07 Feb 2017

Is there space for poetry anymore, Marcus. The poet has changed. The audience even more. That picture that could speak a thousand words, now with better editing and faster distribution, declaims ballads at a glance!

Not in my bookshop, there isn’t. Where Keats whispered to Hafeez and Tagore swapped songs with Browning, there are now piles of newfangled self-improvement guides.

I wonder if I should finish this poem I’m writing…

Oh, but write you must! If poetry cannot evolve, cannot find a way out of the dusty corners and echo chambers in which it finds itself, isn’t it better it ends – with a bang, than with a whimper?

rolling up the sky
the last eagle
drops the moon