The young Canterbury Tales author was paraded by his employer in scandalously tight outfits, says Oxford academic Marion Turner

He may be revered as the father of English literature, but Geoffrey Chaucer’s first appearance in recorded history is as a teenager wearing leggings so tight one churchman blamed the fashion for bringing back the plague.

Scholars have known since at least 1966 that Elizabeth de Burgh, who employed the adolescent Chaucer, bought him a “paltok” for four shillings at Easter 1357, spending a further three shillings for black and red hose, and a pair of shoes. But Chaucer’s first female biographer, the Oxford academic Marion Turner, suggests that no previous biographer had ever considered what a paltok might be. Delving into contemporary chronicles, she found commentators at the time describing paltoks – a kind of tunic – as “extremely short garments ... which failed to conceal their arses or their private parts”.

For Elizabeth de Burgh, it's part of her prestige to have beautifully dressed young men hanging around. They're like her display objects in the living room

Andrew McMillan’s candid exploration of gay adolescence is sensational

Andrew McMillan’s poetry is see-through – it lets us understand, in an uncensored way, how it was to grow up as a gay boy. His much-praised physical made his name and this new collection is another negotiation with the body – the body that, as it were, has a mind of its own.

The collection includes disturbing, unmediated bulletins from adolescence’s frontline. The poems have an anecdotal immediacy and are presented in an unpunctuated lower case. In “what 1.6% of young men know”, he writes about teenage boys who starve to acquire the perfect body and how this leads not to glory on the playing fields but to a more humiliating destination: “…they will end up in the carpark of the doctors”. One notes, in several poems, the decision to shy away from the first person, to keep things general. And the body’s elusiveness is summed up in a wonderful phrase (from “first time ‘posh’”): “the body that is only true in private”. It is McMillan’s enterprise to make the body true in public as well – there is no such thing as a taboo. This is a comprehensive coming out – in poetry.

...and the ones

who turned sixteen find the foreskin too tight

for their urges trying to breathe

in a shirt done up to the collar

when the collar is too small and how these boys must

force themselves to tell their parents then show

a doctor then a nurse how they must feel

like someone who is trying to prove the fault

with a product they are wanting to return

...this scar

that catches the cold weather holds

it deep inside reminder

of my vanity tideline

of Canute tattoo of the time

I couldn’t live with what I was becoming

…and I ran

outside and cried and for the first time ever

refused to go to class
and my phone sat vibrating

in my pocket like a heartbeat

refusing to be silent maybe

halfwanting to be discovered

As the poet behind the San Francisco literary institution turns 100, the city is preparing for ‘Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day’

The last couple of years have taken their toll on Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The American publisher, poet, painter and political activist is frail and nearly blind. He spends a lot of time in bed, relying on his assistant for emails and phone calls.

His body might be failing him. But his mind is still on fire. He’s hoping for a revolution. Trouble is, he says, “the United States isn’t ready for a revolution”.

Related: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'experimental' new book due in time for 100th birthday

Related: Interview with a Bookstore: San Francisco's historic City Lights

Have you heard of Emilia Bassano? I hadn’t until this week, when her name was lent to a report on media coverage of male versus female writers. Bassano was England’s first published female poet, in 1611, and a play has been written about her struggle for recognition. It’s good timing – across the arts, people have been dredging the depths to conjure up history’s forgotten women and, in the case of books, reassess the canon.

The Emilia report into the gender gap for authors, commissioned by the play’s producers and written by Danuta Kean, found a “marked bias” towards male writers in the review pages of newspapers. Furthermore, references to women’s ages were ubiquitous, and female writers told Kean how coverage tended to focus on the domestic rather than the academic. The report also highlights cover design as a factor in gender bias – gender stereotypes on covers “undermine the credibility of fiction by women and their ability to be taken seriously”.

