Michael Hulse

Born:
  • Stoke-on-Trent
Publishers:

Biography

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Bibliography

Half-Life
The Twentieth Century in Poetry
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge/Rainer Maria Rilke
The Secret History
The Devil's Blind Spot/Alexander Kluge
The Cherries of Freedom/Alfred Andersch
Empires and Holy Lands: Poems 1976-2000
Russian Disco/Wladimir Kaminer
The Appointment/Herta Müller
Where are you, Susie Petschek?/Cevat Capan
Vertigo/W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn/W. G. Sebald
The Emigrants/W. G. Sebald
The New Poetry
Caspar Hauser/Jakob Wassermann
Lust/Elfriede Jelinek
Eating Strawberries in the Necropolis
Mother of Battles
Wonderful, Wonderful Times/Elfriede Jelinek
The Sorrows of Young Werther/Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Prison Journal/Luise Rinser
Propaganda
Tumult/Botho Strauss
Knowing and Forgetting

Awards

1993
Bridport Poetry Prize
1991
Cholmondeley Award
1988
Bridport Poetry Prize
1980
Eric Gregory Award
1978
National Poetry Competition

Author statement

My Anglo-German roots, my Catholic upbringing, the moral sense of historical, social and political justice that I absorbed from my parents, and a deep wish to engage with as much of the world as I can, have all found their way into my poetry. A poet, I believe, is always stronger for having a genuine love of language, literatures, the visual arts, music, history, the natural world, and a wish to pursue substance rather than surface effect, and these requirements fire my own writing. There is no such thing as knowledge, or experience, that does not benefit a poem, but nine-tenths is best left invisible below the surface. Words, and the meanings of words, however contingent and evasive, are what we communicate with, as creatures of language, and I believe in using them with an informed scruple. The extremes of poetry ‒ dumbed-down populism, or hermetic sophistry ‒ do not appeal to me. Poetry has achieved greatness of very different kinds over a very long history, and I’d hope that anyone who wants to be thought a poet would have the humility to learn the art and craft thoroughly ‒ no pianist expects to please expert listeners to Beethoven sonatas unless he’s spent many hours, and years, in patient practice. I enjoy writing in syllabics, in free forms, or in metre, and find the experience of listening hard to the first words on the page, when a first draft is coming into being and the poem begins to makes its nature and direction known, exhilarating beyond description. The one rule is to write only the poems that take true soundings.