If Alice's name is new to you, I envy you. You can start by having a rummage around the Disability Visibility website, with hundreds of interviews, articles and podcasts, or you could start by reading the anthologies Alice edited with Vintage, or read her memoir, The Year of the Tiger.

I can't remember much about the film, as I haven't seen it again since it came out, but some sequences are still in my mind, which perhaps says more than my movie verdict. What I do remember, though, is Ginsberg was my 'first' poet in a sense, his was the very first Collected I bought

And to think, there was a lot of griping when Daniel Radcliffe was cast as Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings just over a decade ago, as he was too 'pretty.'

This pic of Ginsberg with a cat is a favourite, also! It's from a brief period where the beard was full, but short.

Oh this is cool, what is the collection of writings called? Apparently, the only line of Ian Dury's memoir was 'Hullo Sausages' (as he was too ill to complete it). Hopefully I can get ahold of the collection book and say hello sosajis instead

He probably wanted to be left in peace, and he would've had every right to tell me to sod off, but no. He was friendly the whole way, and so kind to the stammering and sweaty bundle of nerves sitting beside him.

I met Brian shortly before his reading, on a bus. I was eighteen, and I can't recall what possessed me to sit next to him (was the bus full?) I talked his ear off about poems, and he recommended me a book of Robert Lowell's, Imitations. Brian was so kind to me.

In my infinite wisdom I forgot the source, that Levine quote is from his interview with John Amen, available to read here:

www.modernamericanpoetry.org/john-amen-in...

I'm reminded, also, of something Philip Levine said in an interview, about having an 'inner sense of applause'. He says,

'I do have an inner sense of applause, a sense that I did it, I got what I was after[...]there is a kind of inner applause, and I think that that´s what keeps me going.'

This reminds me of a poem by W.S. Graham, called 'Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons'. In the last lesson, the instructor says to his student,

'One last thing, Karl [...]
Do not be sentimental or in your Art.
I will miss you. Do not expect applause.'

people.umass.edu/~krueger/Doc...

Lane wrote some great books of poems, too. Alas, most of them are out of print, so they're a bit hard to get ahold of. I'm hoping for some justice for his poems soon 🙏

For anyone who doesn't know, the Warsaw Uprising was an effort by the Polish resistance to take back their city from the nazis. The poems of Building the Barricade (comprised of what Świrszczyńska's friend and sometime translator Czeslaw Milosz called 'poem-pictures') took 30 years to write.

I had forgotten that bubblegum poem, but I remember really laughing at the word 'worser', as I have after seeing it again. I love a poem called 'Scabs', too, that's a little too long for Bluesky. One verse goes,

The scab on Eric's knee
is economical.
£2.50:
second-hand skates.

Thanks for sending this over, I didn't know these grants existed! I'll have a look now

I expected the papers to be an odd page or two of correspondence about the book, and that would be that. Nope, it's an enormous folder. Princeton charge the quite low rate of two bucks per page, but of course over hundreds of pages, that adds up. If you can help a poor writer out, I'd appreciate it!