Related: Male and female writers’ media coverage reveals ‘marked bias’

Related: How Was It for You? by Virginia Nicholson review – women, sex and power in the 1960s

Henry Graham, who has died aged 88, was a successful artist in the 1950s until he renounced painting for poetry a decade later. He subsequently had 10 books of his poems published and his work appeared in magazines throughout the world.

Henry was born in Liverpool; his mother was a cleaner and his father ran a billiard hall in the city. Following national service in 1950, working in the British army’s mapping department in Trieste, he attended Liverpool Art School, establishing himself as a key member of the city’s art scene with paintings exhibited in many local galleries. He was also a jazz pianist in his own band, the Henry Graham Quartet, before leaving Liverpool to live and paint in London, where he met and married Liz.

Simon Jenkins (Being allowed to end one’s life is the ultimate human right, 22 March) confuses a right with a liberty. I am at liberty to take my own life, in the sense that it is not illegal, but it makes no sense to talk of a right to die. If someone makes you a gift and you don’t like it or grow tired of it, you are free to put it into the dustbin, but it is nonsense to talk about having the right to give it back.
Rt Rev Richard Harries
House of Lords

• Emilia Bassano (Report, 19 March) is not quite “England’s first published female poet”: Isabella Whitney and Anne Locke are earlier examples, although unlike them she identified herself fully on the title page (by her married name, Aemilia Lanyer). She may be “scarcely known outside academic circles”, but she is a growing presence on university curriculums. At Sheffield, we marked her 450th anniversary earlier this year with an event including papers from undergraduate students Tara Sherwood and Matthew Timms, and from visiting speaker Prof Helen Wilcox (Bangor University).
Dr Tom Rutter
School of English, University of Sheffield

This appealingly worldly address to God makes clear that even if he is wished for, he is not believed in

Supplication

Lord, from this city I was born in
I cry unto you whom I do not believe in:
(Spinoza and Freud among others saw to that)
Show me in this place in which I started
Where I have gone wrong.

Prolific American poet whose work engaged with both the bleak and the beautiful

WS Merwin, who has died aged 91, was one of the most honoured and prolific poets in the US. He published some 25 books of poetry, two of which won the Pulitzer prize, and 18 volumes of translated poetry, as well as stories, plays and essays.

His poetry evolved from a strict formalism to an outwardly simpler free verse that famously eschewed punctuation, but whose ambiguities never argued against the precise sense of meaning of its words, creating a verse both simple and difficult, whose elegant rhythms were almost elegiac.

British Jamaican’s debut collection challenges Hughes’s description of deaf children

After fiercely challenging Ted Hughes’s description of deaf children as “alert and simple” in a poem in his first collection, the deaf spoken-word poet Raymond Antrobus has won the Ted Hughes award for poetry.

The 33-year-old British Jamaican, who has performed at Glastonbury and also works as a teacher, has received the £5,000 prize for his debut The Perseverance. Described as “compelling” in the Guardian, the collection touches on family life, particularly the death of Antrobus’s father, his diagnosis with deafness as a small child, and his biracial heritage. It has also been longlisted for this year’s Folio prize.

Related: Generation next: the rise – and rise – of the new poets

Biography

In an extract from her new book, poet and teacher Kate Clanchy recounts how a school poetry club enabled often traumatised pupils to find their inner voice

• Read an interview with Kate Clanchy

Thirty years ago, just after I graduated, I started training to be a teacher. I wanted to change the world and a state school seemed the best place to start. Certainly, it wasn’t a compromise or a stopgap career: I had no thought of being a writer then.

Soon, I was much too busy to write, even if I had thought of it. Teacher training is hard, a crash course not so much in the study of education, but in the experience of school: in the taking of the register and the movement of chairs from room to room; in the flooding sounds of corridor and stairs; in the educational seasons, from the tempering heat of exam week to the crazy cosiness of Christmas; and, above all, in the terrifying confidence trick that is classroom discipline. It’s a bodily experience, like learning to be a beekeeper or an acrobat: a series of stinging humiliations and painful accidents and occasional sublime flights that leave you either crippled or changed. If you are changed, you are changed for life: your immune system will no longer raise hives when adolescents mock you; you may stand at the door of a noisy classroom with all the calm of a high-wire walker, poised to quell the noise with a twirl of your pole.

