The second of ten pieces I’m writing about the last days of John Keats. This week we find the poet caught between the nut sack of Christmas and arsehole of New Year… open.substack.com/pub/jannoble...

Fuck me did the King just quote T.S. Eliot? Nearly spat my spouts out… #tseliot #toilets #kingsspeach

Closing out the year and rolling into the next with a series of ten essays charting the last days of the poet Keats in Rome. Consider this my Christmas special (sans sleigh bells, fake snow and santa hats) open.substack.com/pub/jannoble...

Ten, short lyric-essays charting the last days of John Keats in Rome… #onthisday #keats

On this day the police in Rome began an investigation into the poet John Keats. On 18 December 1820 a local magistrate, Stanislao del Drago, first filed a report at the head office and the police opened a case, adding Keats’ name to the investigations register…

Sharing this consideration of Lennon at 85 on the anniversary of his death…

In the moments before we’re all vaporised, before we become shadows against walls, before the walls themselves becomes shadows against the scorched earth she will be carefully peeling the paper wrapper from a tin, placing the wrapper in one box, the tin in another...

Be healthy, stay sick…

Two figures, in a landscape. You and I, holding hands on a cold November day, watching the world go the other way…

Do a commercial and you’re off the artistic roll call. Forever. I was happy to take that risk…

Searching for a quick way out? Then this may not be for you… Sometimes we gotta go in deeper, we gotta push on through…

In which I climb a cathedral, get lost in a shopping mall and have an encounter with a candle peddler…

Described by critic John Gibson Lockhart as a “vulgar cockney” John Keats was born above this London pub (formerly the Swan and Hoop) on this day in 1795.

This is not a love poem. This is a death of love poem.

What was the name of that town we didn’t visit? Where the train didn’t stop? That we passed by in rain? I’d like to go back there. Please, please take me back…

Really, what is wrong with you?

It happens that I arrive in the rain… 18-11-25 →

There’s plenty of badly built poetry out there that should come with similar warnings…

Up the grubby coast well out of season… [ … ] Substack → jannoble.substack.com

More howling into the void, more incantation intended to dispel the effects of bad poetry... This week’s essay, and Nº 32 in the series, is online now. Free to read over on Substack open.substack.com/pub/jannoble...

An essay describing an encounter with my nemesis… and how I manifested the presence of another old ghost. open.substack.com/pub/jannoble...

There are days like these. On the slant, on the tilt, out of focus, But here’s a window. And there. there’s the sea…

Sending signals out to the universe. I am not in distress, I do not need assistance. I am not adrift, I am simply failing to maintain my position. I feel both the pull of the tide and a resistance to go with it, I feel the need for attatchment and yet a desire to break free. This is my flag.

18-11-25, 7:30pm

We’re sorry to learn of the death of poet Brian Patten aged 79. Brian was the youngest of the trio of best-selling Mersey Poets who shot to fame in the early 1960s. (Photo: Brian Patten by Chris Gleave).

Not exactly a eulogy for Tony Harrison… perhaps more a lament for the skinhead he encounters in ‘V’, a poem that had a profound effect on me when I first saw it. Yes, I saw and heard the poem before I ever read it…

I came to poetry not through books but in film. I stayed up to watch this as a kid when C4 broadcast it with a red triangle warning and was electrified by it. Described as a "work of singular nastiness" Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ is still very much a poem for our times. m.youtube.com/watch?v=WPut...

Very sad to hear Tony Harrison has died. What a wonderful poet he was: the School of Eloquence, V, ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’… I met him once too when I was in my twenties, and he was very kind about my terza rima.

My Wednesday poem, a reworking of ‘Amour’ by the French Symbolist poet Germain Nouveau…

In which I decide that I am coming round to your house. Are you ready? Get the kettle on. We have work to do, serious work...

Watch this space…

Come, give me your hand. Let me take you there…

Further investigation into the intersection of poetry and theatre… coming to a room near you soon…

That time I returned a library book. After 31 years…

Here’s something I wrote about NYC filmmaker Fred Barney Taylor… or rather his laugh. I’m coming to realise the fundamental importance of laughter in art practice…

About those flags… and what they might be hiding…

I wrote this mid-Atlantic…

Today I got angry. But not half as angry as those who are trying to show you how decent they are…

Wrestling with the spirits… summoning old ghosts… taking an aspirin…

In which I arrive late to the The Salt Path debate…

I took a poem to Milan. It looked like this…

#OtD 8 Jul 1822 English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley died aged just 29 when his boat sank. After the Peterloo massacre he wrote: "Rise like Lions after slumber… Shake your chains to earth like dew… Ye are many—they are few!" More about Peterloo: workingclasshistory.com/2018/11/07/e...

From the terraces at Stamford Bridge to the Temple of Shakespeare…. “Our punishment is that we are ignored, our reward that we are let alone to watch, to study, to survey…” Another essay on Substack today... open.substack.com/pub/jannoble...

Short essays at the intersection of fiction and document…

13 reflections on endings…

This. I write about this, because of this, for this… open.substack.com/pub/jannoble...