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08-02-2024

John Greening speaks with Caroline Sanderson about discovering that poetry was his calling, and discusses his wide-ranging career in verse, editing and literary criticism.

Gerry Cambridge on personal literary excavations, retrievals and early beginnings as a writer.
'If somebody gave you a book token as a gift, you wouldn’t know immediately I was the one you wanted to spend it on. You’d enter a bookshop (independent, old-fashioned, with somewhere to sit in a tucked-away corner). My book would lure you.'
'Art bereft of life must risk desiccation: on the other hand, where the sheer welter of life and its demands encroach too forcefully, the writer may fail to find a proper focus. And the need to earn a living may lead a writer away from her or his real gift.'
Lawrence Sail reflects on his experience of ageing, exploring how some famous writers have tackled the subject and what they can teach us.
Penny Boxall considers literary forgeries and the nature of copying published works, asking whether such counterfeits can ever be considered literature in their own right.
Brian McCabe recalls the early influences that inspired him to become a writer and remembers the unconventional teacher who encouraged his first outing as a poet.
01-10-2020

Stephen Romer speaks with John Greening about the themes and technical preoccupations of his poetry, his life in France, his poetic influences and the deeply personal source material that inspired one of his collections.

'The list of Important Books That I Haven't Read is not as long as it was, but I'm now virtually guilt-free about not reading many of them, and I feel no guilt at reading so-called 'airport thrillers'.'
'Perhaps your subject went away; the war ended; you moved from your special place; the poet of youth grew old, or became Poet Laureate.'
'When I first heard a poet read, in a chemistry laboratory at Newcastle University, he was Ted Hughes; his gruff Yorkshire voice threw me onto a frosty moor. I could see horses. Hear horizons.'
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