Daring & Formal Originality in Philip Larkin’s Poetry with Mark Ford 21/7/26

Join Mark Ford, a major voice in contemporary poetry and leading literary critic, for a deep-dive into one of the 20th-century’s most iconic and popular poets, Philip Larkin. Mark is a brilliant poet himself, as well as one the UK’s leading contemporary poetry scholars, so the discussion will be a rare opportunity to explore poetry with rigorous close reading and literary insight. The workshop will also include a couple of opportunities to write inspired by Larkin’s poetry.

‘It is my contention that Philip Larkin is the most daring and formally original British poet of the second-half of the twentieth century, and I look forward to using this session to explore his power to move and startle, to unsettle and console.

Larkin was also one of the few 20th-century British poets to have been genuinely popular with the reading public. By the time of his death in 1985, Larkin had become celebrated almost as a national treasure, despite the gloom and despair so often expressed in his poems ('Life is first boredom, then fear' ...)

For some, it became difficult to separate the achievement of the poems from the details and context of his life. We’ll draw on biographies and letters, as well has his poems. 

We’ll consider the dramatisation of his vision of Englishness and English landscapes, his love of jazz, his gift for lapidary lines ('What will survive of us is love'), as well as his depictions of characters such as Mr Bleaney or the speaker of 'Wedding Wind'. We will follow his oscillations between romantic lyricism and hilarious profanity ('They fuck you up, your mum and dad'), between melancholy and satire, and assess the relationship between poetry and nationalism.

Mark Ford is the author of four collections of poetry: Landlocked (Chatto & Windus, 1992), Soft Sift (Faber & Faber, 2001), Six Children (Faber & Faber, 2011), and Enter, Fleeing (Faber & Faber, 2018). He has also published three monographs, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Faber & Faber, 2000), Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (Harvard University Press, 2016), and Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2023). His essays have been collected in four volumes, the most recent of which is A Guest Among Stars: Essays on Twentieth-Century Poets (Black Spring, 2024). This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray (Eyewear, 2014), was awarded the Poetry Foundation's 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Other publications include editions of the work of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Mick Imlah, and Allen Ginsberg, and he also edited the 800-page anthology London: A History in Verse (Harvard University Press, 2012). He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. A selection of his poetry is available at http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/mark-ford and an ongoing series of podcasts on poetry made with Seamus Perry is available on the London Review of Books website https://www.lrb.co.uk.

2.5 hours long

Start time: 10am UK time // 5pm Perth Australia // 6.30pm Adelaide // 6.30 Darwin // 7pm Brisbane // 7pm Sydney, AEST // 9pm NZ 

Online on Zoom -   The Zoom link and  joining materials will be sent by email at least 2 days prior. If you don’t receive it get in touch with me.

Cost £30 GBP (with cost effective exchange via STRIPE)

Waiting list - If live workshops places have sold out, please contact me directly here: https://www.tickettailor.com/promoter/help/link/cathdrakestheverandah if you'd like to be included on a waiting list for the live workshops. Don't forget to include the name of the workshop or use the dropdown list.

Times on the homepage of this site are in London, UK Timezone, but when you add the event to your calendar it should be correct for your local time zone. You can check your timezone against London UK time here: https://greenwichmeantime.com/time-gadgets/time-zone-converter/

More events here https://www.cathdrake.com

This event will be recorded. Our workshops are intended as live and interactive. However, there are a small number of tickets for those keen to come, but who cannot make the date of this workshop that are 'recording only' tickets to be purchased in advance ONLY for those who can't make the date. If you buy a live ticket and don't turn up on the day, you can't access the recording – sorry, it's not a fall back. You need to buy a live OR recorded ticket. This is because we primarily want poets to come and participate in live workshops. 'Recording only' tickets allow access to listen to a recording of the workshop during the 2 weeks following the workshop. (Note that we may share the recording at a future time to new participants.)