Articles since 2005

Perhaps because I have always practised both forms, the essay and poem strike me as different expressions of the same impulse. I use the word “impulse” advisedly, because in either case I find it a matter of inspiration, and can’t get started without an unmistakeable inner urge to get something said. A less grand term for the essay is the article. Though Montaigne, who invented the essay, published no articles, almost every essayist since has done so: especially for English literature, almost all the short factual prose pieces that have ever mattered began their lives in newspapers and periodicals.

Hence my main reason for liking the word “article”. It smells of hot metal. Even today, when I have not been a regularly salaried journalist for almost 25 years, I still publish most of my prose pieces as articles first, and I still compose them in the measures dictated by journalism in its various grades. Those measures, I think, happen to fit the natural breath of a prose piece. A thousand words is a natural length to aim at for a short feature in a newspaper. About two and a half thousand is a natural length for a longer feature in a newspaper. Three, four and five thousand are natural for articles in serious magazines. Keep at it for about forty years and you get the knack of planning the number and order of themes in your head so as to fit those frames. I can’t exactly compose when I’m out walking, but if you catch me sitting there looking glazed it’s usually because I’m cooking something up, and if it isn’t a poem it will almost certainly be an article.

The first group of articles listed here can also be found in my collection The Meaning of Recognition, but I hope they might be of interest to visitors who have not seen that book. The second group of articles, listed with the most recent first, have all been published, in various newspapers and periodicals, since that book went to press in 2005. The links in the third group lead to samples of articles from the same book.