John Greening is a poet, critic and editor who has spent much of his life teaching adults and young people — in Scotland, the USA, and Cambridgeshire. Two years as...
Those heaps of books in the living room left as if to mark my territory, with their scruffy bookmarks, torn up poetry drafts may, of course, be evidence of a project.
Buying books to sell at readings, buying more to send out as extra review copies; attending unlikely events in the unlikely hope that someone might be looking for poetry.
If you have to ask yourself why you write, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it. In my experience the best poems take both reader and author by surprise.
True, your diaries tend to trail off around March after your birthday presents, but what about those days you sat pounding the old Underwood? ‘Crash, crash, crash’ was your opening line.