it is my primal scene as a writer because I am still stuck there: stuck with Alice in the wool shop with the White Queen who has turned into a sheep who is bleating…
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I am always telling my students to read and reread. Re-reading is essential; we must move through the layers of language in order to reach home…
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Those two bottles in the centre of the sentence are a mother and child. They are so perfectly neat, inseparable, identical, a union of two forms. Say it out loud….
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George Bowling’s insect-memory is filled with the sound of buzzing. That buzzing sound begins in the kitchen, accompanied by the smell of bins. I am reminded of Joni Mitchell’s wonderful line to a wonderful song, ‘The hissing of summer lawns…
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Knowledge can settle in through experience; it isn’t the only way to know something, but perhaps we see something more clearly through a framed perspective…
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Art is rarely right; it is built upon mistakes, trials and errors, crossings-out, doubt and uncertainty. No reaching after irritable fact and reason as Keats put it in his famous definition of negative capability…
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How do you enter into a story that is strange and foreign? How do you make yourself at home within a strange sentence, a strange culture? Most of us cling to signs and symbols…
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The teeth seem to topple off the end of the sentence. If you read the sentence out loud you fall more heavily on really came to me. Then the sentence starts
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Emily Dickinson’s line, ‘The Gambrels of the Sky’ soars imperiously upwards, pushing up from the ‘leg’ of the gambrels — the ‘jamb’ the French say — the hip of the house where the sloping roof meets the side…
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‘the dearest freshness deep down things’ says Gerard Manley Hopkins. He meant the patterns within leaves that hold them together; the architecture of the atomic and subatomic world…
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The young writer, Sylvia Plath, is, like many teenagers overflowing with a heightened sense of now. ‘Now, now is the perfect time of my life.’ ‘Now’ is the magical present brimming with possibility…
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The implication is that her speaker would prefer twice as much money and half as much husband…
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It is surprising how few writers know how to finish a sentence well. George Orwell’s sentences usually end quite firmly, with something quite definite, usually a concrete noun…
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Somehow, I always come back to Time: time passing, time holding you back, time tying you in knots. ‘O Time, thou art too hard a knot for me to untie!’ Viola. Twelfth Night. Time: how to manage it?
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There is a prevailing myth that Sylvia Plath is a poet of confession. Far from it. She is a poet of evasion and effacement…
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Poor George Bowling has had a shock. He has returned to his childhood haunts of Lower Binfield — the ‘bin’ part is important — and found nothing as he left it. Shock is a passing emotion but it’s also timeless…
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Sometimes the only way to survive life is to dismiss the things you cannot comprehend. Shetland poet Roseanne Watt’s line is a dismissal of what once was, the speaker’s former self. It is a strange self locked into a strange poem. ‘See, I was brought here by storms,’ she tells us…
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I spend a lot of time trying to show students how to create dynamic transition sentences: sentences with confidence and precision, with some direction. Sentences that know why they are going and where they are going…
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I expect Ms. Atkinson had that sort of childhood too. Aren’t all childhoods a mix of rough and tumble and bitter-sweet? Ginger cordial; bitter lemonade; strawberries denied any sugar…
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Hamlet’s ‘I loved Ophelia’ hits hard because it comes as an angry defence to the suggestion that he did not. The line springs out at us as a body from a grave; a maimed lion roaring back to life; back to wounded feeling…
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