Gerald Hughes obituary

August 24, 2016, 3:13 am

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Brother of the poet Ted Hughes and an important influence on his work

“What’s the first thing you think of?” Ted Hughes asked himself in the title of one of his poems. To which the answer was: “My brother bent at his airplane, in his attic.” And the second? “The Heights Road. My brother launching a glider / Below where an airplane crashed above the golf-links.” The brother was Gerald Hughes, who has died aged 95.

Ted Hughes is nearly always regarded as a great poet of nature, the only poet laureate since Wordsworth to animate the spirits of bird and beast, river and moor. He is also remembered as a poet of love and grief, especially in Birthday Letters (1998), his bestselling elegies for his first wife, the poet and writer Sylvia Plath. It is less often recognised that he was a great poet of family. His most under-rated volume is the magnificent Remains of Elmet, first published in 1979, and expanded with additional family poems in 1994. It was here that he wrote most memorably of his childhood in the Calder Valley, of his father forever scarred by the first world war, his Wordsworth-loving mother’s love and her psychic powers, and his older brother, Gerald, who took him from the village of Mytholmroyd to the Yorkshire moors above, where they explored, camped, fished and hunted.

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Rupi Kaur: 'There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse and healing’

August 26, 2016, 9:26 am

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The young Punjabi-Sikh poet made a career by forcing herself into places where she’s least expected – like Instagram and the New York Times bestseller list

Rupi Kaur is planning what she calls a dinner of Queens. Come this fall, she says, “we’re going to go to the bougiest place where there’s no people of colour. We’re just going to sit down looking so fly and have a really expensive dinner”.

Her eyes light up as she continues: “We’re going to be sitting down and negotiating with multimillionaires because we as brown women can and should. We’re allowed to be in these spaces.”

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Night.—Northeaster

August 27, 2016, 3:00 am

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by Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941)

Night.—Northeaster.—Roar of soldiers.—Roar of waves.
Wine cellars raided.—Down every street,
every gutter—a flood, a precious flood,
and in it, dancing, a moon the colour of blood.

Tall poplars stand dazed.
Birds sing all night—crazed.
A tsar’s statue—razed,
black night in its place.

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Poem of the Week: Theocritus: A Villanelle by Oscar Wilde

August 29, 2016, 2:57 am

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Wilde riffs on the Greek poet Theocritus’s depictions of lovers, using sounds to embody meaning with lasting appeal to the ear

O singer of Persephone!
In the dim meadows desolate
Dost thou remember Sicily?

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Liverpool gives Oscar Wilde a good showing in exhibition on his friend | Letters

August 30, 2016, 11:49 am

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Readers interested in Oscar Wilde need not wait until late September or travel to Paris to view rare and unique items associated with him (Paris exhibition to celebrate life and work of Oscar Wilde, theguardian.com, 24 August). Until 31 October, they can also visit the Hornby Library at Liverpool’s Central Library and see (for no charge) an exhibition titled “Richard Le Gallienne: Liverpool’s Wild(e) Poet”, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of an English writer who was one of Wilde’s friends and disciples. Among the objects on display are an original photograph of Wilde by Napoleon Sarony; the manuscript of an unpublished book review by Wilde that he sent to Le Gallienne; a copy of Poems inscribed to Le Gallienne, in which Wilde hails him as “poet and lover”; and a letter by Le Gallienne that describes the first night of Lady Windermere’s Fan and Wilde’s famous curtain speech, congratulating the audience.
Margaret Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner
Curators of the exhibition Richard Le Gallienne: Liverpool’s Wild(e) Poet

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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Take a poetic ferry trip across the Mersey | Letters

August 31, 2016, 10:41 am

≫ Next: Books to give you hope: Staying Alive – Real Poems for Unreal Times

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I was delighted to visit the exhibition mentioned in your letter (31 August) because Richard Le Galienne is one of the Merseyside poets I have included in an exhibition of first world war poets and their poetry at the Wilfred Owen Story museum in Argyle Street, Birkenhead. Argyle Street is near Hamilton Square and just across the river from where you will find the exhibition dedicated to the inspiration that Oscar Wilde was in the life of Richard Le Gallienne. For anyone visiting the Le Galienne exhibition at Liverpool central library, it is well worth the trip across the Mersey – yes, the famous ferry still runs. The WOS is run by volunteers and is open from Tuesday to Friday, 11am till 2pm.
Lucy London
Forgotten Poets of World War One

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Books to give you hope: Staying Alive – Real Poems for Unreal Times

September 1, 2016, 1:00 am

≫ Next: How the Great Fire of London spawned a great literature of loss – and renewal

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In a rotten year, when public language has been poisoned by politics and prejudice, the personal integrity of poetry can keep us going

• Why we’re writing about books to give you hope this summer

“Hope springs eternal”, declared Alexander Pope in 1733. More than ever this year have I needed hope – and I found it, nestled in the pages of poetry.

Earlier this summer, a word was hurled at me on the street by a stranger: “Leave.” Only one syllable and a second long, but it stayed with me. It was the day after the EU referendum results and in the two months since, racist incidents have been rising across the UK. Language itself seems to have been hijacked by toxic political discourse: small words such as “leave”, “immigrant”, “democracy”, “decent”, “human”, and “real” have taken on sinister meanings.

