It’s just over a year since I decided to spend more time writing Some Flowers Soon, and I’ve enjoyed every week of it. I’ve been sending out regular posts since 2021, but since last June subscriber numbers have almost doubled, with hundreds of new readers this year alone. So this week I thought I would do a pocket map of the kinds of thing I write.
Since starting paid subscriptions last summer, I’ve sent out a completely free post at least once a month: the majority of Some Flowers Soon readers are free subscribers, and I’m glad to have over 1,500 of you. These posts are collected on the Pinks page:
https://someflowerssoon.substack.com/s/pinks
Another way to explore previous posts is via the Top tab of the homepage. “Top” posts appear to be decided by Substack through a combination of views, likes and comments:
https://someflowerssoon.substack.com/?sort=top
Despite the weekly nature of these posts, I’ve found I tend to avoid being topical (similarly, I only occasionally post a conventional review of a new book). Instead, I’ve been drawn towards a more seasonal way of thinking about poetry, as in this post on Stonehenge for the summer solstice a year ago:
I also marked the admittedly niche anniversary of when Louis MacNeice visited the medieval East Anglian city where I live — Norwich — one Halloween:
MacNeice’s Autumn Sequel is one of any number of modern poetry books I’d like to see back in print. Here are six more:
On that list is Stevie Smith, a poet who wasn’t always popular, and deserves to be remembered for much more than “Not Waving But Drowning”:
I sometimes think one of the most useful things a literary critic can do is advocate for writers who have disappeared from view — as I did here for Welsh poet Lynette Roberts:
Other writers, of course, don’t need that kind of advocacy, but nevertheless remain a source of fascination. One of these, for me, is T.S. Eliot, about whom I put together some conversational icebreakers here:
Sometimes, I like to trace a resonant phrase out of a poem and into the world of its meanings. Eliot’s Collected Poems is a good place for this kind of adventure:
As a researcher, I’m particularly interested in the prose poem: I edited The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018) and am currently writing a history of the form. So I like to keep up with what’s happening in contemporary prose poetry:
As a lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, I also enjoy thinking and talking about prose fiction, especially from the modernist period. Sometimes I write about how this crosses over into poetry:
I’m also interested in the history and reinvention of different kinds of verse form e.g. the quatrain:
the haiku:
and the sestina:
I don’t think of my professional life as especially eventful, but occasionally I tell stories about being a poetry critic:
What I really like to do though — as a teacher, writer and reader — is to spend time with poems, and come out of them knowing something I didn’t when I went in:
Finally, if you enjoy reading these posts, I strongly recommend using the Substack app as an alternative to the email version; it looks better and updates instantly:
Personally, I also prefer being able to read Substack posts without having to scroll through the rest of my inbox. Here is one I enjoyed this week: Lucy Tunstall’s thoughtful and original essay on “girls in poems”.