Early this year, days after my dog died and before I became lit up with the pale-blue fire of a bout of mania, I became fascinated again with the work of Robert Lowell. As a young man, I had encountered the poet in the corners of a classroom I went spectacularly mad in, my nose always bleeding, and found him stodgy. He was another one of those fuckers who makes you work, I thought, and who unravels himself only when you begin applying the thumb-press of analysis. That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted poetry that was rude; that made no sense at all; that hit the side of the head like a baseball bat. From where I sat, Lowell was in the canon, and I thought the canon could go fuck itself.

Most of all, I was obsessed with David Berman, the lead singer of the Silver Jews, and a writer of verse who made the whole game of ‘interpreting poems’ seem cock-eyed and boring. In ‘If There Was a Book About This Hallway’, Berman paces little circles around a corridor, aimlessly deciding that if ‘Christ had died in a hallway we might pray in hallways’. What more to say than that? No greater themes to unpack. Just a hallway with a crucified man in the centre of it, dying for our sins.