Pages: My 21st year of blogging reviewed! A hub post to the year

Sunday, February 15, 2026

My 21st year of blogging reviewed! A hub post to the year

Every year I celebrate another year of blogging. Last year I did that in the conventional way of looking back at the previous year, here, Pages: My 20th year of blogging: links to favourites!, but because it was the 20^th year, I decided to look back meditatively at those two decades of blogging in their own right: Pages: 20 Years of Blogging - some thoughts about my over 1500 posts, posted on the day, and this one tries to pick the best/favourite posts from the 1500 posts since 2005: Pages: Looking back at 20 years blogging: the best posts 2005-2025 (with links)!

This year, the task is easier. I’ve only got the last year to look at. Even so, there is one strange feature about most of this blogging year (February-February), and that was my ‘project’, marked by its extreme uselessness, of posting my dream diary for 1975, that is, of each dream on its 50^th anniversary. This post collages ALL the dreams into a sort of prose piece and explains itself, here: Pages: Dream Year 1975; or: the solipsist’s headparty (as a text). (I’ve not made up my mind at all about what to do with it.) Here’s one of my favourite inconsequential dreams (with helpful image): Pages: Dream Diary Tuesday 29 July 1975.

Big book news for me was Elle: A Verse Novel, published by Broken Sleep, and there are a couple of posts pertaining to the book, probably the most informative being this one: Pages: My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is published by Broken Sleep Books.

This post was important (to me) in that I was thinking about Stars: A Comedy Machine, my (still unpublished) ‘Dante’ poem, about Philip Terry’s ‘Dante’ poem (which I was reviewing), and about reviewing in general, which I seem to have returned to with some energy: Pages: My Tears’ review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio and my own Dante project revived – plus thoughts on reviewing.

This post features the set lists of 3 readings I did in March 2025. I like to collate such things: Pages: Three March readings up the North West coast (set lists). I was back at the Ainsdale venue in January 2026, as I demonstrate here (with more pictures by Ron Davies): Pages: Another reading in Ainsdale at Poets' Corner and Ron Davies' photos.

I was deeply moved by the death of poet friend John Seed during the year, and posted about him here, also finding myself surprised about how many posts I’d made concerning his work on this blog.: Pages: i.m. John Seed (with links to posts on his work).

I largely drafted my talk for this Glasgow University conference in memory of Jerome Rothenberg in a series of posts. You might as well go to the final thing, in full here: Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium | English Studies in Latin America: A Journal of Cultural and Literary Criticism, from the online pages of English Studies of Latin America, January 2026. (All the other papers by others are there too, of course.)

After my 2016 book The Meaning of Form I’ve been thinking (on this blog and in my journal, and putting some of the latter up on the former) about form. Here’s a few initial thoughts about pushing beyond the Derek Attridge influenced thesis of my book: Pages: From My Journal: On Form (again) and Caroline Levine’s Forms. In early February 2026 I returned to this theme and posted the following long post: Pages: FORM (again!) on Tom Eyers and Speculative Formalism.

My daily writing practice (which I early dubbed ‘Ark and Archive’) reached page 1000 this year, and I thought I’d share it with you. I sometimes make poems out of it (but other times it’s simply a way of keeping ‘writing fit’), and I celebrated that here, with a little video of the thousandth page and of examples of how it’s been used: Pages: Ark and Archive page 1,000 - keeping a daily practice of writing going.

In the latter half of 2025 I posted a number of posts about the British Poetry Revival, trying to find new things to say about a subject I’ve already talked myself hoarse on. Here’s a couple of new things in one of the posts: Pages: How the British Poetry Revival appears in one history of its times: Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat.

Lee Harwood on the cover of Poetmeat.

Indica Bookshop: the Ashers leaving

I really enjoyed my tongue-in-cheek hangdog prose for Rupert Loydell’s Stride on ‘Deflated Ego’. I took it very literally! Here’s a post on that: Pages: My DEFLATED EGO on Stride (a mini essay on my creative summer torpor). Note I think that some of the other excellent posts in the series just weren’t deflated enough! (There's a link to the Stride piece too.)

Three online magazines (so far) have published excerpts from my ‘Tone Poem’ poems about recent jazz. Here’s a hubpost to find those, and some reflections on the rest of the sequence: Pages: TONE POEM and my other poems about music (links).

Brandee Younger (and harp), one of the featured musicians

I always have a few personal matters on here, but this one shades over into poetry: a ‘Burnt Journal’ poem for all my friends (and me!) who were 70 in 2025. See them posing here in the Belvedere. Read the poem here: Pages: Burnt Journal 1955 for the 1955 Committee (including me!).

It was good to be included in a tribute book for poet and organiser Ric Hool; see here for more on the book, and on Ric: Pages: Tributes to Ric Hool included in A Landscape Pulsing with Life (one from me).