Ben Wilkinson

“Burdensome artistically, exhausting over time, damaging to one’s reputation, the source of rebuffs both private and professional … poetry reviewing is an enterprise only a few people do credibly or well”. So Mary Kinzie declared in a letter to Poetry magazine, around the time I stumbled onto this strange path of poetry reviewing, nearly a decade ago. It’s a nifty quotation, and one I’ve gone back to over the years. The hours are long, the rewards are poor, and your typical response is the indistinguishable silence of the indifferent, agreed and aggrieved. That, and the occasional feeling – after a ‘mixed’ or ‘negative’ review appears in print – that somewhere out there, your name is being scribbled in a black book. If you’re really lucky, the poet in question – or their partner, or colleagues, or friends – may even take to social media with brimming ire. (Poets are ‘the irritable race’, as Alice Fulton once quipped.) Why bother? Why on earth did I start penning these things? Bec...

‘What is masculinity if not taking the weight / of a boy and straining it from oneself?” In “Strongman”, Andrew McMillan takes his young nephew’s playful request to “benchpress him” like “his mother’s new lover can” as an imaginative springboard to some urgent personal and social concerns. It is typical of the poems in Physical . Adept at finding the surreal in the everyday, turning an ear to the lilt of conversation alongside serious (but rarely solipsistic) reflection, McMillan’s verse worries away at what it is to be human, to feel through both the flesh and our emotions, to lose and to love, but most of all, what it means to be a man. In his delicate, frank and piercing interrogations of maleness, this is a poet who looks to assess the state of modern masculinity. He does so in ways that few others currently writing are either willing or able to. “The men are weeping in the gym / using the hand dryer to cover their sobs”, begins one grimly comic dissection of male anger and a...

THE WRITE STUFF Award-winning Reds poet Ben is composing more verse about his beloved Liverpool FC Reds fan and award-winning poet Ben Wilkinson is composing a brand new short collection of verse dedicated to Liverpool Football Club's greatest players. Guardian book critic Ben, who was featured in the magazine at the start of the season, recently published a book of poems entitled For Real . Kitted out in the colours of LFC, the collection won the prestigious Poetry Business Competition, judged by University of Liverpool graduate and Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. More of this feature, and a new poem, 'King Kenny', in the Official Liverpool FC Monthly Magazine , issue 27, November 2014    

... So by these various roads we have arrived at a miraculous little form in which our human need for unity and discontinuity, repetition and variation, tension and resolution, symmetry and asymmetry, lyric inspiration and argumentative rigour, are all held in near-perfect oppositional balance. The sonnet might be one of the great achievements of human ingenuity; I hope it’s clear by now that it isn’t an arbitrary construct that poets pit themselves against out of a perverse sense of craftsmanlike duty – it’s a box for their dreams, and represents one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take. Poets write sonnets because it makes poems easier to write. Readers read them because it makes their lives easier to bear. from 101 Sonnets (Faber, 1999)  

Charles Olson (1910-1970) from an interview with Michael Donaghy by Andy Brown, 1998 Yes. Not that there's anything especially wrong with that. But look at those sexy words used all too frequently to describe contemporary art and literature, 'experimental' and 'revolutionary'. The first is a metaphor filched from science - experimental art doesn't have a control group, doesn't collate and publish its findings. And 'revolutionary' properly describes a brick thrown at a police cordon, not a poem in Parataxis . Among the most cherished illusions of the avant-garde is the idea that bourgeois art consoles, pleases and mollifies with received notions of beauty, whereas avant-garde art shocks and challenges and doesn't seek to please. I'm always dismayed by this kind of self-delusion. The audience for avant-garde art is a middle-class audience that pays to be shocked, bored or insulted, much in the same way that Mistress Wanda's clients ...

. @BenWilko85 blogs about how poetry has helped him fight depression and shares his poem Hound http://t.co/UIJiS2yyW4 pic.twitter.com/2TggfvL6ZE — Mind (@MindCharity) April 2, 2015 I've written about my experience of depression for Mind , the mental health charity. The piece talks about the roles that reading & writing, poetry and running all played in my recovery. It also includes my poem 'Hound'. My hope is that it speaks to others, and that it might even help someone. Do share if you think it could.

