have three new poems in the latest issue of Firmament, a handsome magazine made by Sublunary Editions, who are a very impressive small press based in Seattle, with editorial input from the UK. I’m especially happy to have these poems published, as all three are from a new collection I’ve been working on for, […]

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 […]