Related: The Very Quiet Foreign Girls poetry group | Kate Clanchy

Kate Clanchy is an award-winning poet, novelist, non-fiction writer and teacher. She is writer-in-residence at Oxford Spires Academy, a small comprehensive where the children speak 30 languages. Her recent anthology, England: Poems from a School, showcased the work of her students to great acclaim. Her new book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador) looks back over her 30-year career in teaching.

Your school has turned itself around during the decade you have worked there, from the most under-subscribed school in your area to one of the most sought-after. How big a role did poetry play in that change?
There are lots of reasons for the school’s success but poetry is definitely one of them. It’s the cups principle: the more cups you win, the better you feel. And we keep winning poetry prizes at national level, which is great for everyone. We have built up a culture of success and confidence around poetry. Normally, the head boy of a school would be captain of the rugby team but our head boy, Mukahang Limbu, is captain of the poetry team.

These two songs from Love Labour’s Lost read exquisitely as poems, a light warning to not expect more from nature than it can give

Spring

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
“Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

My friend Chaman Lal Chaman, who has died aged 85, was a television and radio presenter whose face and voice were well known to the Punjabi-speaking community in the UK. He was also a poet and published two collections of poetry in Punjabi.

Born in the village of Partapura, near Jalandhar, in eastern Punjab, before the partition of India, to Harbans Lal Pun, a clerk, and his wife, Hanso Devi (nee Sirpal), he attended Anglo Sanskrit high school in Rurka.

The winner of the Ted Hughes award on the poetry collections that influenced him and how George Orwell made him realise he needed to travel

The book I am currently reading
I always have to read an autobiography, alongside a poetry collection, alongside a novel. At the moment, I’m reading Miles Davis’s autobiography. I love it but it’s hugely problematic. If we’re going to talk about taking down people like R Kelly and Michael Jackson, we’ve got to talk about Davis.And I’ve just started reading Lanny by Max Porter and Rebecca Tamas’s poetry collection, Witch.

The book that changed my life
Burmese Days by George Orwell. I was 17 when I read that book and it made me realise that whatever I did with my life, I had to travel. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig was the longest book I’d ever read at that point and it gave me confidence as a reader because it was proof that I could sustain that kind of concentration. In terms of poetry, I wasn’t sure I wanted to write a book until I read There Is an Anger That Moves by Kei Miller.

I read White Teeth and On Beauty by Zadie Smith when I’m away from England – they always bring me back to London

Crazy place to live,
in a field, on a cliff
that every year or twenty
unstitches along one edge ...
Yet see it how I see it:

evening after evening,
considering the waves,
the field a good way up
your window. Then one morning
wake to find the grass

Witch by Rebecca Tamás; Near Future by Suzannah Evans; O Positive by Joe Dunthorne; Discipline by Jane Yeh

Rebecca Tamás’s debut collection, Witch (Penned in the Margins, £9.99), has caused a stir, and it’s not hard to see why. Whereas some poets strive for a quiet lyricism, crafting what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion”, others face the world head-on, penning zippy verse that reflects the current moment. Opening with a “penis hex”,Witch is intent on reclaiming the sorcerer as a symbol of female empowerment, conjuring spells where “the smell of freedom is the smell of vomit”. Freewheeling and spirited, these poems tend to take the form of lengthy streams of consciousness, blurring statements, non sequiturs and disembodied confessions to unpick themes as various as logic and friendship. The formula risks exhaustion over 100 pages, but Tamás is frequently vivid and compelling: “at the trial they made a lot of claims about the witch / that she brought lightning / that she stole babies and ate them raw on battlefields / that she said war and it was war”.

