I've been writing a book about poetry. It's been pretty fun to write, so perhaps it'll be fun to read too. I'd tell you its title and more about its aims, but I haven't definitely figured the title out yet, and the aims are amorphous in some respects. It's a lot of fun hopefully in the same way that reading Sir Thomas Browne or John Aubrey is fun. Not that it'll be as good as Browne or Aubrey, of course, but that's fine; some of these guys like William Strode and so on are really worth looking into, and I'm probably not even at that level, but the point is that it's more of a tone that I'm going for than a revolution.

All that being said, this is much better than any of the technology stuff that I've been working on, far better than phenny or mimulus or any of those things; phenny is a fashion accessory really. It's like one of those lists where people rank the 100 Most Awesome People of All Time, and they only really include modern celebrities, and you know that people in 50 or a hundred years are going to choxelle themselves into a comick phrenzy at these old lists, and then they're going to make lists which are just as bad. What I mean is that I'm trying to write something which isn't all that provincial; it's cosmopolitan. It's not too involved, which is good, and hopefully that means it'll be more accessible than its subject makes it sound.

So it's not just about poetry, but that's what I've been saying, because it's easier to just say poetry, and there is a lot of stuff about poetry in there; I talk about all kinds of poetry from Sappho and Dickinson and Coleridge, all the usual suspects. But these are subordinate to the ideas about what's good about good poetry, which is usually one of those stupid permathread questions that you get in A-Level and you don't really think about any more after that. Well I'm hoping that this book is going to be a bit different, and will let people reclaim some of the meaning in poetry that postmodernism managed to slaughter; but in a different way to what went on before then, because these are different times and there'd be no point writing a book if all you had to do was go out and read A. C. Bradley.

Whilst I say “a book”, I don't have a publisher lined up or anything like that, and it might be years before I consider it complete or perhaps I'll give up and shelve it, or maybe I'll decide I want to really push to get it published; I'm not sure about it yet, because there are still lots of ideas that I want to incorporate, so the tone of the book is potentially far from finished. There's also so much material written now that it would stand as a complete work by itself already.

If you're good at thinking up titles, or just want to chat about and know more about about the book, feel free to contact me.