A 450-yo oak is felled without permission by a Toby Carvery (don’t eat there), who falsely claimed it was "dead". A tree alive when The Gunpowder Plot was hatched, which supports a web of 2000+ species, is in pieces. Legal protection for heritage trees needed. enfielddispatch.co.uk/toby-carvery...

#Internationalhaikupoetryday This is just to say unworn baby shoes for sale. It was delicious. from 'The Sawney Bean WCW Fake-Hemingway-Short Story Haikus'

Working on a long poem incorporating various voices, including free-ish translations of Lorca. #modwrite

A 1939 advert for Huntley & Palmer's biscuits from Reading & the "Empire's largest biscuit factory". This long established company had helped revolutionise biscuit production & marketing & were already part of the larger Associated Biscuits group. #vintage #biscuits ↘️ flic.kr/p/2qWujEg

Academics, please share widely! We have a few speaker slots still available to apply for and registration for attendees is also open: forms.gle/MEUDJjkQxYsp... @chase-dtp.bsky.social @uniofeastanglia.bsky.social @memrn.bsky.social @memsunikent.bsky.social

Good morning to @tommckinney.bsky.social and whatever birds just twittered away on Radio 3 Breakfast. Looks like we’re keeping Bach before 7 and adding birdsong. Maybe Tom can combine the two? Birds singing Bach before 7?

A marginalia drawing consisting of notations, made by former readers, found in a library book compressed on to two endpapers.

“Old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with and old books to read.” All we need in life, according to one 17th century writer.

Tickets now on sale: www.eventbrite.com/e/thorpe-mar...

Had a nightmare that I was trying to retake my final undergraduate exam.* As I wrote, I knew that I would have made things easier for myself if I hadn’t opted to write it while balancing on a tree branch writing into the pale spaces of an old photograph…

Narrowly defeated by F.T. Marinetti

Wyndham Lewis enters the All-Europe Man-Spreading Championships 1913z

"Remember the very first time you watched 'Borat'? And you were like, 'Okayyyyy, TRUE, now I get what people are talking about when they talk about art'? 'To the Lighthouse' was like that."

Today I have a cunning plan to get to my favourite library early and get THE BEST DESK. It is adjustable and has a view out of the window and has seen me through many tough writing days.

When you’re reading a scholarly work and wondering if the author was playing the game of “how many obscure and unrelated words can I insert into my argument?” “Melismatic”? Really??

First reconstruction of the original 1952 4’33” score by John Cage. David Tudor, 1989.

I am so behind the reading times that I have only just read the kaleidoscopic, kleitic After Sappho from Norwich press @galleybeggars.bsky.social longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022. My copy was not exactly stolen - more liberated from a place where I felt it was not being appreciated.*

The builders are wheeling wheelbarrows of rubble past my desk. Both the front and back doors of the house are open. They have advised me to give up trying to make notes on literary criticism for a while.

#PloughMonday 🌾 GOD SPEED THE PLOUGH 🐎 📍St Bartholomew's Church • Llanover ⛪ #Wales

I knew there was a reason I’m not going out tonight.

To White Hall, and there spoke with Sir Paul Neale about a mathematical request of my Lord’s to him, which I did deliver to him, and he promised to employ somebody to answer it, something about observation of the moon and stars, but what I did not mind.

This v interesting 1787 edition of Robert Burns’s poems has been brutally washed in solvent, probably by a lateC19 collector. This results in super clean pages but also a kind of cancelled, ghost marginalia that has been almost washed away. It’s like the book has repressed memories of a former life

We're pleased to announce a deadline extension for the 'Modernism and Data' Special Issue! The new deadline is January 20th. See below for the CFP: modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2024/09/27/m...

Today I was lucky enough to get a preview of a new story by @kitwhitfield.bsky.social and it was a smasher! Dark, beautiful fantasy with an amazing evocation of the sea. Future readers are in for a treat.

