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.
Donald Justice, who died in August 2004 at the age of 78, was one of the most subtle and enchanting American poets of his generation. In ‘Variations on a text by Vallejo’, a poem anticipating his own demise, but written some three decades before it, he pictured gravediggers burying him in Miami (his home town):
And one of them put his blade into the earth To lift a few clods of...
A white finger of frost along the spine Of the country, and the first rumours of the first Female Archbishop of Canterbury: while still In her cradle the Lord filled Her to the brim, and drove headlong The querulous demons whose riddles End only in debt and pain; her dimpled Right hand seemed to grasp and poise A miniature crozier, and her eyes Peered through tears at the sins of the world.
...
Hart Crane, for one, was in no doubt about it. ‘He’s the prime ram of our flock,’ he insisted to Allen Tate in the summer of 1922. Tate was initially puzzled by the phrase, as well as by various other ‘signals’ his friend was making, but eventually came to understand Crane’s drift: ‘In those days,’ he later commented, ‘a lot of people like...
“Virtual information that appears on your own screen tends to seem, viscerally, less someone else’s than when it’s printed in a book with the author’s name on the cover. The ‘boundless textual promiscuity’ of the web, as Thomas Mallon called it, has also decisively altered the way we think about information; the point is not so much to be good at remembering things, as to be good at finding them quickly. Already web skills are playing an important role in the evolutionary struggle for survival. Will future historians turn first to the wrist and clicking finger in assessing a corpse from our era? Will those who develop RSI soon be the information revolution’s lepers? How soon before our relatively recently acquired skills become as obsolete as the ability to kill a mammoth with a spear or write shorthand or programme a VCR?”
This bird used to be the most numerous on earth And to blot out the sun for hours over Wisconsin and Michigan And to strip bare the great forests of cranberries, pine-nuts, and acorns.
Whole trees toppled under the weight of roosting birds. In flight They made a sound like Niagara Falls. Horses trembled, And travellers made wild guesses at their numbers and meaning.
The bird’s sad...
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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