Jeffrey Side

I was interviewed for The Wombwell Rainbow a few years ago. The interview was part of a series of interviews with poets and writers about th...

It has been so long since I first started writing poetry, that I had almost forgotten why I started to write it. It certainly had everything...

Looking at the barrage of overrated and over-produced contemporary films it is easy to forget that film once aspired to be an art form. One ...

What distinguishes a song from a poem? Is it the melody or the vocal delivery, the lyrics or the musical arrangement? Certainly, it encompas...

Christopher Plummer’s In Spite of Myself is one of the best showbiz memoirs I’ve read. It’s very long (over 600 pages) but never boring, la...

It is just over a year since I had to had to close down The Argotist Online, due to the increasing cost of running it, both financially and ...

Since his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney’s reputation as a poet has grown from strength to strength in the popular media and in some academic ...

The pervasive influence of Wordsworth on British mainstream poetry in the Twentieth Century is undeniable. This influence played a significa...

My thanks to Jonathon Penton for publishing my article ‘Reflective Discursiveness: Exploring Poetic Thought and Fragmentation in Wordsworth...

What distinguishes a song from a poem? Is it the melody or the vocal delivery, the lyrics or the musical arrangement? Certainly, it encompas...

Tony Frazer of Shearsman Press said in a 2017 online discussion that ‘few poetry books sell 500 copies. I’ve been told that a sale of 500 is...

In The Reader, the Text, the Poem , Louise Rosenblatt says: ‘The poem, then, must be thought of as an event in time. It is not an object or ...

At one time, poetry was viewed as being the apex of literary accomplishment. However, in contemporary cultural discourse, poetry’s cultural ...

A good friend of mine, Paul Simister, died recently. I first met him in 1982 when I was 19 and he was 36. We were both studying at Mabel Fle...

Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry , published in 1982, sparked controversy due to its perce...

I just heard that Anny Ballardini died a few years ago. I hadn't been in contact with her since around 2013. She was a great supporter o...

I found out recently that poet and translator Kent Johnson had died. I was last in contact with him last month, and though he was ill due to...

Good to see that the name of The Argotist Online ("argotist") has now become part of the lexicon. It is a portmanteau word, create...

Here is an article by Tim Allen called ‘The Kiss of Life? The Kiss of Death? Some Thoughts on Linguistically Innovative Poetry and the Acad...