Smart Devices

A year of hand-picked poems and commentaries from the Guardian's 'Poem of the Week' blog.

Carol Rumens has been contributing 'Poem of the Week' to the Guardian for more than a dozen years. Do the maths: that's more than 624 blogs! No wonder she has a large and devoted following. She's a poet-reader, not an academic. She is fascinated by the new, but her interest is instructed by the classic poems she has read. They make her ear demanding: when it hears that something, it perks up. She perks up.

'A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.' Rumens partly agrees with Williams but she develops the conceit, seeing each poem 'as a more flexible instrument, a miniature neo-cortex, that super-connective, super-layered smartest device of the mammalian brain'.

She tries to avoid poems built from kits with instruction manuals. She looks for surprises, and she surprises us.

About the Author

Carol Rumens was born in Forest Hill, South London, in 1944. She began writing music reviews for the local press when she was sixteen. She has held various literary posts, including the Northern Art Fellowship, and poetry residencies located at Queen's University Belfast, University College Cork, Stockholm University and the Harvard Centre for Hellenic Studies, Nafplio. Rumens has published twenty poetry collections, the latest of which is The Mixed Urn (Sheep Meadow Press, 2019). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Bangor, Gwynedd.