Robert Potts

'Dream awhile' In which the project is introduced, and we consider our resources

Robert Potts, former editor of Poetry Review and a critic who inspired me when I was starting out, has started a Substack about John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, after learning them all by heart. I just bought an old copy on eBay to keep to hand as I read along every week substack.com/home/post/p-...

I'm back at Spumoni Gardens, Brooklyn. 24 years ago, I delivered a pizza from here to Miami, which I figure might be a record.

Rewatching Succession, I have noticed another (possibly overlooked?) Berryman reference, in addition to the season finale titles from all four seasons coming from Dream Song 29. Logan, in 1.10 ("Nobody Is Ever Missing"), says "Its not a good position I am in" - a line from Song 28.

I mistyped "ornery" and the spell-check rewrote it as "Robert"

If there is, in the entirety of all anglophone literature, ever, a better epithalamium than "Til Death" by Japanese Breakfast, well, I'd love to read or hear it.

I am whimsically attempting to find out, as an English speaker, what it's like to be a Greenlander. I have ordered three books so far (two novels, one "travel"). I am in search of good online news sources. I would welcome advice. Especially from bilingual Greenlanders.

Tiny French town left €10m fortune by a man who had never been there Thiberville in Normandy receives windfall worth five times annual budget from a Paris resident who was named after it

What I love most about this story is the name of the Mayor
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

"Don't call me bloke, guy."
"Don't call me guy, man."
"Don't call me man, bloke." etc,
(a la Terence and Philip).

One of my favourite bands since they started. I first heard them on John Peel, "A Friend With A Big Mouth". Peel said of Coughlan "I could listen to that man sing the phone book". His lyrics were astonishing, better than most "poets". Looking forward to this!

Still regretting not sending them as Lionel Shriver's Kevin to be honest.

Doing school run on World Book Day, in which primary school children dress up as their favourite movie character. 3 Spidermen, a lot of Hermione Graingers and fellow Hogwartians, several footballers (?), a good Captain Hook. Two Worst Witches. Various animal onesies. And a huge green alien. Hey ho.

I remain puzzled as to why our attention is drawn by newspapers and thus, helplessly, social media to appalling suffering in some countries and not others.

I presume that even when set an impossible target, England no longer know how to bat out a match, and so will simply aim to lose by a huge margin as fast as possible.

Can't help feeling that Richard III should ideally be played by someone from the actual royal family (or failing that, Phoebe Waller-Bridge), but there you go. No one outside the royal community is going to have a grounded understanding of the royal character, they'll just be ... pretending.

So, I wasted 30 minutes asking ChatGPT to solve a tricky scheduling problem - maths, essentially - and it made errors, failed to learn, etc... then a bright 13 year old human solved it in 5 minutes. I think we may be safe after all, so long as no human is stupid enough to trust and rely on the AI.

Letter in the 'New Statesman'

A villain-elle 😉 for Suella, on the occasion of her resignation

#villanelle #poem

After vanishing from view for a few years, the former Captain of the Titanic is invited to join the flight crew of the Hindenburg: emerges like Achilles from his shed, feels he has a lot to offer.

I very nearly put cumin in the kids' porridge this morning, instead of cinnamon. Not sure what that would have tasted like. My son named the potential result "curridge".

The train station announcement "if you see anything that doesn't look right..." always prompts the thought "where do I begin"

All of this is true, but at the same time, doesn't it suggest that, given we care about this state of affairs, we should seek out new content and enthuse about it when we find it? This might be an older tussle than we are acknowledging, eg in the 80s I used to prefer John Peel to Steve Wright, etc.

Kierkegaard once said something like "take away the alarmed conscience, and you may as well turn the churches into dance halls". Which always reminds me of Tess of the d'Urbervilles - "The mill still worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished, creeds being transient."

I've just taken a rare look at Facebook, and it seems designed to make everyone, despite their vigilance, "stupider and worse". Same is true of Twitter. It feels as if regardless of your choices, they "suggest" bucketloads of shit at you anyway.

What's a perfect album that came out when you were 16?

I am completely addicted to The Trip at the moment, having come to it late. Just doing Greece now. It's a really unusual and remarkable thing.

I was reminded by this lovely post of Prynne: " .... a network of bright gossamer threads , woven close together and catching the slant evening sun so as to shimmer with a soft, trembling brilliancy ; we both remarked on it ..."

I'm now restricting myself to posting avant garde poetry and links to articles about how bad Twitter is, while steadily unfollowing everyone. And am keeping my own blood pressure low by not reading anyone else's political opinions.

LEAVE TWITTER for heaven's sake

Indeed, and if his teacher had offered that observation I think I would have felt very differently about the exchange. 🙂