Radio 3 pushes rap and electronica in search of a younger audience
BBC radio station’s promo films will feature jazz-rapper Soweto Kinch, poet Alice Oswald and a deconstructed Beethoven quartetRap and the discordant collapse of a Beethoven quartet are to feature in a...
View ArticleKeats’s hidden talent as a weather presenter | Letters
Further to Paul Brown’s Weatherwatch (19 September) and Austen Lynch’s letter (20 September), I believe that Keats’s To Autumn can be read as a weather poem. The late summer / early autumn of 1819 had...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Angela Leighton translates Leonardo Sciascia
Taking two turns at bringing the Italian poet’s Hic et Nunc into English, Leighton steers a fascinating course between strict and free renderingsHic et Nunc (1)I am a mutilated statueat the bottom of...
View ArticleRimbaud and Verlaine’s London home should have its blue plaque now | Letters
With the announcement that the homes of Oscar Wilde, Benjamin Britten and Anne Lister are to be relisted by Historic England (Report, 23 September), one hopes that the house where the French symbolist...
View ArticleBernard Bergonzi obituary
Poet, literary critic and professor of English at Warwick University known for his work on TS Eliot, HG Wells and Gerard Manley HopkinsThe poet and critic Bernard Bergonzi, who has died aged 87, was...
View ArticleDarkness and light in PJ Harvey's gritty essay on stark reality
Between 2011 and 2014, musician PJ Harvey and documentary photographer Seamus Murphy documented their travels – in her poetry, and his photos – through Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC. Ahead of...
View ArticleForward prize, backward reading: who grumbles if white writers win awards?
A Private Eye column has taken issue with the award going to a writer of colour again – as if it’s inconceivable that talent alone could have got them thereYesterday an article appeared on the...
View ArticleLemn Sissay: ‘My foster parents were good people who did bad things’
The poet talks about how his foster parents put him into care at the age of 12 and left him there, and finding his birth motherI have a very happy childhood memory of being in Scotland on holiday when...
View ArticleMind your languages: literature in translation – quiz
Which US classic appeared in Swedish as A Man Without Scruples? Who described translation as ‘the art of failure’? Interpret these questions to mark International Translation DayTranslated book sales...
View ArticleDrinks With Dead Poets: The Autumn Term by Glyn Maxwell – review
Part comic novel, part criticism, part autobiography … and wholly brilliant evocation of a mysterious university campus, its students and visiting lecturersPoetry is a pitiless mistress. How else could...
View ArticleBBC2’s poetry night chugs along nicely
Channel goes back to its roots with poetic train journeyWell, will it keep the Bake Off audience tuned in after Jo Brand’s spin-off cake show? Or even win over a few X Factor fans from ITV? Probably...
View ArticleAt home in Heaney country
Seamus Heaney HomePlace, a new centre designed with the help of the poet’s family, is full of his words and spiritMy strong guess is that not even the proudest local would describe the somewhat...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The dog itself by Helen Farish
A benign metaphor for inspiration and recollection, this is a rare creature in poetry, and an unusual image of creationThe dog itselfMemory rounds this up, breathless,like the dog herding sheepbelow...
View ArticlePoet Caleb Femi named first young people's laureate for London
The 26-year-old says he wants to use his role to ‘normalise poetry’ for disenfranchised young people and ‘show them how their voices can be heard’Poet and English teacher Caleb Femi, who has just been...
View ArticleThe Bristol Burroughs on why he waited 93 years to publish his poems
Ray Webber, a former unionist and postman, has just published his debut collection of poetry – at the age of 93Ray Webber has a boxful of books to sign, a launch to attend and a nurse to make sure he...
View ArticleOdes to roads, sausages and other English icons penned for National Poetry Day
Organisers of the annual celebration have commissioned works giving voice to local landmarks in ‘a lyrical mapping of the English landscape’From the “worst road in Britain”, the “Essex/Suffolk artery”...
View ArticleOn National Poetry Day we should be championing the artform’s diversity |...
Despite women and people of colour dominating poetry slams, it’s still white men who get most of the paying gigs and festivalsWhen it comes to the diverse range of people championing poetry in the UK,...
View Article'Cities are built with language': how poetry feeds on urban life
The excitement and frustrations of city life have inspired poets from 18th-century Grub Street to the 50s Beats and modern-day rappers. But can poetry actually help us make cities better?I see the F...
View ArticleKate Tempest: Let Them Eat Chaos review – pop, poetry and politics collide
Performance poetry might still be a niche concern, but Kate Tempest now gets to do hers on primetime TV – and deservedly soRelated: The Bricks That Built the Houses by Kate Tempest review – daring and...
View ArticleJackie Kay announces makar's tour of all the Scottish islands
The poet has revealed plans for ‘an odyssey’ that will take in overlooked parts of Scotland and form the basis of a long poem about the countryAs the UK lurches towards xenophobia, it is a writer’s...
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