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Campaign to make Jeremy Prynne the new poet laureate
Charlotte Higgins is only joking, in her piece on the Guardian Culture blog: Jeremy Prynne for poet laureate! But I think it’s a great idea. He may write obscure and difficult poems, but wouldn’t it be refreshing to get the nation scratching its head on a regular basis? And after all, he is the most…
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Allen Ginsberg on William Carlos Williams
I found this link, with audio of a lecture by Allen Ginsberg on William Carlos Williams. The notes say: First half of a class by Allen Ginsberg on William Carlos Williams and prosody. Included are discussions on Williams’s poems: “Thursday,” “To Elsie,” “Horned Purple,” and “The Term.” This class also covers the importance of Williams…
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Poetry’s Popularity Soars Online: Telegraph
In light of traffic figuresto the Poetry Archive website, which is delivering 1 million page views a month and reaching 125,000 unique users, Andrew Motion suggests that the internet is providing a better medium for poetry than books: “Either books have not been doing the job or they are being outmanoeuvred by the internet.” Full…
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The Theme of Regret in Thomas Hardy’s Poetry
One of Thomas Hardy’s most powerful themes is, as Joanna Cullen Brown puts it, that ‘one awakes to understanding too late’. Many of his poems cover this territory, but take the Self Unseeing as an example: Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet…
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Thomas Hardy’s Poems 1912-13: Ghosts, Memory and the Presence of the Past
Throughout Thomas Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13, written after the sudden death of his first wife and originally published in the volume Satires of Circumastance, there’s a dominant theme of ‘haunting’, in both the supernatural and the psychological sense. Often this is a direct allusion, such as in the poem The Haunter, where the ghost of…
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Analysis: Second Glance at a Jaguar by Ted Hughes
Much of Ted Hughes’s early animal poetry is an attempt to capture the ‘Real’ in nature. Here he is not concerned with the effect of nature on man’s sensibilities but with ‘the thing itself’. One of his most successful poems in this respect is Second Glance at a Jaguar. The poem literally gets under the…
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Audio: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Marriage
Diane Middlebrook, the author of Hughes and Plath: A Marriage, discusses her book, and the influence that these two great poets had on each other and their work, in a podcast produced by Stanford University. It’s well worth listening to for an understanding of the context of their poetry, as well as providing an insight…
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Video: A Tribute to the Poet Ted Hughes
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18DdJO9Lg-s
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Analysis: The Hawk In The Rain by Ted Hughes
As we came to approach the poetry of Ted Hughes for this month’s Culture Club, I wondered what it was that had led me to neglect him. Like a lot of people, I first encountered Hughes at school, but he’s not a poet that I’ve ever felt compelled to go back to since those early…
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Analysis: Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop’s Sandpiper is concerned with the particular. Through a controlled tightening of focus, like the turn of the lens on a telescope, Bishop draws our attention ever closer to the minutiae of existence, of which the bird is solely conscious: from the water glazing over its feet, to its toes, to the spaces between…