Prose poetry often gets rather meta towards the end, so I thought I’d end this Personal Anthology by nominating a text that is, literally, personal, in the sense that I am — sort of — one of its personae. Will Harris was our Poetry Fellow at UEA last year, and as part of his time here he gave a masterclass for the Poetry MA students, on a serene May evening, where he read from a prose work in progress and invited comment from the room. My contribution was to mention Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” — specifically, the bit where Benjamin compares a story from Herodotus to a seed that survives, dormant, for centuries, in an airtight pyramid. What preserves both story and seed, says Benjamin, is their dryness. My anonymous double in the retelling remembers it much more articulately than I did, though also doesn’t mention something I added — which is that Benjamin’s inspired simile of a seed surviving “for centuries” has been debunked. Does it matter, though? It’s a wonderful story about stories, as is this poetic essay, which is an elegant and reflective refashioning of an hour or so during which we kept a many-angled thought collectively alive (“this is the story we’re telling now, together”). These hours are why we have universities.

First published online in Too Little / Too Hard, issue 1, and available to read online here