Rory Waterman
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rorywaterman.bsky.social
Rory Waterman
@rorywaterman.bsky.social
Poet, writer, prof of modern literature, leader of AHRC Lincolnshire Folk Tales project (2024-5). New poetry collection COME HERE TO THIS GATE (Carcanet, 2024). Co-editor of New Walk Editions. Views yours; likes/RTs=marriage proposals. OTBC🔰/COYP
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My comment, for @pnreview.bsky.social, on the Len Pennie & Sarah Doyle affair - or Canongagegate, as I like to think of it. Honourable mentions: @naush.bsky.social, @thetimes.com.

Feel free to share, to attack me with your little jelly pitchforks, or to ignore.

www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/rema...
PN Review Print and Online Poetry Magazine - Remarkable Coincidences - Rory Waterman - PN Review 286
One of the outstanding poetry journals of our time.
www.pnreview.co.uk
Reposted by Rory Waterman
Ilse Pedler won first prize in our 2025 Open Competition, judged by Rory Waterman, with her poem, “After the calving”.
October 20, 2025 at 6:38 PM
I'm reading in OXFORD, 12 Nov (Wednesday) at 6.30pm. Please come!

www.southbankcentre.co.uk/venues/natio...
Rory Waterman and N S Thompson | Southbank Centre
www.southbankcentre.co.uk
November 9, 2025 at 6:07 PM
Choosing poems for a reading in Oxford next week. This starts a sequence in my most recent collection (www.carcanet.co.uk/978180017396...).
I worried it was too syrupy, but concluded it provided balance to other parts of the sequence & could survive in context. Here it is OUT of context.
November 7, 2025 at 10:00 PM
Sarah Doyle: grace, grit, and some very good poems that deserve your attention for the right reasons.
I have found this whole episode incredibly distressing and isolating, so I'm grateful to see Rory Waterman's analysis shine a light on both the poetry and the poison. Whatever your views, we need a more courteous and humane public discourse, from and for all parties. Please.
My comment, for @pnreview.bsky.social, on the Len Pennie & Sarah Doyle affair - or Canongagegate, as I like to think of it. Honourable mentions: @naush.bsky.social, @thetimes.com.

Feel free to share, to attack me with your little jelly pitchforks, or to ignore.

www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/rema...
November 7, 2025 at 6:40 PM
My comment, for @pnreview.bsky.social, on the Len Pennie & Sarah Doyle affair - or Canongagegate, as I like to think of it. Honourable mentions: @naush.bsky.social, @thetimes.com.

Feel free to share, to attack me with your little jelly pitchforks, or to ignore.

www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/rema...
PN Review Print and Online Poetry Magazine - Remarkable Coincidences - Rory Waterman - PN Review 286
One of the outstanding poetry journals of our time.
www.pnreview.co.uk
November 7, 2025 at 2:43 PM
I'm leading a two-hour online workshop on writing sonnets (or, really, poems that meaningfully twist away from the expectations of the form) for The Poetry Business on Mon 12 January. Sign up below!

www.tickettailor.com/events/thepo...
Buy tickets – Online Workshop: “Sonnets: Playing Meaningfully with Expectations” with Rory Waterman – Zoom
Online Workshop: “Sonnets: Playing Meaningfully with Expectations” with Rory Waterman – Zoom, Mon 12 Jan 2026 - Sonnets: Playing Meaningfully with Expectations In this two-hour workshop, you'll unders...
www.tickettailor.com
November 7, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Attend the New Walk Editions online reading with Mark Ford and Sean O'Brien, 7pm on 20 November. It'll be excellent, I assure you.

us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: New Walk Editions launch: Sean O'Brien and Mark Ford. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.
Join us for the launch of exceptional, surprising pamphlets by two of the finest and most highly acclaimed poets writing today. MARK FORD, The Morlocks: A Fantasia SEAN O'BRIEN, A la Carte The even...
us06web.zoom.us
November 4, 2025 at 8:11 PM
Reposted by Rory Waterman
Tomorrow, please join Evan Jones online at 7pm for the launch of his new poetry collection Men of the Same Name!💻

The event will be hosted by Jim Johnstone and will feature reading and discussion.