A friend of mine proudly posted that he read 50 Non-work books in 2024. The thing that amazed me was that none of them seemed to be the sort of embarrassing romantasy / chick-lit / mysteries set in the 1930s that I read. So far this year - embarrassing books: 6 worthy and non-embarrassing books: 1

‘On Going to Read Don Paterson’s Famous Zen Poem in the Digital Edition of his Book and Not Finding It’ #poetry #missingpoetry #digitalEditionsNotDoingTheirJob #thisIsMyThesisInANutshell

My family has just attempted the TLS Christmas Quiz (first cousin to Uncommon Places from @cbeditions.bsky.social). We scored 20/200 and by the end were awarding ourselves points for vaguely having thought of that author at some point during the day.

In the swine cellar?

Somewhere in my house I have concealed a small cuddly wild boar. Where? Where??

"Thank you so much for the poems, the greening grasshoppers and the concertina one. If and when [we] get a house, we will put this on the mantlepiece (if there is a mantlepiece)."—Ian Hamilton Finlay, 6 October 1964. Stephen Bann, with Colin Sackett, 1964/2024 #concretepoem

Following @jntod.bsky.social’s impossible Christmas poetry quiz, here is another question I have no answer to. Unless it’s Malc Bradbry.

Being a poet sometimes feels like just getting one poem after another rejected - which is why a kind, personal rejection email is so cheering. Thanks to the editors of The Interpreter’s House!

More and more I think I have Never read any poetry. More and more I think I have never read any poetry. More and more I think I have never read any Poetry

Come research with us! AHRC/CHASE Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD studentship at UEA & History of Advertising Trust ‘Creating a Feminist Archival Praxis to Reveal Histories of Women in the UK Advertising Industry’. Application deadline 17th Feb www.chase.ac.uk/cdas/creatin...

Had a fabulous trip to the Rare Books Room at St John’s College Cambridge this week, to see their Mallarmé collection. What a Christmas treat! Letters between Mallarmé & Australian poet Christopher Brennan, together with some of Brennan’s own collection of Mallarmé’s most beautiful publications.

Listen up Londoners. Two FREE tickets for Dr Strangelove (starring Steve Coogan) at the Noẽl Coward Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue tomorrow night (Wednesday 18th December). No strings. DM for details and the first to get back to me can have both tickets. NOT FOR RESALE.

How well do you know your modern Christmas poems? I made a (possibly too hard) quiz someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/the-some-f...

@juliansimpson.bsky.social I listened to the final part of Sebastian Harcourt and the Rose of Pamir yesterday and I am SAD. SAD. Possibly too sad to have Christmas. Not as sad as it looked like I was going to be at one point in the episode. I hereby award you all the prizes for radio drama.

Perched in a train luggage rack on my way to the British Library. It’s a scholar's life.

Jacquetta Hawkes’ description of the nature and formation of chalk, from 'A Land' (1951), her seminal book on geology and landscape. See Alt text. The eighty-one word text is repeated twenty times, and each time with increased word-spacing, from one to twenty spaces; 1995/2024.

Excellent letter in the latest London Review of Books from Robin Kinross about the woeful state of book production in the UK. The first principle of the grain direction of paper has seemingly been lost, and bookshop tables of trade hardbacks a depressing experience. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

A NEW Aldrich Kemp!!!?! This is the motivation I need to dislodge the cat, download the programme, and get out for a run.

Cover design by Vanessa Bell for Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Love the emphasis on the price on the spine, which almost outweighs the title and author’s name.

“Has anyone written anything about the contemporary reception of Un Coup de dés?” I asked innocently. Yes indeed. They have written 1060 PAGES about it. En français, bien sûr.

Fascinated by the fold works (drawings) by Sol LeWitt at the moment. Here's three of many, from early 1970s.

And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass. -Ezra Pound

More printing delights - this is a #monotype machine in its process of turning holes on a strip of paper into freshly-moulded letters and, most excitingly for me, spaces. Seen at Norwich Print Museum.

This is a flong. From Norwich Print Museum.

having a whale of a time at @smallpublishers.bsky.social. So far I have spent far too much money on books, and have only visited 3 stalls.

Off to @smallpublishers.bsky.social today for an afternoon of page stroking and book-snuffling / chatting to independent printers and publishers about their work. This is tied in to my PhD on gaps and spaces in 20th-century poetry and poets’ relationship to printing and printers.