I’ll be running initially to catch up with myself, but the plan from now on is to accompany each After Slumber poem with a short prose piece detailing the background, explaining the references and so on. This may help to make the poems themselves somewhat more intelligible. Douglas Oliver used a similar approach in An Island That Is All The World to unfold the contexts of his poems and develop a line of thinking that ran alongside them.

I’m also now intending that there should be 91 poems in total - one for each verse of The Masque of Anarchy. It’s quite possible I’ll run out of steam before I get there, but if I don’t this will add up to a small volume of poetry and prose on the themes of public (and private) disorder and the plutocratic anarchy of the past three decades. We’ll see. It might turn into something totally different by the end…