St Thaddaeus the Tractor was my favourite Apostle
'An Arbitrary Light Bulb' the Poetry Book Society Winter 2024 Choice: "some of the most moving, restrained, memorable and technically adroit poetry of our times" --- TLS, 3/25
2,677 followers 636 following 560 posts
view profile on Bluesky
St Thaddaeus the Tractor was my favourite Apostle
That's right: like some black cat superstitions here
I read once with Yevgeny Rein, I alluded in my introduction to 'The Lammas Hireling' that Pushkin's life was saved by a hare crossing his path and stopping him joining the Decembrists. Rein explained that locals raised a statue to the hare . . . Pic: hare rescue during a spring flood in Russia.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would unblock the U-bend herself
Amazed this groundbreaking volume by two great modernist authors isn't better known among the literati.
I need only read mine to have the most savage attacker screaming "Make him stop! For pity's sake, make him stop!"
To help you get to know your judges for the 2025 National Poetry Competition, we've asked each one to participate in a visual Q&A. First up is @ianduhig.bsky.social! Find out more about the 2025 National Poetry Competition here: poetrysociety.org.uk/npc
Cruel, but funny
Glad to have a couple of poems in the forthcoming issue 2 of this new mag with a roster of terrific poets I have snuck in among.
I'm hoping to catch your talk at Ilkley, Stan. Looks terrific.
I sometimes use comedy as a form of defence. Like Glasgow Rangers: www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...
This is me with the poem I'm trying to write standing behind me, mocking me, refusing to reveal itself.
Conor McCarry's photograph from Ballycastle on the last day of the Oul Lammas Fair when, he notes, "some of the locals, have already had enough". This actually what 'céad míle fáilte' really means.
I think that's right: easy to say, hard to enact.
I heard James Fenton read this at The Badly-Loved conference organised by Adrian Rice millennia ago. Thanks to The Poetry Pharmacy for the reminder.
I used to live near there and Burley had a very recognisable accent, different from the others in Leeds. It was an interesting community -- George Orwell's ideal English pub was in part inspired by one he visited here -- but the slum clearance was long overdue.
Slum clearance near Burley Road in the 70s when I first came to Leeds. The lad delivering Hovis was getting old by then. Photographer unknown
Thanks James!
Today is the perfect Bank Holiday Sunday to lose yourself in poetry and Geraldine Clarkson writes the stuff damn well.
The poet's question
Tom Leonard
When you're visiting a friend and your friend's dog hears you say you're a poet
I look forward to reading this, @annaannawalsh.bsky.social -- also sending good writing vibes!
These poetry projects I do with Leeds Irish Health and Homes give that community the chance to express important things about their lives in a form which will be remembered. They are run on a shoestring but truly valuable so huge thanks Steve and @martindoyle.bsky.social for support and publicity.
When your poetry reading was so bad even Dracula refuses to bite you and throws you out.
The speaker of the poem glimpses the poet over her shoulder art: Rob's Room
"No, Jesus" sighed Satan a little impatiently: "You put your RIGHT leg in, your RIGHT leg out, in, out, in, out, you shake it all about -- that's what the Hokey Cokey is all about!"
Reminds me of Kuppner's 'A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty': here's its 247th quatrain about translating an old text: Something breasts something something bosom; Something bust something bosom something; Breast something something caterpillar something; A look of doubt crosses the old scholar's face.
"Can I read you some of my poetry?"
9yo boy gets the essence of the Scottish Play
Rereading Jonathan Bates' Clare biography, I note even then his Northampton asylum encouraged basketry among its inmates. This reminds me of the 1970s Mental Patients' Union slogan, "Another day, another basket!"
What do you call the huge grey poet in the middle of the room being ignored by everybody? TS Elephant Happy #WorldElephantDay
When I did poetry workshops with a group of Leeds Sikhs every session was accompanied by serious quantities of nosh. I read out some Mona Arshi for food references and she might recognise the psychology of this flow chart.
Chekhov's dog
This is the kind of entry a poem should make into ordinary prose Melvin Sokolsky, Jump, 1965
James Wright never mentions this in his damn hammock poem
Thank you, Valerie, for these kind words
Very pleased to have belatedly discovered this Sunday Post review from last November of my latest book
I can see why
Reading and writing about heavenly bodies reminds me of this poem
I would be proud for one of my poems to be bookmarked with a taco
Left: the poem in my mind Right: the poem on my page
For a rock star, Ozzy had an ear for an original simile: “I hate vacuum cleaners. They make the most nauseating fucking racket in the world, like a dying wildebeest being dragged up and down the corridor.” (Via Rolling Stone)
Got back pix from Anthony Earnshaw Retrospective opening at Dean Clough including this with Gail Earnshaw, Tony's widow who was the driving force behind all this, Nigel Walsh, Curator of Contemporary Art at Leeds Art Gallery (which has works by Tony) and, er, me. Exhibition on till 28th September.
Wordsworth and Coleridge at the Coldplay gig
I'd like to read her love poetry inspired by these feelings
Thanks Steve!
Sam Rowley's photo won the People’s Choice Award in the 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. He thinks they're fighting but I prefer to think of it as a late-night tango between two mice very much in love.
Just found the perfect poets' waste paper basket in our local charity shop.
The poem 'Omni' in my book An Arbitrary Light Bulb published last year mentions the 'library' on 36 buses for which riders bring and borrow books. Just back from one where I found this new-and-collected-ish poems by Andrew Crozier from 1967, the first sequence in which is called . . . 'Train Rides'.
Most poems come from our reading, so if your writing seems to have died . . . read!
another www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9kC...
