About Poetry

Peter Riley (born 1940) is an English poet, essayist, and editor. Riley is known as a Cambridge poet, part of the group loosely associated with J.H. Prynne which today is acknowledged as an important center of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. Riley was an editor and major contributor to 'The English Intelligencer'. He is the author of a number of books of poetry, and many chapbooks. He was the poetry editor of 'The Fortnightly Review' for several years and was a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award in 2012 for "achievement and distinction in poetry". He lives in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire.

• Editor's PrefaceSpitewinter Provocations: Interview with Kelvin Corcoran (1983)Commentary on Ospita (1987)The Creative Moment of the Poem (1992)Interview with Keith Tuma (2001)Quote, 'It Don't Mean a Thing' (2005)Manchester (2007)Interview with Todd Thorpe (2008)Interview with Daniel Eltringham (2012)Interview with Kelvin Corcoran (2012)Erudition: Interview with Kelvin Corcoran (2016)An Act of Pure Trust: Due North: Interview with Kelvin Corcoran (2016)What Happened to Poetry? (2018)There and Then (2012; rev. 2021)Encountering (2022)Provenance of the items collected in this volume

"Peter Riley is a major poet, and this collection of essays and interviews testifies to the humility, lucidity, and ability to think and feel that has characterised his ongoing 'encounter' with poetry, and which has enabled his work to develop so exhilaratingly throughout his career. Many of the pieces collected touch on the relationship between avant-garde - 'late modernist', 'experimental' - and more mainstream poetic expression, and demonstrate how Riley's generous acceptance of the diversity of modern and contemporary poetry has not only insulated him - as poet and critic - against the sectarianism of cliques (Paterson on the one hand, Prynne on the other) but has provided him with access to the resources that underpin and inform his uniquely analytical catholic vision and reflexive, exploratory expression." -Steve Ely"This book is like a fabulous intellectual boot camp. I am stretched to my very limits, I sometimes fear the challenges are beyond me, but Riley, the kindly instructor, his mind agile and muscular, but always compassionate, guides me through. I leave invigorated, enriched, and with an indefinable inner glow." -Frank Skinner "Across almost forty years of interviews and essays, Peter Riley thinks his way through what poetry is and does. Always, he returns to the experience of the poem itself, a thing of care and amazement and contraries, 'neither transparent nor opaque'; a shared space of possibility. Sharp, wry and companionable, About Poetry is one of the wisest accounts I know of what it means to write and to read poetry, and why doing so matters. Or as Riley puts it, 'What I'm muttering on about is the world'." -Judith Willson