Talking Walking: Podcast interview
Back in March, I was interviewed by Andrew Stuck for the Talking Walking Podcast. Here it is, along with a cheering birdsong chorus.
An audience with angst: trying on techniques
Experimenting with poetic forms – here I have a go at a Villanelle – possibly the least ‘me’ form of all.
Performative Readers and Hypocrite Lecteurs
Apparently, there’s a thing called ‘Performative Reading’ and the ‘internet’ or rather some Insta/TikTok 20-something lol-merchants don’t like it. Here’s a blog on it with a bonus new poem.
Some place, unplugged
My backhanded, somewhat grudging tribute to Bath, from a Bristolian.
A Love Poem to Libraries
A love letter to libraries, in the form of a poem. ‘Library Stamps’ by Matt Gilbert
Reinventing New York through the medium of trousers
Some places are so famous, so iconic, it might be said that they visit you long before you return the favour…
Unamerican
There’s a new poem below. I don’t tend to like explaining poems, but I do appreciate a bit of context. Like many others I suspect, not least in the USA itself, I feel profoundly shaken by recent events there. When I was six, I discovered Charlie Brown cartoons, encouraged by an American exchange student assistant…
The meaning of ‘Meh’
The meaning of ‘meh’ or the beautiful mystery of subjectivity.
Ghosts exorcised by art, books & memory, plus unexpected delis. Four recent poems.
Four new poems – October 2024.
In search of the remarkably mundane
This article was originally published on Mono Fiction in 2021 – sadly the magazine and site seems to be no more. The approach it outlines still applies to a lot of the posts, which appear on this blog and often my poetry. Guest blogger, Matt Gilbert talks about finding writing inspiration in the seemingly mundane……
Can you ever know if a poem’s finished?
Writing poetry can be a strange and frustrating exercise. Sometimes lines, or even entire poems arrive like a kind of gift from the subconscious and you must record them on whatever comes to hand. Occasionally you might get one that feels complete from the off. Though in my experience this is rare. Even dreamlike poems,…
The poem’s the puzzle, or ‘I couldn’t not keep looking’
A very thoughtful, considered review of my poetry collection ‘Street Sailing’ in Briefly Write. Click the link to read it on their site. ‘In ‘Street Sailing’, Matt Gilbert looks anew upon familiar streetscapes. His reader can’t not keep looking’ ‘Street Sailing’ is a puzzle with many readings and many answers. Matt Gilbert is a skilful setter,…
“I’m really not quite sure about that…”: how (not) to make a poetry collection
Part Four in my blog post series about my poetry practice: Assembling a collection
Having admitted in previous posts in this series that I don’t always know exactly what I’m doing when setting out to write a poem, I must now confess I find the art of putting a collection together even more mysterious…
RIP Jonathan Raban
A brief appreciation of Jonathan Raban, upon his death.
2022: Another year in reading (as in books, not the town near Slough)
Middlemarch – despite predictably squealing ‘Nooooooo, don’t do it’ as Dorothea Brooke settled on the notion that the ridiculously dusty Casaubon would make the perfect husband, and then, experiencing similar stomach-pit lurchings when Lydgate started making eyes at Rosamond Vincy, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Advice to the poet from a five-hour drunk
In which I attempt to mine the gap between what’s thought and what’s spoken, in a cider fuelled conversation about poetry.
The world’s first psychic, intuitive, walking guide…
What if your average numbered walking guide, turned out to do much more – going beyond the basic geography to be predictive, intuitive, even psychic? If that happened, it might go something like this…
Imagine that there was a CheckaTrade for writers…
Imagine a world where there was a demand for poems to be repaired, plot holes to be fixed, unnecessary exposition removed, unfinished tales completed, or lost books and stories to be patched-up and rewritten. The literary equivalent of MyBuilder; let’s call it, Your writer.
word gnats
A Veritable Bewilderment of Delights
I’ve always quite liked the style of old handbills: the erratic punctuation, jumbled type sizes and overuse of exclamation marks especially. If I produced a handbill for this blog, it would look something like this…
Richly Evocative 