Journalists From England

"His face was blue, on his fingers Flecks of green. 'This is my father', I thought."

"Poetry is certainly about pitting yourself against the unknown. The thing about a poem is that you’ve got to get it right. And you’ve got to get it all right. If there’s one word wrong, then the whole thing won’t work. It can be a 500 line or 5 line poem, it doesn’t matter. You get stuck on that word that isn’t right. You know the poem isn’t going to be finished until it all clicks into place. It is a kind of weird concoction."

"In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time."

"But the cruellest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn't. (23 March 2008)"

"I haven't really commented on the whole Steve Irwin thing. Since I live in the country he arguably embodied this seems like a tragic oversight. I mean, he was Australian, I live in Australia, he wrestled crocodiles, I pick my nose a lot, it was like losing a little part of me or something. But when that stingray broke his little heart and a nation was united in grief - or at least a media was - I kept conspicuously silent. I even had some prepared witticisms I could have used, like "I bet the crocodiles are pissed off that they never got around to it first" or "The guy who went for 'stingray' in the 'animal by which Steve Irwin will one day be killed' betting pool is pretty fucking happy right now". (16 October 2006)"

"How long does it take to shut up a baby? How long does it take to run through the possibilities? Are they hungry, sleepy or sitting around in a pile of shit? If it's the second option I'm sure we can all sympathise. But how long could the process of elimination take?..... I'm sure it's wrong to wish death on a baby, but for the first time in my life I'm actually trying to awaken some kind of latent psychic ability I could use to will the life from the little pillock. Or, fuck it, maybe I'll just walk over and wring it like a flannel. (Travel Notes)"

"The 'wemon' is a shy creature and bathrooms offer it comfort by reminding it of its native Sweden! Try to lure it out with a few styrofoam packing peanuts and scratch it gently behind the ears. (5 October 2005)"

"The presence of The Sean has a tendency to taint a film, I find, because he is never his character; he's always just The Sean. (The Leauge of Extraordinary Gentlemen)"

"As poets we do not ask permission before we begin to practise, for there is no authority to license us. We do not inquire whether it is still possible to pen a drama, for the answer to that question is ours alone to give. It is our drama, spoken or sung, that asserts our right to the title of poet. It is our decision that counts, and not the opinion of some theatre management, or the ponderings of the critic, or even the advice of our friendliest mentors."

"My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost — that it is born again."

"The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting."

"We are never such kleptomaniacs as in our juvenilia. We steal from our masters. We steal from our friends, from our enemies even. We try out tones of voice for which we are ill suited. We write as if we belong to some other period. We are suckers for gorgeous words such as nenuphar, asphodel, and pelf. And because we are not yet in command of our vehicle we get out of control. We reveal ourselves inadvertently and we inadvertently commit ourselves to some point of view that really isn't "us" at all."

"There is always a nasty surprise in store for the imperial mind. It is typical of the imperial point of view that it is ignorant of, or blind to, the other. The imperial mind keeps missing the point. It fails to appreciate, for all its benevolence, why it might come under attack, why it might, for instance, be worth a nation's while to rise up against it. The imperial mind has to be shocked out of its daydreams."

"Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done."

"Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most...are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so."

"A serious mistake in a nightie, A grave disappointment all round Is all that you'll get from th'Almighty, Is all that you'll get underground. Oh he said: "If you lay off the crumpet I'll see you alright in the end. Just hang on until the last trumpet. Have faith in me, chum – I'm your friend.""

"Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world."

"Tennyson follows his feelings in creating each line. He follows the music in his head. If you had asked him, at the end of the day, to describe the prosody of the poem to you, he would no doubt have had to think for a moment before he could answer you, not because he was ignorant of the terms, but because he had been writing a poem, not a metrical exercise. At every point, he was exerting his free will. And the outcome of that exertion was the form."

"The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation."

"Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in its origins, its transmission was oral."

"Poetry is not a metrical exercise."

"It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist."

"Yes You have come upon the fabled lands where myths Go when they die, But some, especially the Brummagem capitalist Juju, have arrived prematurely."

"It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees."

"Can the ear hear a thirteen-syllable line as consisting of thirteen syllables? I don't think so, but I think that a series of thirteen-syllable lines (supposing that was the length chosen) would, after a while, begin to have a characteristic resemblance. For the most part, though, counting the syllables seems to be something that works, if it works, for the poet. It is a private method of organization."

"I changed the locks long ago. He’s been litigating against me for more than two years, and I’m broke. I can’t afford a restraining order."

"Anyway. #MeToo."

"I have C-PTSD. I wonder why? His "compassionate writings" on mental illness make me want to throw up."

"I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form."

"Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator."

"I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer."

"Things are only boring if you are boring."

"So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal."

"The éminence cerise, the bolster behind the throne."

"Campaigning at a school in Enfield in 2001, Tony Blair was caught unawares by a feisty British Asian sixth-former. Suddenly this apparition arose before him, demolishing Blair's points as speedily as he tried to make them. This time around the New Labour machine haven't wanted to risk any of that. The Emperor has been ferried from Potemkin village to Potemkin hospital, and before he arrives a rigged rent-a-crowd of "ordinary people" are brought in to wave little flags. Journalists have been "embedded" - undoubtedly the cadres were hoping that these trusties would begin to sympathise with the man upon whom their jobs depended [and] they'd cease to notice how much of what he said was utter shit."

