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Brutal inspiration: why poets are writing about Coventry's ring road

Encircling an eccentric city centre where medieval streets meet the modern world, this hulking piece of 1970s infrastructure is the subject of 27 poetry films celebrating its bizarre concrete beauty...

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Norman Thomas di Giovanni obituary

My friend Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who has died aged 83, was an American-born writer and translator perhaps best known for his translations of the poems and stories of the Argentinian writer Jorge...

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Translation Tuesday: Two poems by Moon Taejun

The South Korean poet mourns a departed mother in these elegiac poems, capturing the stillness and beauty in griefBy Moon Taejun and Hannah Pang for Translation TuesdaysbyAsymptote, part of the...

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Nikki Iles/Roger Garfitt: In All My Holy Mountain review – powerful poetry...

(Restringing the Lyre)When the Ellingtonian composer/pianist Michael Garrick was driving a vibrant poetry-and-jazz movement in Britain in the 1960s, it wasn’t unusual to hear writers of the class of...

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Glenda Jackson on playing poet Stevie Smith – archive, 1977

17 March 1977: Jackson spoke to the Guardian ahead of the opening of Hugh Whitemore’s play about the late-blossoming poet from Palmers GreenGlenda Jackson met Stevie Smith on a poetry-reading platform...

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Why poetry is the perfect weapon to fight Donald Trump

Poems are an expression of the truth: they are the ideal antidote to a demagogue’s hoarse imperativesWhat does an anthology of poems do? It lets you – it makes you – experience in words the feelings of...

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Nobel laureate, poet and playwright Derek Walcott dead, aged 87

Walcott, who died in Saint Lucia, was famous for his monumental body of work that wove in Caribbean history, particularly his epic OmerosThe poet and playwright Derek Walcott, who moulded the language...

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St Patrick's Day: Trump's 'Irish proverb' provokes derision on the web

Tweets claim the US president’s quote to impress the Irish PM on the eve of St Patrick’s Day is a poem by a Nigerian poet – but is it? Did Donald Trump quote a Nigerian poet, thinking he was reciting...

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Derek Walcott obituary

Nobel prize-winning poet who explored the cultural complexities of Caribbean lifeIn a career spanning poetry, theatre, journalism, painting and teaching, Derek Walcott harnessed “the complexity of his...

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Don’t be a Grinch – my girls love Dr Seuss | Letters

Emma Brockes (I do not like that Dr Seuss, 17 March) seems to have lost touch with her inner child. My own daughters had a Dr Seuss-free upbringing, but I recently bought a compendium for my...

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The Saturday poem: Bluegrass

by Richard OsmondIM Earl ScruggsHe played the banjo like a whiskey distillerslitting open a sack of grain:swiftly, with a workman’s knack, spilling goldin brilliant unquantifiable cascades.Continue...

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BBC must now do for arts what it has done for science, says R4 culture boss

James Runcie plans to rebalance programmes in drive to put more ‘creative voices’ on airWith mathematicians, physicists and doctors dominating much of the airtime on BBC Radio 4, science coverage has...

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The Guardian view on music and poetry: growing up together | Editorial

Cultural forms built with words were once all indistinguishable, but in popular culture they are again coalescing. Figures such as Chuck Berry and Derek Walcott were part of bringing them togetherThe...

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Poem of the week: To Himself by Jeffrey Wainwright

In a meditation on the sea, this scrupulous poet strives to imagine the limits of images and their relationship to languageDreams and systems; humble wishes;myths that sustain because venerable;even a...

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Chuck wrote history of rock’n’roll music | Letters

In August 1972 I was wondering whether I could afford to go to the London Rock and Roll Show at Wembley. A pantheon of performers had been booked, including Bill Haley, Bo Diddley and the unholy...

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Nash Ensemble/Brabbins review – Davies, Matthews and Holt take the modern...

Wigmore Hall, London Two new works and a London premiere, alongside revisits to three other pieces, rode the spectrum from elegant and concise to dark and ruminativeThere were three premieres – two...

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Border stories: Brexit Britain as seen by a witness to the scars of India's...

As someone whose family fled their homes for England’s Midlands 70 years ago, how do I embrace my own Britishness in a time of imperial nostalgia?On 14 August 1947, my grandparents fell asleep in one...

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‘It captures a time before Dad became a public figure’: at home with Seamus...

Catherine Heaney remembers gatecrashing her poet father’s kitchen photoshootThis picture was taken when I was six years old. The photographer, Geray Sweeney, had come to our home in Dublin to take a...

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The Saturday poem: The Milk Lorry

by Les MurrayNow the milk lorry is a polished submarinethat rolls up at midday, attaches a trunk and inhalesthe dairy’s tank to a frosty snore in minutesbut its forerunner was the high-tyred barn of...

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Sell-out festivals and book sales up … it’s poetry’s renaissance

New Nottingham festival founded by Henry Normal joins boom led by Kate Tempest and John Cooper ClarkeAgainst all publishing predictions, poetry, so long the Cinderella of literary forms, is back. Verse...

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