When the reader announces their last poem but then you see that it runs to several pages.

Writing a poem about hubris. It's going to be FANTASTIC!!!

Preparing for an online session with Irish in Britain and Innisfree Housing Association about their End of Life Care Project, I describe using poetry for this community, always on hand --Maria McCarthy's 'Learning to be Irish' is mainly prose but here proves herself adept in a tricky technical form.

Thanks for the tip. I've been reading the Italian poet Fabio Franzin's collection 'Factory' ('Fabrica' 2009). Originally written in the Opitergino Mottense dialect and brilliantly translated by Cristina Viti in this new edition. Strongly recommended. francisboutle.co.uk/products/fab....

When the Mass rock invocation goes wrong: "Isn't he actually, y'know, the Goat of Mendes himself?" "Er, that would be an ecumenical matter."

I have this book and can recommend it highly; I can't think of a poet who has so successfully engaged with factory work since the late and much-lamented Fred Voss.

At the Riverside Studios where I sometimes went in my lunch break I saw Samuel Beckett ahead of me in the queue. I failed to shout up at him "Hoy, Sam! Waiting for gateaux?'

Separated at birth

Historical fiction can be a rough old game

I posted elsewhere about a lady in one of my Leeds Irish Health and Homes workshops who wrote 'I've had dementia / for as long as I can remember'. It came back to me reading @ravoon.bsky.social's tremendous debut 'Dirt Rich', full of technically brilliant, emotionally-devastating work like this:

When your poetry reading was so bad Dracula refuses to bite you and throws you straight out.

An old poem but having one about local dealers on scooters in the new Little Review brought it back. I had a site-specific joke to go with it but you really had to be there . . . morningstaronline.co.uk/a-8c9e-ian-d...

I've posted this story I heard in Ireland before, but recent discussions about art and the motivation of its makers brought it back to mind.

I'm thrilled with this review by Harry Speirs - really perceptive and insightful - www.indiependent.co.uk/poetry-revie...

All the passengers have to die in combat on this bus for it to reach its destination.

"Look, all I'm saying is if we call him 'Alexander the Great' I think that puts a lot of pressure on a kid. Would 'Bill' really be so terrible?" Woodcut illustration of the conception of Alexander from 'Alixandre le grant', printed in Paris by Michel Le Noir ca. 1507-1520.

Troy is an area of Leeds near Horsforth station. It never really recovered from being sacked by the Achaeans in the 13th century BCE. The Achaeans soon realised Helen was not there and set off for the Dardanelles, vowing to keep their blunder secret. But in Leeds, we remember.

Our train services are now so bad in Yorkshire that we have to factor in huge delays and begin our journeys as fish so we will have evolved into human beings by the time we get to Manchester

"And the wind cries 'Molly'!" (plays guitar with his teeth) #HappyBirthdayJimiJoyce

This reminded me of when I went to London to read for the Irish Literary Society and called in at the wrong super-posh hotel. The manager looked at me and rushed out to check what I was up to: I told him and he replied. "I can assure you, sir, there will be no poetry reading in THIS hotel tonight!"

A follow-up to 'Spankhing the Monkhey' I presume

When the regulars overhear you ask the barman where the poetry reading is in mediaeval Sweden

My friends at Poetry at Leeds University have opened the Brotherton Prize up for submissions; it's open to anyone in the world over the age of 18 who hasn't yet published a full collection of poems. Full deets &c here: poetry.leeds.ac.uk/brotherton-p...

Alan Lomax’s Music Archive Houses Over 17,400 Folk Recordings From 1946 to the 1990s

We have only come to understand this test from the Malleus Maleficarum in recent decades and I, for one, am convinced. Image via Ralph Kirshner

This - gulp - is in the paper on Sunday - I'm very grateful to the editors - www.thetimes.com/culture/book...

It is publication today for Late Heaney I am told, although I imagine it’ll be a while before I see it between ice storms and the broad Atlantic. I thought I’d share a few thoughts about it, as it’s a different kind of book for me in form and style. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Philip Glass boycotting the Kennedy Center Philip Glass boycotting the Kennedy Center Philip Glass boycotting the Kennedy Center Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass boycotting the Kennedy Center

On the fifteenth anniversary of his death, I wrote about one of my favourite poets, R.F. Langley, who I was lucky enough to know for ten years someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/we-speak-f...

YT Poem of the Week: 'Ground Gives' by Ian Duhig @ianduhig.bsky.social @picadorbooks.bsky.social yorkshiretimes.co.uk/article/Poem...

I'm very grateful to @stevewhitaker1.bsky.social for this close reading of my elegy for Seamus Heaney. He brings to it his usual great acuity and literary intelligence, for which I am grateful as I know are many other poets he has reviewed.

Shakespeare after visiting Turkey

They never tell you these are the sort of risks that come with privatisation, wrestling with bloody ancient-god-tentacles when you want a bloody cup of tea.

Tradition and the individual talent

A curiosity: " The song hoped to capture the atmosphere of the Chapeltown/Harehills area of Leeds where I had lived in the mid-70s" (Bob Pegg). It became a Melody Maker Single of the Year, Sounds Single of the Week, and The Guardian's Obscure Single of the Month. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTcu...

Tony Harrison in Kirkgate Markets. His 'Thomas Campey and the Copernican System' celebrates an old bookseller here: Keen winter is the worst time for his back, Squeezed lungs and damaged heart; just one More sharp turn of the earth, those knees will crack . . . I'm with you there, Thomas

New Kaminsky in the New Yorker

This pony's seductive, come-hither look I find . . . strangely engaging

Roy Foster on how the occult attracted a line of Irish writers, many Protestant. I feel Catholics had a more relaxed attitude to magic while Protestants were invited since James I to regard all such things as Satanic, which might have made it more thrillingly other. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcqK....

"We're priests not feckin' psychotherapists!" pic via Meanwhile in Ireland

Mark Carney's speech really is terrific: full text is here and very much worth your time.

Astute review with a clear analysis of what makes this such a good book. Highly Recommended.

Corpus Christi procession, Tralee, Kerry 1952 by Henri Cartier-Bresson via Verocska Kosch This reminds me of Cocteau's 'Beauty and the Beast' of 1946, the scene where Belle runs down a corridor past white, translucent curtains billowing in slow-motion.

Apparently the fact that she's Canadian particularly angered him. But he added that if he receives the next Nobel Prize for Literature for his tweets, and they rename that the Trump Prize for Bigly Writing, he might reconsider his invasion plans.

A selection of poems from new books I'm reading, beginning with a beauty by @ravoon.bsky.social someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/pinks-39-t...

Two English Literature students leaving a tutorial with Geoffrey Hill, Leeds University, 1973.

via Frances Owen, from 'Folk-lore of Shakespeare, by T.F. Thiselton Dyer', 1883, Steve Ely might have known this detail about the sexuality of eels but it was news to me. Not so witches and eggs, though as a child I heard it was eggshells witches sailed in.

This is really an excuse to repeat a pet factoid from the BBC: 'The Lindisfarne Gospels weighs 8.7kg or as much as an adult badger'. I have my criticisms of the BBC, I'm right behind the drive to ditch Imperial and metric in favour of adult badgers as units of weight measurement.

Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking? Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me. 1/

The worst thing about being an atheist is trying to put on your hat