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 is out now.
Born in 1914, Randall Jarrell belonged to the first generation of American poets who found a ready home in the country’s burgeoning university system. Of the great modernists of the previous era, only Robert Frost assumed the role of pedagogue to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart...
Is the night Chilly and dark? The night is chilly But not dark. An all but full April moon Slides above barely visible clouds, and is greeted By a burst of hooting from an urban Tawny owl. On empty Brownfield sites they nest, and rear their young, and feed On vermin. Has Any Probing, saucer-eyed astronomer, even a modern Or French one, ever Grown genuinely accustomed ‘aux...
stretched out on the grass, and tried to relax. A delightful breeze stirred his beard but his ear-canals ached, and his tongue felt bloated. While there is blood in these veins, he mused, and I can hear the murmur of leaves, and sparrows sing, I will not despair. He half-dozed, and in a waking dream relived the despair
that had seized him during a stormy voyage from Alexandria to Athens....
after Lucretius
A snake, if a man’s spittle Falls upon it, will wriggle And writhe in frenzied contortions, and may even gnaw Itself to death; and there are certain Trees, should you ever drift off to sleep In their shade, you’d wake clutching your throbbing head as if an axe Had been buried there. The blossom, I’ve heard, of a type of rowan That flourishes in the mountains...
The protagonist of ‘The Enduring Chill’, a short story Flannery O’Connor began in the autumn of 1957, is a 25-year-old would-be writer called Asbury Fox, who has been forced to return from Manhattan to the family farm in rural Georgia on account of a mysterious illness from which he believes he is dying. His path-breaking play on ‘the Negro’ has not yet been...
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.
Not unlike the God he complains about, Thomas Hardy’s smilingness is often in league with his sadism, and writing poetry was a way for him to plead innocent and guilty at the same time.
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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