Smart Devices

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 in love with the new, but herlove is instructed by the great poems she has read. They make her eardemanding: 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 poetryis the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in allmachines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more thana literary character". She tries to avoid machines built from kits withinstruction manuals. She looks for surprises, and she surprises us.Rumens has published seventeen collections of poetry andcurrently teaches Creative Writing part-time at the University of Bangor.