A young woman warms her back against a fire. It’s been burning in the besieged public space long enough to have partially ashed down; low flames and embers set the silhouetted sleeve of her leather jacket aglow. Charred poles from makeshift placards, sacrificed for heat, protrude at angles from the edges of the pyre, together with thicker timber of uncertain origin. The woman is fashionable, striking even with that long, oat-coloured scarf looped confidently around her neck. In the deeper field, a melee of other young people: a kneeling figure among them clutches a placard that says, simply, ‘NO’. The...

In crucial, inescapable ways, all evaluative writing in English Studies is life writing – a historicisation of professional and personal selves. Thus the seemingly rarefied academic exercise of charting the ‘(re)turn to history’ in Romantic Studies in the introduction to a recent collection of essays on the legacies and current modalities of New Historicist practice became for me a kind ofbiographia literaria.¹ In the process of anatomising what is still the dominant methodology in the field, and identifying the characteristic moves of my own, and others’, critical negotiations with Romanticism, I was invoking and interrogating not only another age,...

Here, or nearby, is a poem.

Read it.

Does any more need to be said?

The heartfelt response of many readers, and of many writers, would be No! Anything you add by way of a gloss, says that response, diminishes the poem; it undermines its autonomy, denying its power to speak for itself. The most common criticism of a poet’s introductions in performance is that they repeat-in-advance, less concisely, what the poem already says and does. Equally, the reader’s freedom is reduced … and in practice it makes no sense to distinguish between the ‘autonomy’ of the poem (which may...

The take-off of creative writing courses within university English departments happened so quickly in the UK that a lengthy phase of ‘pedagogical deficit’ was perhaps inevitable. The situation is in some ways a repeat of what happened with literary theory in the 1980s, when a major new area of content was added to the syllabus very rapidly, before any serious thinking had been done about how to teach it. This may partly explain why the influence of theory has proved to be more ephemeral than we would have imagined twenty years ago. The same may yet prove to be the...

It’s not often that personal items come to my academic address, but there it was in my pigeonhole that afternoon. The flickering of my monitor that had been merely annoying was becoming painful to my eyes – text coming and going; flashes of black space. I needed to get the chapter done by the end of the month so I couldn’t just abandon the business and go home to watch reruns of Miss Marple on the ‘Elderly Female Detectives’ channel. “‘How Depict the Invisible?”: Eusebios of Caesarea, St John Damascene and theSkiagraphicQuestion’ – what was I thinking? The only reason...

And another thing, the implied reader mutters as I begin: no more ditsy stories like how your father would phone each time he read one of your first person poems to ask, ‘But when did this happen?’¹ For heaven’s sake don’t be anecdotal – it’s so mainstream. Deploy the appropriate academic register if you want to be taken at all seriously. Invoke strategies of resistance or ethnogeographies or synergy and don’t mention dads, telephones or whathappened.It’s justembarrassing.

But the scene of writing – and associated activities like teaching, giving readings, workshops, negotiating the critical–creative interface – already seems prickly...

A poet, Brian Kim Stefans, spots the dissonance immediately.

ThoughPoetic Artificeadheres to the conventions of a text that can be re-used by members of the academy, there are moments when Forrest-Thomson’s skill as an experimental poet, along with her occasional wit, lift the writing and theory itself beyond the level of disinterested speculation, engaging the reader – should the reader be a poet – in what is serious shop-talk.¹

Should the reader be a scholar these occasional moments in Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s critical masterpiecePoetic Artifice(1978) might seem out of place or saccharine lapses of taste to disguise the bitter...

Why do we teach creative writing in higher education? Since the late 1990s, many prominent contemporary British and Irish writers have engaged in creative writing teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, some we might hazard primarily for economic reasons. Unlike our U.S. counterparts, however, many British writers, particularly poets, have not themselves been a ‘product’ of the creative writing workshop. In this essay, I will think specifically about the role of the writer as writing tutor, emphasizing the importance of process-based teaching and thinking through the need for teachers to clarify in their own minds their expectations of the discipline,...

This essay explores translation and co-writing in the context of Metropoetica, a project that began in 2009 with a group of seven women poets and translators from different European cities working collaboratively on walking, writing, translation and performance, partly online and partly through workshops in Krakow and Ljubljana. The first phase of the project, involving Ingmara Balode (Latvia), Julia Fiedorczuk (Poland), Sanna Karlström (Finland), Ana Pepelnik (Slovenia), Sigurbjörg Thrastardottir (Iceland), Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese (Poland) and myself, is complete, although at the time of writing further collaborations and performances are planned.¹ The initial idea for Metropoetica grew out of my Arts and...

How squirmily embarrassing it is to think about, let alone reveal, what goes on in a writing process, whether creative, critical or confessional. It is an intensely private matter, and, at the same time, darkly and murkily unknown. The reader might want to know, but you, the writer, don’t. It feels a little like being asked to think about your toilet habits, and, thinking about them, to wonder how yours might be like, or unlike, those of someone else (unless, of course, you’re inclined for other reasons to think about these things).

R. S. Thomas, asked once at a poetry...