In this kill you darling (or DVD extra), I am visiting my great-great-great grandfather’s William Litt’s birthplace, Bowthorn Cottage. Above the door were carved the date ‘1685’ and the initials ‘E.M.S.’ I suddenly felt as if I were standing outside Wuthering Heights – over the principal door of which is carved the date ‘1500’ and the […]
In this cut section from Wrestliana, I imagine giving my ancestor William Litt a creative writing tutorial, to help him improve his novel Henry & Mary. Scene: My office. Ah, William – hello. Come in. Yes, that chair. I always sit in this one, don’t know why. Fine – okay? How are you? How have […]
A kill your darling from Wrestliana. Written a while ago. I miss Ali Smith. We edited an anthology together. We used to have the same publisher. Yesterday, searching for something else, I saw she was up for another prize. There was a photo of her, from The Independent. She stands, arms spread, as if caught […]
Today is the launch day of New Poetries 7, the occasional Carcanet anthology of new and not-established poets. I am very happy to be one of them. Most of the poems by me included in the anthology are lyrical. But the opening few are from a sequence I wrote the day Donald Trump won the […]
In this cut section from Wrestliana, I write about turning in to someone else. As a very private joke, a couple of years ago, I bought myself – from GAP – a grey tweed jacket of the blazer variety with oval black patches on the elbows. It was to make mischief of something I saw happening […]
This kill-your-darling from Wrestliana is about the American literary critic Harold Bloom. In A Map of Misreading and The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom puts forward a theory of how writers come to be the writers they are. It is, he says, because of an agon, an Oedipal struggle, a wrestling match, a war-embrace, with strong forbears […]
When D.H.Lawrence writes of sport, in his essay ‘Education of the People’, he wants agon. Set the boys one against the other like young bantam cocks. Let them fight. Let them hurt one another. Teach them again to fight with gloves and fists, egg them on, spur them on. Let it be fine balanced contest […]
Next in the continuing series of kill-your-darling sections painfully taken out of Wrestliana. The following really hurt. This was written to illustrate the split between intellectual and physical labour. (It’s meant to be very awkward.) The symbolic moment for me, and I knew it was this at the time, came during the summer of 1986. I […]
This kill-your-darling section from Wrestliana is about Samuel Beckett, my love of and ambivalence towards him. Happy birthday, Sam. So, I’m at my desk, who am I fighting right now? Who am I losing to? Sentence by sentence, it’s Woolf, Bellow, Lawrence, Mandelstam. But in figuring myself as a writer? Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), author of […]
In this extended section from Wrestliana, I am on my way up to Carlisle, to have a go at Cumberland Wrestling. I am nervous, and thinking about losing, and getting hurt. I watch a lot of chess videos on YouTube. One of them comes to mind. 23rd March 2016. All the way up, on […]
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