"There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy than connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply…the person who wants to read what I have written."

"My ex wants to divide up the contents of the former marital home by coming round, when I’m not there, putting a red dot on absolutely anything he wants, then getting me to organise it all into a place where he can have it picked up. Anyone else had this?"

"The deal between the Russian state and the oligarchs was pretty clear: keep your nosy beaks out of politics, out of power, and enjoy your money. But if you ask the wrong kind of questions, things will not go well for you. It was a recipe for the zombification of Russia."

"Once again, the only credible explanation for the siege of Beslan is that the Russian secret state orchestrated an attack by terrorists and then used maximum force to destroy the evidence of its complicity. So not one black operation by the machinery of fear, but three: the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999; the Moscow theatre siege of 2002; the Beslan massacre of 2004. The goal was to create a state of terror; the victims the ordinary people of Russia in their hundreds; the only true beneficiary the master of the Kremlin."

"Putin said that Anna was a woman whose influence was 'extremely insignificant'. The truth was that she was extremely significant, very dangerous to his hold on power. No one else was asking the questions she was. And then her voice was silenced."

"In Russia, Putin's enemies are not allowed to have a private life. We know all about what they do in the bedroom. But no one knows simple facts about Vladimir Putin. How many kids has he got? With whom? And are they by any chance extraordinarily rich?"

"Putin shapes his public image to the nth degree. Never mind the fake sun shining from behind North Korea's fatty-fat despot, Kim Jong-un, or the Hollywood stars worshipping the leader of the Church of Scientology, Vladimir Putin's cult of personality is the richest, the most well-funded in the whole world. [...] To me, it looks as though this is a man who had an unexceptionally unhappy and unloved childhood, who fears mockery and being laughed at, who wants to show to the world that he is the master of all he surveys, but comes across as a small boy, out for revenge. But then I'm not the target audience."

"He wanted Ukraine like he had wanted all the other things that rightfully did not belong to him. Time and again, he had probed the West's steel and found jelly. But this time, Ukraine, its president, its people and its army had other ideas. This time Mr Pleonexia found people who said, 'No, that's not yours. It's ours. Give it back'. No wonder he seems so surprised that Ukraine played hardball. That was not supposed to happen."

"The received story of Putin's two decades plus in power was of his tolerance of a monstrously corrupt system. The trade-off with the oligarchs was they were allowed to keep much of their fortunes so long as they paid the master of the Kremlin homage and tithes. And they had to keep their snouts out of power. Or else. But that description masks what's really going on. Putin is stealing Russia's wealth, big time, personally, but he cannot be seen to be doing so – psychologically, he hates the idea of being caught out – so he employs proxies to do the stealing for him. True, the oligarchs emerged from the road-crash of the Soviet Union's implosion and Boris Yeltsin's alcoholic incompetence. But with Yeltsin out of the way, a new president had an opportunity to strip the oligarchs of their ill-gotten and obscene wealth and start afresh. Instead, Putin cemented the oligarch system because it best suited his secret urge to take things that rightfully belonged to others."

"The Make America Great Again wing of the US Republican Party has been highly critical of Ukrainian attempts to police the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church, also known as the Moscow Patriarchate, not perhaps realising that its head, Patriarch Kirill, was an active KGB agent in Soviet times, has been mired in a cigarette smuggling scandal and is reckoned to be worth $4 billion. For the avoidance of doubt, Kirill has called Putin's presidency 'a miracle of God'. Praise be, some say."

"Dictators fuck things up, big time. They destroy the chance of peaceful political change so that when, eventually, they die in their sleep or blow their brains out or are stabbed repeatedly in the anus – the respective ends of Stalin, Hitler, Gaddafi – chaos reigns. At best, for him, old age will come to Vladimir Putin and then the only end of age and the Russia he created will fall apart. At worst, Alexei Navalny's prediction after the fireball that did for Evgeny Prigozhin that creating, then destroying, armed gangs is a recipe for civil war will come true sooner than Putin thinks. And then, perhaps, Russia will descend into Mad Max with snow on its boots, cast out of the pale by the Western world, hated by the Islamists in its south and east, its Siberian riches eyed by the Chinese dragon."

"Full of flaws, unbelievably arrogant, a man who did flirt with the far right, but, over the course of the last ten years, the boy from Chernobyl stood up for the idea of another Russia, a country not defined by grotesque corruption, cruelty and a stupid war, but by honesty, courage and great good humour. That secures his place in history. When all hope was lost, and Russia turned, yet again, back to darkness, then along came a knight in dented armour, tilting at evil windmills. Alexei Navalny was bold and good. Alexei Navalny kept the red eye of Russia's soul alive and one day it will start blink-blink-blinking again as it stomps, like Terminator 2, towards the machinery of greed that controls the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny is dead, but what he stood for will be back."

"All concerned deny any wrongdoing."

"Unlike Shoigu and Gerasimov and, don't even whisper it, Putin himself, Prigozhin would go to the front line and be seen taking risks."

"So why did Prigozhin stop dead? My working hypothesis is that the secret police got to Prigozhin's family. For example, if his grandchildren had been kidnapped, then that might well have forced him to call off his mutiny. In return, the word on the street was, Prigozhin and his lieutenants would be granted immunity because of their previous heroics. But would Putin honour his word?"