Tickets cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book:🎟️
us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Men of the Same Name: Carcanet Online Launch. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.
Please join us to celebrate the launch of Men of the Same Name by Evan Jones, hosted by Jim Johnstone. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along. Men of the Same Name is satirical, elegiac and memorable, bringing together lost books, burned libraries, Goethe, the lives and deaths of Presocratic philosophers, Paris, statues of Niobe, patterns in history, war, displacement, the evils of ambition, and Pachynian tuna. What if, Jones asks, instead of using the ancient world as a metaphor for modern life, the poet uses modern life as a metaphor for the ancient world? Working in this way between allegory and reality, the book rethinks poetry’s changing relationships to politics and our historical moment. Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event. Canadian poet Evan Jones [Ευριπίδης Ιωάννου] lives in Manchester. His first collection of poetry, Nothing Fell Today But Rain (2003), was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He co-edited Modern Canadian Poets (2010) and has since published Paralogues (2012) and Later Emperors (2020). His translation from the Modern Greek, The Barbarians Arrive Today: Poems and Prose of C.P. Cavafy (2020), was a TLS Book of the Year. Jim Johnstone is a Canadian poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The King of Terrors (Coach House Books, 2023).
us02web.zoom.us
November 3, 2025 at 10:00 AM
MARK FORD and SEAN O'BRIEN launch their New Walk Editions pamphlets online, 20 November, 7pm UK time.
Book here: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
October 25, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Good point well made by @abrackenbury.bsky.social.
October 25, 2025 at 9:45 AM
Sometimes good things do come to those who wait.

I have read a version in ts, and think this will come to be seen as one of the significant debuts of the decade. @carcanet.bsky.social throws another 180.

And yes, the cover looks excellent.
I'm thrilled to say that my collection "Dirt Rich" will be published by Carcanet in January. I've been working at it for almost 30 years: love poems, elegies, lamentations, jokes... The aim is "all killer no filler". Please buy it if you can. Here's Andrew Latimer's brilliant cover:
October 25, 2025 at 9:42 AM
Reading in Oxford on 12 November, 6pm. I'll mainly read from my new(ish) @carcanet.bsky.social collection Come Here to This Gate, plus some of my earlier work. There will be a reading also by N.S. Thompson, and a public discussion about poetry. Do come! It's free.
October 7, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Reposted by Rory Waterman
Tomorrow at 6.30pm, join @rorywaterman.bsky.social at Louth Words Festival where he will be reading from his Carcanet collection 'Come Here to this Gate'.

The event is free to attend, but for more information see here:⬇️
www.zerodegreeslouth.org.uk/home/louth-s...
Louth Words Festival 2025 – Zero Degrees Arts Festival Louth
A Festival of the Spoken Word with a Local Flavour. Free to attend for all Celebrating Poetry, Lincolnshire Dialect, Prose and Oral History Open Mic events for
www.zerodegreeslouth.org.uk
October 3, 2025 at 2:02 PM
Tributes to the great John Lucas, compiled by Neil Fulwood, and including Kathleen Bell, Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, Andy Croft, Michael Eaton, Roy Marshall, Jonathan Taylor, Gregory woods, and me. A joy to read, even if it makes your eyes and forehead sting.

www.openbook.org.uk/chainlink/20...
John Lucas (1937-2025): A Tribute
Photograph of John Lucas copyright Graham Lester George When Roy Marshall asked me, back in 2016, when I was going to stop mucking about and put a collection together, my reply was that I genuinely…
www.openbook.org.uk
October 1, 2025 at 8:45 PM
As it is Lincolnshire Day, on which all citizens of the good earth genuflect in the direction of Market Rasen, here are two of the Lincs-set poems from Come Here to This Gate, published by
@carcanet.bsky.social last year.

