Smart Devices

Carol Rumens has been contributing `Poem of the Week to the Guardian for more than a dozen years. Do the maths: thats more than 624 blogs! No wonder she has a large and devoted following. Shes a poet reader, not an academic. She is in love with the new, but her love is instructed by the great poems she has read. They make her ear demanding: when it hears that something, it perks up. She perks up. She feels her way, agreeing with William Carlos Williams that, `A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. And he adds, `Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. She tries to avoid machines built from kits with instruction manuals. She looks for surprises, and she surprises us. Rumens has published seventeen collections of poetry and currently teaches Creative Writing part-time at the University of Bangor.