The Long Haul

variousness, voice & audacity: learning from morgan

we are all translators

Region versus Province: from the intro to Lit
from the introduction to Lit: New Writing from the School of English, Newcastle University    (I thought it might be worth posting an edited version of this intro, especially as it attempts to make a historical argument for the integrity of the North East as a literary region. (An argument, incidentally, echoed by Seamus Heaney when interviewed during his visit.) Also, even though it's only a year old, events have already begun revising the teritory under discussion

The Long Haul
(A version of this review appeared in the summer issue of Poetry London)   David Constantine, Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe), 88pp, £8.95; Peter Porter, Better Than God (Picador), 81pp, £8.99; Sheenagh Pugh, Long-Haul Travellers (Seren), 64pp, £7.99   One of the minor reliefs of the last decade has been a sense that contemporary poetry is at last moving on from its twentieth century obsession with beginnings. By this I mean seeing an art form solely in terms of myths of origins, those in which the world either comes into being without awareness of any past, or sees its old gods impri

Is this the place?
Over the years I've done a whole series of pieces in collaboration with visual artists including Bridget Jones (not that one), David Annand, David Edwick and David Paton. I don't know why so many of them are called David. I've worked on a variety of sites from Darlington to Ambleside, and Newcastle to Dumfries, but I've never really pulled this work together in terms of presenting it clearly as a strand in my writing. Yet collaboration, whether with artists, musicians, or other poets -- whether on shared projects or through translations -- is an important part of the way I see myself working.   Why I haven't explained that coherently must rank alongside why I