If you order it, St Guthlac won’t curse you: carcanet.co.uk/author/rory-...
October 1, 2025 at 3:12 PM
I've just learned that my review of Jake Morris-Campbell's Northumbrian travelogue BETWEEN THE SALT AND THE ASH has been published in Folklore. Paywalled, but for those with institutional affiliation, etc: www-tandfonline-com.ntu.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10..... A good book.
Shibboleth Authentication Request
www-tandfonline-com.ntu.idm.oclc.org
October 1, 2025 at 12:35 PM
For the past week and a bit, I’ve often been preoccupied with two sets of thoughts: about John Lucas, and about ridiculous responses to reviews. Here I am, writing 11 years ago, in a piece included in a book I published with John’s Shoestring Press a year ago. Be more John.
October 1, 2025 at 11:22 AM
Well, Robin, I really enjoyed doing it, Peter was a great interviewer (as you would have been), hearing you chat about my book in the after-interview bit was great if at times uncomfortably perceptive (as it should be), and being invited was a compliment. Thank you.
I really enjoyed 'Come Here to This Gate' by @rorywaterman.bsky.social Here's my interview with Rory on @planetpoetry.bsky.social : planetpoetry.buzzsprout.com/1414696/epis...
September 29, 2025 at 11:47 AM
One of three ‘interludes’ in ‘All But Forgotten’, a sequence in my book Come Here to This Gate (@carcanet.bsky.social, 2024).
I probably wouldn’t have written these 3 poems without Tony Harrison’s From the School of Eloquence. He gave us direct, moving poems, and I’ve wanted more of them ever since.
September 28, 2025 at 10:55 AM
Next millennium you'll have to search quite hard
to find my slab behind the family dead,
butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard
adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.

Tony Harrison (1937-2025)

Photographs taken in 2019
September 28, 2025 at 10:51 AM
Two evenings in two cities for two very different reasons with the one and only Imtiaz Dharker. Here she is reading for Inspire in Notty.
September 25, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Reposted by Rory Waterman
Join @rorywaterman.bsky.social at Louth Words Festival at 6.30 pm on Saturday 4th October where he will be reading from his Carcanet collection 'Come Here to this Gate'.

The event is free to attend, but for more information see here:⬇️
www.zerodegreeslouth.org.uk/home/louth-s...
Louth Words Festival 2025 – Zero Degrees Arts Festival Louth
A Festival of the Spoken Word with a Local Flavour. Free to attend for all Celebrating Poetry, Lincolnshire Dialect, Prose and Oral History Open Mic events for
www.zerodegreeslouth.org.uk
September 24, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Rory Waterman
Join @rorywaterman.bsky.social at Louth Words Festival at 6.30 pm on Saturday 4th October where he will be reading from his Carcanet collection 'Come Here to this Gate'.

The event is free to attend, but for more information see here:⬇️
www.zerodegreeslouth.org.uk/home/louth-s...
Louth Words Festival 2025 – Zero Degrees Arts Festival Louth
A Festival of the Spoken Word with a Local Flavour. Free to attend for all Celebrating Poetry, Lincolnshire Dialect, Prose and Oral History Open Mic events for
www.zerodegreeslouth.org.uk
September 17, 2025 at 3:01 PM
I'm also reading at No Limits Festival, Normanby Hall, on Sunday 21 September, 1.30pm. Thanks for Rabbit Hole Books for inviting me!
Normanby Hall is gorgeous, and a lot will be going on.
September 13, 2025 at 6:09 PM
Reading on 4 October, in Louth, which is somewhere close to the centre of the universe. When you're in it, anyway, by definition. Please come if you are in the area. I only bite when invited to do so. Free entry.
September 13, 2025 at 5:37 PM