Thanks @poetrysociety.org.uk for the new issue of Poetry Review. Featuring a fabulous new poem by @mrjohnmccullough.bsky.social

Coming soon! From the Bloodaxe New Books 2026 catalogue. With thanks to Joelle Taylor for the endorsement. ⚡️🙂⚡️

Can’t believe I wrote this six years ago. Still true. x

This week @Waterstones are offering 25% discount on preorders for @BloodaxeBooks titles out in early 2026, including mine. Offer closes 17 October. Just go to waterstones.com, put 9781780377810 into the search box, click PREORDER and add code OCTOBER25 for the discount.

My online Advanced Poetry Workshops course returns in October. Each week I talk on the effects of techniques and we read contemporary pieces. We workshop students' poetry and there are exercises to help produce fresh, surprising poems. www.creativewritingprogramme.org.uk/advanced-poe...

Been working on my next collection Crowd Voltage since 2021, aiming to find fresh ways to write about working-class and queer experiences that would draw on my energetic approach to imagery and phrase-making. Here are some of the writers I’ve gone back to most often…

Excited to say my fifth collection of poems, Crowd Voltage, will be published by @bloodaxebooks.bsky.social in March 2026. It's a high-energy book about class, crowds and community. This specially designed cover is by the brilliant queer artist, Villain.

Poem for the new month. From Wendy Xu's book, You Are Not Dead. #poem #books #writing

Kim Addonizio. This is the opening of a poem in her fantastic recent collection, Exit Opera (Norton, 2024). I’ve been a fan for a long time and for me this book and the last see her at the top of her game. So wildly imaginative and thoughtful, intimate and funny all at once.

Twenty years since my 2005 author photo. 🙂 Part of my boy band phase. Album includes the hit singles ‘Dreaming Barman’, ‘Ding! Dong! My PhD is Dead!’, ‘Puberty Won’t Leave’ and ‘Nobody, Nobody [Wants My First Book Yet]’.

@mrjohnmccullough.bsky.social I've Carried a Door on my Back for Ten Years is the perfect foundation for tonight's class on redrafting #TheProcessofPoetry #Cantwaittoshare

A copy of #HerNameisAlice is winging its way to several politicians and members of the House of Lords who have been offered, and have accepted a copy.

John McCullough (@mrjohnmccullough.bsky.social), from Opening Line (@brokensleepbooks.bsky.social)

The latest poem in our little sidewalk poetry box is @mrjohnmccullough.bsky.social’s Flamingo from 📖 Reckless Paper Birds 🦩

Just seen this poem by John McCullough in Broken Sleep’s ‘Opening Line’. It has stopped my heart - it’s like it was written just for me!

Springtime sadness from Tomas Tranströmer, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton in Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2006).

Diane di Prima. From: Revolutionary Letters (City Lights, 1971).

Robert Bly. From: Collected Poems (Norton, 2018).

Hey hey it's Frank O'Hara's birthday! 'Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern.' - 'Mayakovsky'. Me too - any second now. :) (Image: Frank with his cat, Muffins, photographed by Richard O. Moore.)

Poem about my first boyfriend that appeared in Poetry Wales in 2023.

James Crews. From: Telling My Father (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2017).

Emily Fragos. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 21, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.

Anne Carson. From: ‘The Life of Towns’ in Plainwater (Vintage, 1995).

Molly Brodak (1980-2020). Her one full-length collection is A Little Middle of the Night (University of Iowa Press, 2010).

Emily Dickinson, c. 1864.

I found a bunch of new D.A. Powell poems over at www.rejectedlit.com/issue-10/da-... They're not half bad

Both Atrium editors - @clairewalkerpoetry.bsky.social & @hollyannepoet.bsky.social - are reading this FREE event tomorrow for #internationalwomensday It's not often you get both of us reading at the same event these says ao do come and say hello. Lovely to be part of this great line up.

"The greatest challenge, for me, is to try and express difficult thoughts in plain language. I prize clarity and simplicity. I like to present complicated or mysterious ideas in the simplest way possible ... Complexity, I think, often obscures fuzzy thinking." - Elizabeth Bishop

“People find poetry difficult because they’re looking for hidden ideas in it but the real purpose of a poem is emotional resonance. If poetry wasn’t fundamentally emotion then it wouldn’t need to be written in rhythm and with imagery.” - Robert Gray in The Age, 25 August 2002

My next online gig is this Monday 10th March for Café Writers when I’m their featured poet but, most importantly, joined by the winners of their competition for which I was the judge, including Esther Morgan, Laura McKee & Lesley Sharpe. Live on Zoom, details in the link - mailchi.mp/a52fe36e796b...

Surrealist Women: An International Anthology Meret Oppenheim & Penelope Rosemont #poetry #surrealism #avantgarde

“How close can you get this language to be like music & communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? … Language is always burdened by thought. I’m just trying to get it so it can be like feeling.” - Terrance Hayes, 2013

Teaching a class this morning on one of my favourite modern collections, Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018).

Jane Hirshfield. This poem is from The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2024).

Recent poem of mine.

William Stafford. This is from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1998).

One of my recent poems. 🙂

Nicky Beer. First published in Poetry magazine, December, 2008.

Writing exercise from the wonderful Stephen Dunn in The Practice of Poetry, ed.s Robin Behn and Chase Twichell (William Morrow, 2013).

Esther Morgan. From: Grace (Bloodaxe, 2011), a fantastic collection I’ve been teaching on today.

I love the direction Christian Wiman has taken his writing in during the last decade. This is so different to the formal poems he’s associated with. First published in Poetry, January 2020.

Hey hey - I now have a Wikipedia article about me. 🙂

Knockout poem by Robert Long (1954-2006), a US poet whose work I think deserves to be better known. He's like a darker, grittier Frank O'Hara. This is from his only full-length collection, What Happens (Galileo, 1988).

Louise Glück. From: Descending Figure (Ecco Press, 1980).

Love continues. Poem by Robert Hershon (1936-2021) originally published in Poetry Northwest, Autumn 2000.

Gorgeous 1939 painting of Elizabeth Bishop's house. It's by Loren MacIver, the first woman represented in MOMA's permanent collection, and uses watercolours and ink on paper. (Everything is just rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. Looks like she let the fish go too - always wise.)

On my way to perform at Bede’s School in East Sussex today, where I’m giving out prizes for a competition in which students wrote poems in response to my own poem ‘Soulcraft’.

Announcing our Competition winners 🎉 First prize £1000 Esther Morgan - Polishing the Glasses Second Prize £300 Laura McKee - the mail never gets delivered… Third Prize £200 Lesley Sharpe - dream: vessel The Norfolk Prize - Cai Draper - More in the link: mailchi.mp/917113ca0a07...

One of my favourite poems about ageing, by Dean Young. Bender: New and Selected Poems was published by Copper Canyon in 2015.

‘Soulcraft’, chosen by The Guardian as one of its poems to boost your mood. The poem's part of my collection Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins, 2019). Visiting Bede's School on Wednesday to hand out prizes for a competition in which students wrote responses to it.