Category craic

So here’s a true story for you. Earlier this week I was in Leeds, and met up with an old friend who’s over from the US. We spent the day mooching round the city centre, marvelling at the beauty of…

Over the past couple of months I’ve been putting together a new collection of poems. It’s called snapshots from the fall of home and features poems that have been placed in competitions, found their way into anthologies, and circulated online,…

I don’t remember when I first got to know photographer John Sevigny, but I do remember why. Somehow, years ago, via the wonder of social media, I’d seen one of his pictures: a black-and-white image of a statue of Our…

To all the poets, up and down the country, who put in the hours, days, and weeks of hard work which makes poetry events happen. Who find venues, who rustle up funding, who haggle and cajole and sweet-talk and enthuse.…

After spending almost all of the summer in various fields around the country as part of a team whose job it is to make sure musicians have the best possible platform to entertain a festival audience – and I can’t begin…

I can’t remember when exactly it was that I decided my life’s mission would be to follow my nose and see where it led me, but – weighing up the evidence of the past decades and the scrapes and adventures…

Culture Matters have been playing their part in supporting and promoting radical, political poetry for years. The work they do is invaluable – and achieved on a shoestring budget. They’ve commemorated the coronation of our latest monarch with an anthology of…

A couple of years ago British Art Show 9 came to Wolverhampton. To complement this, there was an event called Offsite9, involving local artists, and as part of that I was one of ten people commissioned to write a piece…

This week’s kerfuffle in the UK poetry world seems to centre round the announcement of the Caffe Nero book awards and the absence of a category for poetry. Here’s my thoughts. Some poets are up in arms about what they…

Whisper it quietly, but I’m having a bit of a year when it comes to poetry. One poem shortlisted in the Verve poetry comp, and now another awarded joint second place in Poets & Players. Last Saturday I headed up…

It’s fifty-five years since Enoch Powell made his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, and judging by yesterday’s comments beneath a Twitter post pointing this out, there’s plenty of people dumb and deluded enough to still believe “eNoCh WaS rIgHt” despite…

Maybe it’s because the clocks are going forward and I’m anticipating the arrival of summer already, but this last couple of days I’ve been having something of a spring clean. The house is tidier, the hoover’s been pressed into action,…