I may write an essay a week but Dave reads dozens of them… and then picks a bunch… always a thrill to make this list…

Performed a section of this at Keats-Shelley House yesterday, showing the whole thing today... bodyoneonefive.com/livestream/

Such a great resource this... it gets my endorsement not simply because I made the list again but for the wealth and diversity of material Dave curates here each week...

At about 4pm in the afternoon of 23rd February 1821 John Keats called out to his friend Joseph Severn: “lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy; don't be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come” He died at around 11pm.

On this day in 1821 the poet John Keats died in Rome. #onthisday #otd #keats I’m launching a new work, ‘A Masque for Keats’, at Keats-Shelley House in Rome, 28 Feb, 5pm. More info here: ksh.roma.it/events/masqu...

An honour to be on this list… do come and find me on Substack and follow the series I’m writing about Keats…

Launching ‘A Masque for Keats’ at Keats-Shelley house in Rome on 28th February, a new verse-drama at the intersection of theatre and poetry…

The critic John Lockhart began his savage attack on Keats by saying, “Of all the manias of this mad age, the most incurable, as well as the most common, seems to be no other than the Metromanie.”

Plaster cast of life-mask of John Keats by Benjamin Robert Haydon.

Going live at five to talk all things Keats… open.substack.com/live-stream/...

My fourth essay on John Keats concerns letters, criticism and why shutting the fuck up is sometimes the only policy… open.substack.com/pub/jannoble...

Good artists steal, bad artists imitate... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Here’s my third piece on the ‘vulgar cockney’ Keats. The first of the year and 45th overall… open.substack.com/pub/jannoble...

Maresca left by ‘mutual consent’… but we pushed him over the edge on this podcast…

Starting out as I mean to go on… #blankpage

You might be tired of me prattling on about poetry… so here’s another subject I can speak about with even less authority…

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…