Thanks for reading Some Flowers Soon! As I head for my 100th post at the start of December, I’m aiming at 100+ paid subscribers for 2024. So for one more week, there’s 15% off monthly and annual subscriptions:
Since I started Some Flowers Soon in Autumn 2021, Substack has grown. As a lifelong grazer of reports, reviews, columns and essays, I like it because it brings a lot of short fresh reading into one place. The old problem of unread print subscriptions piling up now has a new variant: undeleted Substack emails. But increasingly I read posts in the app, which makes for a smoother experience of swiping away, like a magazine whose pages disappear as you turn them: https://substack.com/app
As I near my 100th post here next week, I thought I’d make the 10th Pinks — the name for my free public posts (pink, v. “to decorate by cutting small holes”) — a top 10 from the first year-and-a-half, before recent readers got here. If you’ve been reading from the start: thanks! I hope this is a welcome trip down Mnemosyne Lane.
One of my most widely shared posts, written after trying to help my daughter revise for GCSE English. I was glad to hear from some teachers afterwards, who gave their insights into the challenges from inside the classroom / curriculum:
The last few years have seen the octogenarian avant-gardist J.H. Prynne become almost multi-dimensionally prolific — and three new pamphlets for 2023 were announced just recently from Face Press: http://face-press.org/. I considered a few aspects of his life’s work here:
Earlier this year, poetry briefly became the highest test of intelligence journalists could imagine, as they rushed to ask ChatGPT to write (terrible) poems. Here are my thoughts on why AI might struggle to polish its doggerel:
In February, I went on BBC radio to talk about Stevie Smith for In Our Time. Inevitably, when you prepare to face Melvyn Bragg over a mic, you jot down more notes than you can use, so I wrote some of them up here:
I’ve had quite a good run in recent years of predicting the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. I didn’t call it this year, but here are my thoughts nevertheless on some of the subtle formalism to be found in Zaffar Kunial’s England’s Green:
Like J.H. Prynne, Geoffrey Hill was a poet who seemed to be increasingly energised by his eighties. Here are some of my favourite zingers about the art of poetry from his final, intentionally-unfinished long poem:
Last year, I had to move offices, and all the cardboard boxes got me thinking about quatrains, and a contemporary master of that stanza form, Ian Duhig:
I’m quite glad, in a way, that I wasn’t writing a weekly poetry newsletter during lockdown. But here is a post looking back to the strange way certain poems loomed large at that time:
Almost certainly the silliest of all my posts here, for a long time this list of lesser-known facts about T.S. Eliot was also the most popular. As the man himself said: “the poet aspires to the condition of the music-hall comedian”.
One of my immediate regrets about deciding to stop reviewing poetry for the Sunday Times in summer 2021 was that I wasn’t able to write about Gail McConnell’s wonderful book-length sequence, The Sun is Open. Sadly, the publisher, Penned in the Margins, has now gone on an “indefinite hiatus”, but happily the book is still in print (this year we made it a set text for all first-year Literature students at the University of East Anglia): https://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2021/08/the-sun-is-open/
As an honorary top ten selection, I would nominate for new readers “Last Admission to Solstice Car Park.”
“06.00 hours (or when full)”
https://someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/last-admission-to-solstice-car-park