Nicholas Lezard on the ghost stories of EF Benson (Guardian)

I wonder what it is that made the era so propitious for the production of this kind of story. (HG Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle were at it, too, among countless others.) One could propose a kind of morphic resonance, whereby Freud’s research into dreams a decade earlier had filtered through into an otherwise placid world; or you could suggest that it was the bad conscience of empire at work, undermining the pinnacles of its achievements as they were experienced at home: the church, the academy, the country house. [MR] James and Benson themselves remained, as they used to say coyly in the obituaries, unmarried, and maybe the sense of existing to some extent at a marginal level of society helped them conjure up tales of visitors from unseen worlds. I see Benson as trying to work something out from the unconscious: it’s not unusual for his stories to break the membrane between the waking and dreaming world, as in “Caterpillars”, or the recurring nightmare in “The Room in the Tower”.

— from Ghost Stories by EF Benson review by Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian, 18th October 2016

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‘But after’ in Eye to the Telescope

I’m really pleased that my poem about reincarnation ‘But after’ appears in the interesting and broadly-themed “Ghosts” issue of Eye to the Telescope.

Thanks to editor Shannon Connor Winward! Edited to add: and thanks too for her fascinating series of seven blog posts, talking about the selection process for the issue and her thoughts on the poems she chose (and their relation to each other, and sequencing). The blog posts are a great read. Here is the seventh and last post which includes discussion of ‘But after’ (there are links to the rest of the series at the end of the post).

Robert Lowell and confessional poetry (Lost Puritan)

Soon Lowell walked in with several other dons, was introduced, and read. Afterwards, the don who’d introduced [Lowell] asked if there were any questions and, when no one raised their hand, [Michael] Waters asked Lowell about his confessional poems. At once the don interrupted to explain that Mr. Lowell did not write confessional poetry, and that if that was the sort of question his guest was to be subjected to, there would be no more. Lowell, still at the podium, interjected. If there were to be no more questions, could he read another poem? Fine, the don agreed. “Then I’d like to read ‘Skunk Hour’,” Lowell drawled. “It’s one of my confessional poems.”

— Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (1994) p.390

Susannah Herbert on not marketing poetry as a vitamin pill

The whole evangelical look-lovely-poems-are-good-for-you schtick assumes poetry is a precious endangered superfood, somewhere between a vitamin pill and a rare flower.

Wrong. It should be ranked among life-forms that will survive nuclear holocaust: jellyfish, cockroaches, Millwall fans.

Any effective campaign promoting poetry needs to distil this toughness and ask: what immunity does this awkward art carry deep within it that resists eradication? What force lives in a form in which language, selfish as a Dawkins gene, deploys all its armoury to demand space, seize attention, burrow tenaciously into memory?

—Susannah Herbert on the Resilience of Poetry

From a great post by the Executive Director of the Forward Arts Foundation.