this evening !! come along if you think T. S. Eliot’s reading voice is boring 🙃

Harold Monro’s hit list of ‘Bad Verse’ at UCLA Library. First one is my personal favourite & also seasonally appropriate !

v much enjoyed presenting at Sounding Modernism King's College London today on free verse & verse speaking 🔊 left with ears full of interesting sounds + a new appreciation for the resonances of Entente ! many thanks to Dr Imogen Free + Anna Snaith for an excellent couple of days 💥

a lovely few days of writing in beautiful box ! thanks to Arts and Humanities Research Council for keeping us supplied with biscuits, wine & very good company🍷

v excited to be a part of this year’s T. S. Eliot studies annual ! big thanks to Frances Dickey & Julia E. Daniel for putting it together. like to think the man himself would appreciate the millennial pink cover

very Eliot-esque last weekend in beautiful boston for the International T. S. Eliot Society annual meeting 🍂 1: they say never meet your heroes but Ronald Schuchard is 10x better in real life 2: not usually a red brick fan, but ! 3: some nascent practical cats in the houghton collections ?

Workplace well-being initiatives don't boost employee mental health newscientist.com/article/241156…

⭐️💫CHR 18 is launched 💫⭐️ Internet sonnets, Wittgenstein, utopias gone wrong, Joanna Hogg & a bit by me on the BBC. All a pleasure to edit & a strong candidate for your rainy Saturday read. Joe Davidson

Had fun writing about Kafka and the Kafkaesque for the Financial Times this Saturday ! Because I hear it's a slow news week... A Cage Went in Search of a Bird — the meaning of Kafkaesque in today’s world on.ft.com/3zrMUWC

…Phil Hebblethwaite in The New Statesman on composer Modest Mussorgsky, Yasmin Nair (One Tenacious B.) in Current Affairs on the state of book reviewing at the Times, and Isabelle Stuart in Public Books on Sheila Heti and autofiction. Plus, Julia’s notes on a poem by Jim Peterson from The Good Life Review. Read now!

Wrote about some old and new kinds of life writing for Public Books. Prompted by reading Sheila Heti’s quite boring / silly sounding Alphabetical Diaries and wanting to explain why I thought it wasn't silly or boring at all. Read this but also read it! publicbooks.org/the-writing-i-…

Coming soon: Issue 10!

Reviewed Daniel Matore's v good study of C20th typographical experiment for RES! An excellent new resource for anyone interested in print cultures, material text or metre in the period. academic.oup.com/res/article-ab…

“Hunter was a poet before she turned to fiction, and the language of ‘Days of Light’ is richer and denser than that of her angular first two novels.” Isabelle Stuart examines Megan Hunter’s new novel, “Days of Light.” lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-le…

Wrote about the Poetry Bookshop's early C20th broadsides for RES. In 1926 Harold Monro 'recommended [them] for hanging almost anywhere, schoolroom, pantry, garret, bathroom'– ours is still going strong in 2025 ! academic.oup.com/res/advance-ar…