poet critic person · typographer @FaberBooks · contributor @theTLS · known birdwatcher · you could hire me to typeset something: tom.cook@turnstonebooks.co.uk
Joined May 2012
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Jan 14
My most recent piece for @theTLS is a review of Helen Vendler’s final book of essays on poetry. A truly brilliant collection overall, though she was wrong about Ocean Vuong, who is – as we know – shit.
GET IT HERE:
the-tls.com/literature/poetr…
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Jun 7
A taste of the first You Ain't Going Nowhere since 2012! Last night in at a Washington winery.
Jun 7
It’s officially Basement Tapes Summer. Show #2 opened with the first You Ain’t Going Nowhere since 2012!
📸 containsmultitudes
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Tom Cook retweeted
Jun 5
The big setlist news was delayed, probably bc very few people recognized the song. For the first time ever, Bob played the extremely obscure Basement Tapes outtake "Baby Will You Be My Baby"
It was the first live debut of an original song since Rough and Rowdy Ways!
A snippet:
Jun 5
Tonight's setlist included…
When I Paint My Masterpiece
Rainy Day Women
I Contain Multitudes
Crossing the Rubicon
All Along The Watchtower
Soon After Midnight
Early Roman Kings
Under The Red Sky
Forgetful Heart
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1 May 2025
bob dylan like a rolling stone - Google Search google.com/search?q=bob dyla…
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Bob Dylan absolutely deserved that Nobel. Few minds in music have come up with such concepts as riding through the desert on a nameless horse, or being stuck in the middle with you
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May 18
‘wield at’
"pretentious" is the word the unambitious wield at the ambitious.
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May 2
Paul McCartney on bumping into Bob Dylan at the airport
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Mar 26
Longfellow continuing the grand old tradition of poems about Shakespeare that start off well then crash headfirst into a brick wall
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Mar 24
I am seeing* Bob Dylan tonight!
(*actually a sliver of Bob Dylan visible between a hoodie and an enormous piano.)
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Mar 15
the scene in Hamnet where Paul Mescal does the To Be Or Not To Be speech is one of the most embarrassing scenes of 2025
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Mar 11
C. S. Lewis really gets it sometimes
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I just think it's neat that Shakespeare decided to cap off his career in the theatre by writing the only honest poems ever written
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Still completely baffled by this sequence where Buckley decides to play Agnes—wife of a playwright—as an infant seeing a play for the first time, or perhaps someone raised by wolves being reintroduced to human society. It goes on for what feels like 20 minutes. It’s unbearable.
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Tom Cook retweeted
Mar 1
Full offense but if as an academic I ever used AI to do any research for me, summarize any readings, or write any of my work, I would be so incredibly humiliated and ashamed of myself.
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Mar 2
I’m rereading Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) this morning. They’re much parodied, but they really are stunning; proof, however inconvenient, that the prose poem exists.
(Does anyone recognize the quote in the second stanza? Is it, knowing him, something from e.g. Ruskin?)
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Mar 2
(I have tried googling it, but Google is fucked now because of AI, and anyway all the search results lead back to… Geoffrey Hill’s 1971 collection of prose poems, Mercian Hymns)
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Mar 2
(It could equally, of course, be the voice of a schoolmaster? I don’t bloody know)
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