Peter McDonald

Marianne Moore, 1964

Gerard Hopkins, 1864.
“Overloaded, apparently “ he recorded after it in his notebook.
What a strange poet he was, even early on.

Still live in hope.
I’ll miss (necessarily) my obit there. But it will be an interesting one!

I remember getting a couple of days off school in I suppose 1977, when I went there to hear about writing with Paul Muldoon, James Simmons and John Morrow. Amazingly exciting then, and in retrospect too. Simmons put a poem I wrote in class in the Tele - first publication! So, bless the tech!

Lovely poem, which wears its debt to Larkin on its sleeve (and I admire that). There’s also - not an allusion and still less a direct debt - a coincidence in that “east Anglian sky”: Yeats’s “The Cold Heaven” was started on a bright cold day in a train approaching Norwich. (An English poem, then?)

I remember going to a poetry reading at Queen’s where CM compèred his three prize exhibits: Heaney, Muldoon, and Paulin. They were interesting to watch in the presence of the Boss.

Thom Gunn, 1961.

I like the idea of an interval!

Time for the tv mini series, no?

Theodore Roethke, 1948

Interesting how misreadings sometimes shed light on submerged issues… Or how SH, having eaten his cake, refused to have it.

I believe the house in question was once a brothel (which might have aroused Larkin’s interest). Or else someone was pulling my leg.

Michael Longley, 1979

T.S. Eliot, 1942. There’s a lot to be said for this, and about this.

Michael Longley (1985)

Louis MacNeice, December 1942

YouTube video by DrRobDoggett "September 1913" (with Peter McDonald)

Join us for the latest episode of Yeats Conversations, in which Dr. Rob Doggett and Dr. Peter McDonald discuss the poem "September 1913."

Help keep Yeats scholarship freely accessible to all by donating to our fundraiser today! -> donate.stripe.com/00gaGU0246YB...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZuQ...

Had to look up the list, I’m afraid. Think I know which book you mean, but haven’t read it (or any of the others). I may do, but am in no hurry. My bad, as they say. I’ve seen too many in my time to take prizes and shortlists at all seriously.

I wonder could we make 'late splurge' a common term - I quite like it! W.S. Landor is the only poet (to my knowledge) whose complete poems has, as well as a 'Juvenilia' section, one called simply 'Senilia'. Which again I like: a useful category (no names, no pack drill).

Well, yes. Though I've always found it quite funny, Geoffrey desperately covering all the bases. I'm sorry he dropped it for the Collected (Broken Hierarchies), since this deadpan, Les Dawson-esque humour got lost. His last Ox Prof lecture ended with quotation from Charlie Brooker: "NOW GO AWAY".

Geoffrey Hill, epigraph page to 1998 edn of The Triumph Of Love.
The ultimate out of office message.

The Elbow Room: long gone, but should have had a blue plaque - “Louis MacNeice (and half the BBC) often drank here while supposed to be working”.

Yes - he had recently left university. As I recall, it’s not that good! Some interesting moments re Ulster (the Reverend Bilbatrox), but otherwise very much a curiosity. He didn’t try it again …

From Geoffrey Hill’s The Triumph Of Love (1998).

Belloc, yes? I like it, and think it’s more bold than sentimental. Line 2 dares a Wordsworian almost-bathos in diction, but the whole thing is tightly-knit. (Good poems can be sentimental, but by soaking up the sentimental rather than wallowing in it, if that makes sense.)

No perhaps about it, in my view. And anyway (as EP said) damn perhapses!

Louis MacNeice, on this National Poetry Day. I like this, though from what I can see it must strike many poetry-lovers these days as a kind of heresy. What a nasty man! (Well, of course he’s a man etc etc - write the rest of the outrage yourself…)

Two years today since I quit the job I’d had for nearly a quarter of a century. I miss the students (with a small ‘s’), but little else, and am in many ways busier than ever. This poem partly explains why I had no appetite for being the Irish mud on such distinguished English boots.

Sorry to learn of Tony Harrison’s death. Important in his own right, he was also one of the very few modern poets able to turn Greek poetry into poetry in English. His Oresteia (1981) is a permanent achievement: ktema es aei.