Kerraway » Poetry

Goodbye to Peter Porter

Michael Kerr — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:09:30 +0000

A lovely Telegraph obituary this morning of Peter Porter, a poet who made an art of self-deprecation:

Porter himself liked to tell the story of how, when he won the 1983 Duff Cooper Prize, one of his daughters had remarked: “Oh, Daddy, that’s just like you! Why couldn’t you have won the Cooper Prize?”

Heaney on translating

Michael Kerr — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:38:46 +0000

Lovely bit of phrasemaking this morning by Seamus Heaney on Today on Radio 4, where he was being interviewed about his translation work. Asked whether he turned to it when he lacked the impulse to write his own poetry, he answered that it was a way of “giving yourself the high of finishing without the distress of starting.”