Programmes, Blogs, Books

So that's The Killing finished and life seems a little empty without my daily dose of Danish crime drama :) But the good news is that series 2 is apparently on its way!

The BBC series A Poet's Guide to Britain is currently being re-run. It's good getting a chance to catch up on the programmes I'd missed first time round. I'd only seen the Plath and George MacKay Brown ones. So the other day I watched the one on Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach', which was really enjoyable and the one on the Welsh poet, Lynette Roberts, and her poem 'Poem from Llanybri' which I also really enjoyed, not knowing much about her previously. I'm really looking forward to watching the Louis MacNeice programme, a poet I've very much neglected to read which leaves the Wordsworth programme, which I think I might pass on...

Blogs of Interest: -

Thanks to Andrew Shields for the link to this fantastic blog - How a Poem Happens - every post is a poem followed by an interview with the writer of the poem analyzing how the poem came to be written. Reading through the back-posts has been fascinating, enlightening and full of little gems of advice. Very satisfying for those, like myself, who probably think too much about the actual process of writing!

Randomly came across this blog - Angel Exhaust - while researching the British poetry scene, lots of interesting stuff on the history of the underground/experimental/non-canonical poetry scene.

Been lazy about writing over the last couple of weeks, probably because I've been mostly reading prose. So need to decide on a new poetry reading plan, feel a little Crowther and Grunbein-ed out, though I'm still thinking on their poems I need to bring in a fresh strand of reading/focus.

I've been reading Primo Levi properly for the first time since I visited Dachau six years ago. Levi is a favourite writer of mine, I love his ability to see things so concisely and analytically. I think his collection of essays in The Drowned and the Saved is some the most insightful and honest writing on human behaviour ever written. I expected visiting the camp at Dachau to be an upsetting experience but wasn't ready for it to be such a traumatic experience. So six years on I'm now ready to face my Levi books and the difficult unanswerable questions he raises.