Talk About Poetry: Conversations on the Art

Talk about Poetry is made up of twelve interviews, conducted over the last decade or so for hard-to-find print and internet journals, in which Peter Robinson discusses such subjects as poetry and sexual violence, the balkanization of the art and ways to resist it, the techniques of poetry and how they engage with the circumstances of life, and the connections between his own poetry, literary criticism, translations, aphoristic writings, and ancillary work. He recalls the editing of Perfect Bound and Numbers, and the organization of the Cambridge Poetry Festival; he responds to criticism, praises fellow writers, has his doubts about some questions put to him, and much more besides. Talk about Poetry is not only a companion volume to The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, published in June 2006, but also a reliably open-minded guide through the forest of poetry during the last thirty years. Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953 and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He has degrees from the universities of York and Cambridge, and since 1989 has been a professor of English literature in Japan, at present in Kyoto where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He was described as 'the finest poet of his generation' as early as 1983, and has since established an international reputation in many of the fields associated with modern and contemporary poetry. His many publications include Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (2002), Selected Poems (2003), the aphorisms and prose-poems Untitled Deeds (2004), and Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations (2005). In 2006 he has published two books of poems, Ghost Characters (Shoestring Press) and There are Avenues (Brodie Press), and two translations, The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (Princeton) and, with Marcus Perryman, Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (Chicago).