The website of writer and poet Daniel Bennett
Which of them will triumph? I would see our trumpeter on visits to the town. A scruffy but amiable figure, standing outside the old museum. He had worked in the same office job for as long as most could remember. But a dispute broke out. These are difficult times. He lost his job. Anyone could tell you a similar story. … Continue reading Trumpet Wars of the Old Town
'Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.' J. G. Ballard In retrospect, I should have known I was in trouble when someone asked me to list the influences of my novel All The Dogs. I named William Blake, Flannery O'Connor, Michael Reeves, and Graham … Continue reading Writing and Painting
'first a man and then a street' - Iain Sinclair Influences are tricky things, running like pathways of mercury through a writer's life. In part, to name a literary influence is to limit yourself, to take a place on the second step behind some greater figure. Sometimes, though, the opposite is true, and by naming … Continue reading London Smoke: Iain Sinclair
'I stopped my bicycle under a street lamp near Riddervolds Square and spread out the map to see where I was going.' Over the last years, loyal to the time in my life when I eschewed travel for reading, when the word edged out the world, I've taken to choosing a novel or book of … Continue reading Trapped In Oslo – The Blue Room by Hanne Ørstavik
'I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's.' William Blake I've always avoided writers' biographies, beyond the potted versions at the front of the work. It was an early decision, and one I've more or less stuck to over the years. When you start out at writing, it's tempting to go looking … Continue reading Influences
'Cigarette smoke hanging on in the living room. The ship's lights out on the water, dimming. The stars burning holes in the sky. Becoming ash, yes.' - 'Tomorrow' Every poet is a critic, at least if you believe Harold Bloom. In The Anxiety of Influence, he imagined the great poets of the twentieth century wrestling … Continue reading In a Marine Light: the poetry of Raymond Carver
I've never really got to grips with short stories. It wasn't like I didn't try. My first literary hero was Edgar Allen Poe, and I spent my mid-teens writing tales which delighted in darkness and imagination. I had a favourite English teacher— a neat and dapper man who smoked Marlboro Reds and drove a 2CV— … Continue reading Short fictions
In 2001, I travelled to Brussels, for a long weekend. One night, travelling back to my hotel on the Metro, on the way to Simonis, a man took the seat opposite me. He was mixed race, and balding, dressed in jeans and trainers, a T-shirt with an illegible decal underneath his cotton jacket
Absence Club 