Mark Ford teaches English at UCL and presents the LRB podcast series Close Readings with Seamus Perry. Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry was published last year.
What aileth thee now, that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops? – Isaiah 22:1
I (gulp) had to have a certain operation, and as I went under, found myself assailed by a flock of hostile pigeons, by a whole parliament of fowls, cooing hysterically – blackbirds and ospreys and screaming gulls. How daftare you! mocked a jackdaw, jabbing its beak at my groin. Vile droppings...
T.S. Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words he deployed in his poems. But what exactly is the difference between an interesting allusion or echo and a mere verbal coincidence?
So much in the life and work of Ted Hughes was weird and transgressive that even now it is hard to feel confident that his actions and achievement can be judiciously assessed. For a start, he wrote and published at such a rate: Jonathan Bate’s bibliographic tally of Hughes’s books runs to more than seventy items, while the various Hughes archives contain nearly a hundred thousand pages. The vast Collected Poems edited by Paul Keegan and published in 2003 presents a poet who insistently ‘o’erflows the measure’.
Undo that step, or at the least tread softly, for a sleek and bushy-tailed urban fox is counting chick- chick-chick- chickens in his dreams; when he wakes he’ll yawn and prowl, while I’ll be staring, shamefaced, down the grainy, haunted vistas opened by insomnia. Sing, birds, I mean all ye bird-brained in every furrow that you hop in; warble tales of the species that will wade...
Until quite recently, paper played a crucial role in the composition, and transmission to posterity, of most poems in English: they were written down on paper, or antecedents such as parchment or vellum, or typed on it, and then printed in pamphlets, newspapers, magazines or books. Computers and digitisation have changed all that: the poemhunter.com version of ‘La Belle Dame sans...
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of two poets, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic poetry,...
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Charlotte Mew, who brought the Victorian art of dramatic monologue into the 20th century, and whose difficult experiences are often refracted through...
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to the life and work of W. B. Yeats in the latest episode in their second Close Readings series, Modern-ish Poets.
Seamus Perry, Mark Ford and Joanne O‘Leary discuss the life and work of Emily Dickinson, her dashes, death instinct and obliquity.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of the Saint Lucian poet, playwright and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.
In this episode, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to the life and work of Adrienne Rich, the great poetic interrogator of the American family home as a site of trauma for daughters and wives.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Robert Frost, the great American poet of fences and dark woods, in the latest episode of their second series of Modern-ish Poets.
In the first episode in a new series of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford take on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Victorian literature’s only anti-modern proto-modernist queer-ecologist Jesuit priest.
Mark Ford reads a selection of poems he’s published in the LRB.
Mark and Seamus are joined by Joanna Biggs, an editor at the LRB, to look at Sylvia Plath's life and poetry.
Mark Ford talks about his latest book Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner with Seamus Perry.
If Hardy was half a modern Londoner, the other half had a weakness for the pastoral-oracular. The two halves changed shape, feeding and modifying each other.
‘I have travelled a great deal,’ Raymond Roussel wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but from all these travels I never took anything for my books.’ It’s an odd...
Suppose, having been betrayed – ‘hooked/then thrown back’ – you decide to let your instant reflex, a desire for revenge, cool off overnight; then suppose you wake up the...
In 1924 the Surrealist Benjamin Péret was eager, like many artists then and since, to relate his own interests to the works of the rich, bizarre and innovative French poet, novelist and...
The excitable, exuberant surface of Mark Ford’s poems makes them instantly attractive. They speak with a bewildered urgency: See, no hands! she cried Sailing down the turnpike, And flapped...
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