They say poetry, like charity, begins at home. If her debut book of poems is anything to go by, Liz Berry would surely agree. Along with its lavish, atmospheric cover image of a bird’s dark plumage, what is immediately striking about Black Country , winner of the Forward prize for best first collection, is the way it digs deep into the poet’s West Midlands roots, enlivening and reimagining the heritage of that eponymous heartland of iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills, on both personal and public footings. Here are Thomas Telford’s “fabled waterways” and the swaggering Lady Godiva, the right hook of the “Tipton Slasher” and the legend of “The Black Delph Bride”. Even a “Birmingham Roller”, the unlikely pigeon famous for its tumbling backflips in mid-flight, turns up: an emblem of light and hope amid the dark post-industrial hinterland. And, of course, the “bostin fittle” – Black Country dialect for “great food” – of granny’s homemade “faggots minced with kidney and suet”, ...

'Wilkinson employs a direct approach [in For Real ] in terms of trying to unravel or describe complex things. Don Paterson once said that poets have "a greater obligation to clarity the more complex the idea they're trying to communicate." Paterson's rationale can also be applied to Wilkinson's poems and in particular the pamphlet's final poem, 'The Door' ... The door itself is real, albeit "bricked up" as old windows and doors sometimes are, but the door also potentially serves as "a portal between worlds." We could say that this is the essence of much of Wilkinson's poetry: to serve as a "portal" between the real and the possible to create a sense of truth.' The rest of the review, in which Maria Taylor assesses four smith|doorstop pamphlets, can be read in the current issue of Under the Radar . For Real is available through this website, or on Amazon .  

Hot off the press ... I'm thrilled to announce that the Arts Council England have offered me a Grants for the Arts award, to help complete, and secure a publisher for, my debut full collection of poems. I'll be using the grant to buy the time and space to write two sequences, which sometime visitors to this corner of the net will already know a little about: Kopite Sonnets , commemorating the legendary players of Liverpool Football Club from the '50s to the present day, placing them in the wider social and political history of the time; and The Catch , exploring experiences of clinical depression - stigma and despair; hope and renewal - with the added aim of widening understanding of mental illness. The latter will also include a series of free writing workshops to be held in conjunction with Writing Yorkshire . Initial poems from the Kopite Sonnets include 'This is Anfield', included in my pamphlet For Real , and 'John Barnes', winner of the Off...

“How did it get so late?” wonders Simon Armitage in Paper Aeroplane , his new selected poems. It’s a fair question. The recent fanfare of the Next Generation Poets 2014 , a promotion touting fresh voices set to dominate British verse, has coincided with Armitage, once poetry’s poster boy for the original New Generation Poets 1994, releasing this hefty retrospective. Twenty-five years have passed since he stunned the poetry world with his debut Zoom! (1989), his voice distinctive, his energetic style fully formed. Since then there have been: 10 book-length collections, a host of novels, plays, translations and memoirs, not to mention a clutch of TV and radio programmes. What surprises is how urgent and contemporary those early poems still read. “Heard the one about the guy from Heaton Mersey?” hollers “Snow Joke”, the opener from Zoom!. From the outset, Armitage’s combination of coined phrases, cliche and zippy vernacular with a sharp adherence to meter, rhyme and form, worked ...

  Today marks the end of a footballing era. The conclusion of a sporting career without parallel or equal. Steven Gerrard, Liverpool FC captain and legend, has confirmed that he is leaving the club to move to America and finish his Premier League career. Sports commentary is famously full of hyperbole, cliché and empty platitudes - perhaps nowhere more so than football. But LFC manager Brendan Rodgers seemed to put it near perfectly with his reaction to the news. “It is almost an impossible task to find the words to appropriately sum up Steven Gerrard and his importance to Liverpool. This is an era where the word ‘legend’ is vastly overused, but in his case it actually doesn't do him justice.” A local lad done good, Gerrard was born in the Merseyside village of Whiston, joining Liverpool's academy when he was a kid. He made his first-team debut as a last-minute substitute against Blackburn Rovers in 1998. Since then, he has gone on to lead a truly dazzling career, ...