When Dylan's Time out of Mind came out in 1997 you could tell it had a different kind of electricity; lightning bolts instead of dim bulbs. Such a turnaround in creative endeavour was a long time in coming, but you knew it would come. The roots of that album were...

With the imminent release of The Dictator, Baron Cohen's despot comedy this new blog post is a new poem, begun on a flight to Khartoum last October, the day after Colonel Gaddafi of Libya was beaten, mutilated, buggered with a knife and eventually killed by what seemed to be a...

In the cultural pecking order, film and poetry sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. Film is probably the world's most popular art form, drawing the biggest audiences. Poetry, on the other hand, almost certainly draws the smallest. So what kind of fusion happens when you put them together?

As...

Let's wind back the tape 30 years and spring it from the machine and here we are in Camden, 1983, Chalk Farm market, second home to a ragged ephemera of household junk-cum-collectibles, dead men's suits by the rackload wheeled across the cobbles, and lines of blokes with crooked smiles and...

It's possible that poems are unusual as a blog entry, though to my mind they are the most vivid and impactful form of communication in the slippery underwater realm of online interactivity. And so, as Europe appears to be unravelling before our eyes, and into the hands of feral financiers...

It's last week and we're standing outside the Ministry of Culture in Khartoum, Tilal Salih and I, waiting for the taxi driver to emerge from afternoon prayers, with the temperature nudging towards the mid-40s and the highway shaking with buses, trucks, battered taxis, and the odd four-wheel drive with UN...