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How the Great Fire of London spawned a great literature of loss – and renewal

September 1, 2016, 11:00 pm

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Pepys and Evelyn were the most famous chroniclers of the fire, but it also inspired a few amateurs and hacks...

One of the more surprising consequences of the fire that destroyed London 350 years ago this week was the way it spawned an entire literature of loss. While the most famous accounts of the Great Fire, by diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, didn’t see the light of day until the 19th century, broadside ballads with titles such as “The Londoners’ Lamentation” and “London Mourning in Ashes” began to appear on the blackened streets within weeks.

Some were eloquent in their simplicity: “Old London that, / Hath stood in State, / above six hundred years, / In six days space / Woe and alas! / is burn’d and drown’d in tears.” But there were also heroic couplets and Pindaric odes and Latin verses. There were outrageously mannered compositions – “And still the surly flame doth fiercer hiss / By an Antiperistasis” – and conceits of metaphysical weirdness. The makeshift camps outside the City walls were so full of sleeping refugees that the area was “the Counterfeit of the Great Bed of Ware”.

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Poster poems: madness

September 2, 2016, 8:00 am

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From the insanity found in modern politics to the genuine tragedies of mental illness, this month we want your prose to help us find sense in the world

We live in a mad, mad world. If you don’t believe me, just watch the news tonight to see the full gamut of insanity on display. From low tragedy to high farce, politics, economics and celebrity culture all seem to be locked in a downward spiral of lunatic proportions. It’s enough to drive a poet to despair.

Mind you, this is no new thing. In the 18th century, a poet like Christopher Smart could be driven to the asylum by virtue of religious experiences that were at odds with the dictates of the rational fashion of the time. His contemporaries considered that, by virtue of their resistance to reason, the insane were a danger to society and should be held in isolation – so it was with Smart. During the six years he spent in mental health asylums, he wrote most of his very best poetry, including the wonderful Jubilate Agno, which sees the poet turn inwards for his inspiration, ignoring the bedlam of his surroundings and making poetry of Orphic power.

I have lived it, and I know too much.
My café-nerves are breaking me
With black, exhausting information.

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Poetic Artifice: A Theory of 20th-Century Poetry by Veronica Forrest-Thomson – review

September 2, 2016, 9:01 am

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This classic study, reprinted after more than 30 years, prefers bad new things to good old ones

The death of Veronica Forrest-Thomson in 1975, aged just 27, is among the most galling and tragic losses to modern British poetry. Born in Malaya and raised in Glasgow, she published a first poetry collection at 20 and gravitated to Cambridge, where she was taught by JH Prynne. Heavily influenced by the close reading tradition of IA Richards and William Empson, her criticism also drew on French structuralist and poststructuralist theory, then much in the air.

Published posthumously in 1978 and now reprinted for the first time, her classic study Poetic Artifice marked a provocative intervention. There is a widespread and mistaken assumption, Forrest-Thomson argues, that poetry is important for what it tells us about the external world. Not so: poetry is important for its vindication of “all the rhythmic, phonetic, verbal and logical devices” that make it what it is, and the production of “alternative imaginary orders”. Anything else is flim-flam. It is not the job of poetry to deliver states of “inarticulate rapture”, but to be the articulation of that rapture.

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The Saturday poem: El Desdichado

September 3, 2016, 3:00 am

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by Katharine Towers

On failing to translate Nerval

Not that I had wished to meet the Widower
nor any man who calls himself the Unconsoled.
But there he was, stepping from the wreckage of his tower,
harp pressed against his dusty heart.

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Voices above the chaos: female war poets from the Middle East

September 4, 2016, 1:30 am

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The carnage in Turkey and Syria has led to a blossoming of poetry – with women at the forefront. Here, two of them, one Syrian and one Kurdish, tell their stories

The Syrian city of Aleppo crumbles into rubble, assailed by Russian bombs, government artillery and chemical weapons. In the heat of battle, Turkish troops and Kurdish fighters turn on one another, fighting their age-old war, though both are supposed to be fighting a common enemy, Islamic State (Isis), advancing on the battered, tortured civilians of Aleppo and other Syrian and Kurdish communities in a murderous pincer movement.

So the Middle East continues to implode – but amid the chaos emerges a further force, perhaps incredibly, a poetic and literary one. It comes in defiant journalism, like the story televised last week of a gardener in Aleppo who was killed by bombs while tending his roses and his son, who helped him, orphaned.

I’m Kurdish, and you learn early that others do not regard or accept the land in which you are born as your own

Poetry should be an anti-weapon, a means of abating the weapons

Related: A week in Aleppo - in pictures

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Poem of the Week: In a dream she meets him again by Maura Dooley

September 5, 2016, 2:00 am

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The luminosity of spring is captured in this short poem, one that rings with an ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere

In a dream she meets him again

The trees shake their leaves
in this loveliest of springs
lit from within, like the face
of the boy whose fresh glance
finds her as he tilts a glass
at a book or film, at life itself,
where they sit by the river
in the red and gold of dusk
while bubbles rise to the rim,
o, o, she almost had his name.
Remember me? Maybe she does.