This always reminds me of Wallace Stevens' statement that "A poem is a meteor" in 'Adagia', similarly existing by virtue of its self-annihilation.
Me at Leeds City Gallery yesterday investigating the role of spectacles in art.
If you can, take two minutes to make room in your life for this re-imagining of a well-known Irish song www.tiktok.com/@dailychoirs...
The Galtymore was a legendary barn of an Irish dance hall in Cricklewood in the 1960s-70s. The ad for Big Tom and the Mainliners reminds me of a story I heard that when they toured the US, in New York a load of hippies turned up, thinking from its name that it was a druggy music band . . .
That is actually the plot of a canonical text of gigantic insect literature
Robert Frost at the swimming pool
I should mention that this poem is by Michael Longley
for John Clare's birthday
Robert Graves poem much in my mind this summer when I have seen record numbers of cabbage whites
What I like about the new CAPTCHAs is the way they force you to really think about what it means to be human. pic via John Attridge
#theweekendstartshere
Sometimes, a whole Mediterranean village would turn out to try and get the duvet back in its cover. (Art: Sewing the Sail by Joaquín Sorolla, 1896)
When I was young, we sometimes used the Quex Road church social room for events, though the women who looked after it didn't always approve. One, seeing us carry in crates of beer declared it 'a good away win for The Devil'. I'm sure this is what she imagined we'd be doing there.
My new author photo by the artist Stephen Peter Weir. He took the pictures at the Tony Earnshaw Retrospective launch at the Dean Clough on Saturday -- on till September and well worth a visit.
Tommy found the Zen Poetry Summer Camp challenging
"Any other business?"
Liked Suzanne Vega's T-shirt in her NYT interview
I recently had a discussion about smoots, which Robert MacFarlane defined without reference to the fact that they also describe deliberate gaps in walls for animals to pass through. This one in Ambleside, photographed by Alan Cleaver, is surely the most de luxe wall smoot I have ever seen.
“Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.” Jean Cocteau, The Necessity of Art, 1959 #happybirthdayjeancocteau pic: Magnum
Good days
Now on sale - w/ our headliner, @ianduhig.bsky.social ✨
'The Meeting' or 'Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney' - Peter Blake 1983 after Courbet's 'The Meeting' with (left) Howard Hodgkin, Peter Blake (middle) and David Hockney via Heather Burns
This is just to say touch my stuff in the icebox, I'll fuck you up
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan An adult pleasure zone decree
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan An adult pleasure zone decree
Fewer secrets: less harm - A poetic history of the Irish in Leeds. Ian Duhig on an anthology he co-edited inspired by Leeds Museums’ 19th-century Irish holdings, including an Orange sash, anti-Irish cartoons and a cosh confiscated from an Irish rioter www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...
When a seagull retires, they can often be spotted on ferries visiting sites of great chip-theft triumphs and car-craps. "I consider myself an artist in gull-shite, a Pollock of Poo, if you will" this one tells anybody who'll listen. And is willing to share a sandwich.
Me with my Irish skin looking out on a day when the temperature is predicted to reach 30 centigrade
Dog with Human Mask, slip-painted ceramic sculpture from Colima, Mexico, dated 200 BC – AD 500. Collection: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Reminds me of the hybrid dog in the Donald Sutherland remake of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'.
"An aged man is but a poultry thing", Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium'
This is just to let you know I'm moving to a new role and so your light bulb issues will be handled by Tanya, before she goes on maternity next next month.
Thank YOU Steve.
How many editors does it take to screw in a light bulb? Not sure about this wording: it could be read as meaning editors have sex in light bulbs! Also, do we really "screw in" UK light bulbs? Don't we tend to use bayonet caps? Rewrite and bring it back in your own time, OK? Have you finished yet?
'The New American Gothic', Oil on Canvas by Criselda Vásquez
Tanagra, a gilded bronze sculpture by Jean-Léon Gérôme, exhibited and acclaimed at the Salon de Paris in 1890, where Darmok and Jalad visited it frequently.
I'm going to get a sign made up like this Alloa pub one and put it outside my house.
Steve @stevewhitaker1.bsky.social crafts the most wonderful reviews of poetry. An art in itself. yorkshiretimes.co.uk/article/Poem...
Huge thanks to @stevewhitaker1.bsky.social for this astute close reading of Keith Fenton's poem in the Leeds Irish Health and Homes anthology 'The Holdings' I co-edited with Laura MacDonagh: yorkshiretimes.co.uk/article/Poem...
It must have been an amazing Glasto line-up that made Joseph of Arimathea come over that time. #Glastonbury2025
Wonderful performance by Satnam Galsian at Leeds City Varieties this evening though this sign in the auditorium must be more in hope than expectation
Photo from the Royal Highland Show this year by Jane Barlow. The Royal was awake anyway.
The poet inside the speaker of the poem realises they are not in control of its direction.
'Beo Faoin bhFód' will have it's World Premiere at Galway Film Fleadh on Friday the 11th of July at 11:30am. I'm honoured to appear in it celebrating Mick Meaney, written about in my latest book 'An Arbitrary Light Bulb'.
We can’t wait to host Ian, Kirsten & Henry. Tickets on sale from Weds.
I used to be in charge of single homelessness services for York City Council and enjoy visiting the town now. Thanks to @nickykippax.bsky.social and looking forward to reading with Kirsten and Henry -- hope to see some of you there.
The proceedings of the Old Bailey for 1833: (www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t1833...), James Chasty's poverty such he'd "even gone to ballad singing to get bread". Nearly as bad a fundraising idea as writing poems. via The Ballad Tree