Another collection with its gaze fixed on the zeitgeist is Suzannah Evans’s Near Future (Nine Arches, £9.99). Reflecting our age of anxiety and doom-mongering, it worries at “the five types of apocalypse: nuclear, contagious, climatic, superintelligent, religious”. But if titles such as “A Contingency Plan”, “Coastal Erosion” and “Letter into Eternity” make Near Future sound like a preachy eco-manual, it is rarely didactic. Evans’s style combines serious concerns with strange comedy, from a school play directed by “Mr Maxwell, millennial prophet and Head of Theatre Studies”, to “the call centre at the end of the world” where “lateness for shifts is not tolerated / although at this stage few of us / have homes to go to”. Influenced by science fiction as much as apocalyptic eco-poetics, these imaginative poems unpick distinctions between the human and the natural world, as fatbergs “dream of freedom” and robotic bees are revived “with a teaspoon of WD40”.

This rhymed recipe is comfort food – an amusing and sensuous guide to making a dressing that ‘would tempt the dying anchorite’

Recipe for a Salad

To make this condiment your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole;
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault
Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar, procured from town;
And lastly, o’er the flavored compound toss
A magic soupçon of anchovy sauce.
’T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl;
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me, -- I have dined today!”

Debate over whether poem was written by multiple authors or one has raged for years

Beowulf, the epic poem of derring-do and monsters, was composed by a single author, research suggests, pouring cold water on the idea it was stitched together from two poems.

One of the most famous works in Old English, Beowulf tells of the eponymous hero who defeats the monster Grendel and his mother, thereby rescuing the Danes from a reign of terror, before returning to his homeland and later dying in a battle with a dragon.

There are no words to describe puffed up politicians reciting poetry, until someone invents a verb that is between cringing and retching

Mark Francois reading all 70 lines of Tennyson’s Ulysses to a bunch of pensioners at a pro-Brexit conference while, across a corridor in the House of Commons, a panel of Tory MPs were wondering how to appeal to the under-35s, should have struck fear into our hearts. “I say to the European council, Brexit has gone on long enough. You will be facing perfidious Albion on speed. It would be better for us to face our separate futures with mutual respect,” the vice chair of the hardline Tory European Research Group said, before launching into Tennyson’s poem to demonstrate how completely unwavering he was. Yet who was frightened? I wasn’t. It was too funny; I was, in the Peter Cook coinage that has proven so useful for our times, sinking giggling into the sea.

I want to say politicians quoting poetry at any length over about four words never works, since it always amounts to puffed up, undisguised hubris. Thatcher entering Downing Street for the first time with the words of St Francis of Assisi (“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony”) is hard to describe, at least until someone invents a verb that is between cringing and retching. I guess you could parse the difference between that and Jeremy Corbyn doing Percy Bysshe Shelley at Glastonbury– at least he wasn’t accruing the noblest of human qualities to himself, or even talking about himself in the third person; rather, he was trying to empower his audience (“Ye are many, they are few”). But the sheer incongruousness of the language (“Rise, like lions after slumber / in unvanquishable number”) is a plain attempt to dignify your own political proposition with a glory conceived for something quite different. Most poetry is something other people should say about you, not something you should say about yourself.

As her acclaimed take on Four Quartets heads to London, choreographer Pam Tanowitz explains why she’s still trying to crack the poem

Her choreography has been hailed by the New York Times as some of the greatest dance being made in the world. And yet her creations have never been performed outside the US until now. Next month, Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets will receive its UK premiere at London’s Barbican.

It is the first time the TS Eliot estate has granted permission for the poet’s last great work to be used in a dance production. Tanowitz had been carrying lines from it in her head for a decade before Gideon Lester, artistic director at Bard College, New York, commissioned her to choreograph a piece to mark the 75th anniversary of the first publication of the Four Quartets last summer.

Four Quartets is at the Barbican, London, 22-25 May.