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Hera Lindsay Bird: I prefer poetry that allows room for ugliness and error

September 5, 2016, 4:51 pm

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The New Zealander has become a cult favourite for her explicit, cutting and often funny writing. But, she says, you can’t judge poems by page views

It’s a midwinter Monday night and Hera Lindsay Bird – New Zealand’s most exciting young poet – is tucked up in bed in pyjamas and a robe her boyfriend calls “too Laura Ashley for human consumption”.

Her first book of poetry – a provocative, raunchy bestseller – was published in July by Victoria University Press and a reprint has already been ordered.

I never want to say that I don’t work extremely hard at what I do

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BBC2 to compete for Saturday night audience with season of culture

September 6, 2016, 8:52 am

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From autumn, channel will focus on arts including poetry and dance, with intention of making BBC2 a ‘cultural destination’

BBC2 is entering the Saturday night ratings battle, taking on The X Factor, Strictly and Casualty with poetry, dance and Alan Bennett.

The channel said from autumn it would replace the jumble of repeats normally shown at that time with programmes dedicated to arts and culture.

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Brexit poems and dirty limericks: poetry left in boxes across Exmoor to be compiled for book

September 7, 2016, 8:14 am

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More than 6,000 poems, including ones about Brexit and marriage proposals, left in boxes over the last three years, will be considered for publication

Following in the footsteps of Wordsworth and Coleridge and encompassing everything from dirty limericks to love sonnets, thousands of visitors to Exmoor have added their poetic contributions to tin boxes, left out for the last three years to entice passersby.

Conceived by the poet Chris Jelley and supported by the Lynmouth Pavilion Project, the venture has been running for the last three summers. It has amassed more than 6,000 poems written by people lured by the boxes’ message: “Draw, read or write inside,/ And leave for the next to scribe and confide.”

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Sharon Olds wins $100,000 Wallace Stevens poetry award

September 9, 2016, 7:04 am

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The American poet, who has also won the TS Eliot prize and the Pulitzer, is credited for her ‘outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry’

American poet Sharon Olds has won the $100,000 (£75,000) Wallace Stevens award for her “proven mastery in the art of poetry”. Judges praised her work for its “candour and clarity” and for having given younger female poets “permission to speak”.

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Lemn Sissay: ‘I begin work trying to describe dawn in 140 characters’

September 10, 2016, 2:00 am

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The author on poetic tweeting and finding poetry in the art of Tracey Emin and in the lyrics of Amy Winehouse and Adele

I wake at 5.25am. My alarm starts at 5.30am. It plays “Lovely Day” by Bill Withers. I check Facebook. I check Twitter. Then I have a twinge of self-hatred for checking Facebook and Twitter. But I am reaching for words, I tell myself.

These are unprecedented times for the author and reader. There are more written words flowing between us than at any other time, and I am part of a privileged generation who knew what it was like before the internet. I ponder this, and check Facebook again.

A pause between end & applause
To the Valkyries’ delight
A graceful bow from darkness
A standing ovation of light

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Say Something Back by Denise Riley review – heartfelt and deeply necessary

September 11, 2016, 2:00 am

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Denise Riley’s latest collection, much of which is about her late son, has qualities that place it apart from other poetry

It sometimes seems that contemporary poetry divides into two sorts – those poems that did not need to be written and those written out of necessity. Denise Riley belongs to the second category – her writing is perfectly weighted, justifies its existence. It is impossible not to want to “say something back” to each of her poems in recognition of their outstanding quality. Her voice is strong and beautiful – an imperative in itself. But her subject is not strength – it is more that she is robust about frailty. She describes in A Part Song, the most important of her poems, the death of her adult son, Jacob – to whom, along with his sisters, the volume is dedicated.

Maybe; maybe not starts the collection on a wing and prayer – in which Riley refashions the biblical with a new take on Corinthians – I love her line about putting away “plain things for lustrous”. Although written with certainty, it is a poem about doubt, and leads naturally to A Part Song, which follows it. Here she begins by doubting song itself: “You principle of song, what are you for now.” And in song, it is the plain, not the lustrous, she craves. She dismisses the conventional lyrical solace of elegy. “I can’t get sold on reincarnating you/ As those bloody ‘gentle showers of rain’/ Or in ‘fields of ripening grain’ – ooh/ Anodyne.” Instead she wishes her son’s “lighthearted presence, be bodied forth/ Straightforwardly”.

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Gordon Hodgeon obituary

September 11, 2016, 8:08 am

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My friend Gordon Hodgeon, who has died aged 75, was a poet, teacher, teacher-trainer and arts activist and a hugely influential figure in the worlds of education, publishing and poetry in the north-east for 40 years. Towards the end of his life, profoundly disabled, he produced some outstanding poetry while able to communicate with the world only by blinking.

He was born in Leigh in Lancashire, son of Fred Ward, a wages clerk, and his wife, Nancy. Gordon studied English at Durham University and taught English in a secondary school in Leeds before working as a schools adviser, first in Teesside, later for Cleveland county council.

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