The hit-and-miss quality, furious checking, worry about mistakes — all that helter-skelter wildness running with the sense of social connectedness and communication now — they’re all part of the fun of this kind of writing. It begins with the search for the opening sentence, an invocation, a muttered here goes.
Tom Paulin, “Introduction”, Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays 1980-1996
I’ve had more than one conversation recently lamenting the disappearance of the poet and critic Tom Paulin from UK literary culture. In the Nineties, he threw himself into the role of public intellectual, most famously with his appearances on the BBC arts programme Late Review. For this, of course, he received quite a bit of mockery, though much of it affectionate (there was even an indie band called Tompaulin). But although steadily employed as an English Literature academic at Oxford University, he took the risk, to borrow the title of his selected critical essays, of writing to the moment.
All of which is why it was Paulin I reached for when I realised this post would mark the temporary suspension of Some Flowers Soon, in light of the ongoing strike action across UK universities, which began on Wednesday and will continue next Thursday and Friday (with fifteen more days scheduled after that).
Writing a poetry newsletter every Friday afternoon is not something my employer has asked me to do, but it’s something I’ve done to try and keep in touch, in a small way, with Paulin’s idea that criticism might respond to the moment “with a sense of social connectedness and communication”. I’ve also done it because it’s fun, so I hope to be back sooner rather than later. Thanks, for now, for reading.