Beowulf is going to be filmed. Twice. The Canadian screenwriter of one version commented that some parts of the story are implausible, but that will not stand in the way. He adds 'several significant characters' but remains true to 'the bones of the story, the horror, the beauty and the doom'. Others have commented on the absence of love interest, forgetting the touching figure of Grendel's mother. Beowulf & Grendel will be directed by Sturla Gunnarsson as a $12,000,000 co-production involving British, Canadian and Icelandic funders and starring the Scottish actor Gerard Butler. This will be a 'spiritual' interpretation. The $70,000,000 Hollywood production from Sony, funded by the millionaire Steve Bing, is directed by Robert Zemeckis. The script, co-written by Roger Avary, who worked with Tarantino on Pulp Fiction, is 'a sort of dark-ages Trainspotting, filled with mead and blood and madness'. Previous attempts to translate the poem to the screen have been commercial madness.

The American poet ROBERT CREELEY has died in Texas at the age of 78. In 1995 John Ashbery introduced a reading by Creeley at the New School, New York. Recalling how they were students together at Harvard, sharing a course on the eighteenth-century English novel, Ashbery says they never spoke then; nor does he remember the work-shop poems Creeley produced. But he does not regard Creeley as a minimalist: 'what strikes me most about his poetry is a sense of richness and ripeness, beautifully contained in a vessel which was made to order by the circumstance of writing the poem'. He adds, 'His succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond' (Selected Prose by John Ashbery, edited by Eugene Richie, 2004). Creeley liked to quote Melville's words, 'Visible truth' is 'the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things.' Achieving that truth was his poetic goal. If he was a minimalist (John Simon said of his poems, 'They are short; they are not short enough'), he was a voluminous one, with five dozen substantial publications to his credit including poetry, fiction, dramatic writing and essays.

PHOEBE HESKETH, devoted to Edward Thomas from an early age, a poet of considerable precision and inventive traditional prosodies, died in Lancashire in February at the age of 96. She was admired at one end of her career by Siegfried Sassoon and Roy Campbell, at the other by Ian McMillan. Anne Stevenson championed her work and tried to enhance her appeal to women readers and writers in the 1970s, but she is a poet whose loves, and whose tragic losses (her son's death by drowning), belong to the conservative and formal, even the rich residual Georgian, tradition of English lyric and elegy.

ERNA ROSENSTEIN, the Polish surrealist poet and artist who was at the heart of the Krakow avant-garde for much of the twentieth century, died last November at the age of 91. On 5 January one of the most inventive and generous of British literary agents, GERALD POLLLINGER, died at the age of 79; he was a wizard and magician when it came to copyright, and he understood the place of the independent small presses and magazines in the ecology of literary publication. MARIO LUZI, the allusive and spare Italian poet who some regarded as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, died in February in Florence at the age of 80. On 1 March LUCIEN CARR, Ginsberg's 'Old Angel Midnight' and a key, controversial and enigmatic figure among the early Beats, though not a Beat writer himself, died of cancer in March at the age of 79. Another associate of the Beats, PHILIP LAMANTIA, a surrealist and disciple of Breton whom Breton warmly acknowledged, died in March at the age of 77; he was one of the poets who read at the famous Six Gallery event at which Ginsberg first performed Howl. In February JUSTIN HOWES, the typographer and expert in letter forms who was responsible for the re-design of PN Review that began with issue 93 and was retained until PN Review 110, died at the age of 41. CHARLES HOBDAY, the biographer of Edgell Rickword and a Communist activist whose writing, especially of poems, came into its own as his work for the Party diminished, died in March at the age of 87; he was one of the last of that remarkable, overlooked generation of writers that included the excellent Jack Beeching, Arnold Rattenbury, Jack Lindsay and (less neglected) Christopher Hill.

In January in Palermo LES MURRAY and GEORGE STEINER were honoured, Les Murray with the thirtieth Mondelo Award for Freddy Neptune and George Steiner with the Chairman of the Jury's Award recognising his life's work.

Every two years, on the eve of Midsummer, writers assemble for the Finnish Lahti International Writers' Reunion. In 2005, from 19 to 21 June, the event will take place at the Mukkula Manor near Lahti, and the theme will be 'Writing as an act of love'. Judging from reports of the Lahti Reunions of yesteryear (they began in 1963) the theme is apposite.

The fifth International Literature Festival Berlin will take place from 6-17 September under the patronage of the German UNESCO Commission as part of the Berliner Festspiele. One hundred and twenty authors from fifty countries will participate. This year the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes will inaugurate the festival. The focus will be on California; over twenty American writers will attend. (www.liter-aturfestival.com)

'Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe' is a conference organised by Edward Ragg (The Rothermere American Institute, Oxford) and Bart Eeckhout (Ghent University) and scheduled for Thursday 25 to Saturday 27 August 2005 at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Scheduled to coincide with the month of Stevens's death a half-century ago, the conference will examine Stevens's legacy through a European lens. Its main theme concerns Stevens's intellectual and poetic affinities with European arts, culture and letters. If you would like to register for the conference, please contact Edward Ragg (e.p.ragg.99@cantab.net). Speakers will include J. Hillis Miller, Charles Altieri, Joan Richardson, Mark Ford, Stella Halkyard, Justin Quinn, Massimo Bacigalupo, Matthew Welton, Gareth Reeves and many others.

A nine-month-long Text Festival opens on 19 March and runs until 27 November at Bury Art Gallery in Lancashire. A series of events, commissions, workshops and exhibitions explore, for the first time in a major British festival, the relationships between the written text and poetry. Exhibitions include 'The Text' (19 March-- 19 June) surveying the uses of language in contemporary art and poetry, and exhibitions of the work of Bob Cobbing (19 March-- 22 May; event 9 April), of artists' books (4 June-31 July), the Lawrence Weiner poster archive (25 June-- 4 September), and on the creative uses of alphabets (17 September-- 27 November). The festival includes readings by British and American poets, poetry workshops, and events focusing on the work of Bob Cobbing, Dom Sylvester Houedard, Robert Grenier and Alan Halsey. For the full programme contact Bury Art Gallery, 0161 253 5878, artgallery@bury.gov.uk, www.textfestival.com.

Verulamium Press was launched in January 2005 with the publication of a collection by the Argentinean poet Andres Bohoslavsky, The River and Other Poems, translated by the publisher, Robert Gurney. The book is available for £5.00 from 18 Icknield Close, St Albans AL3 4NQ or from the European Bookshop, London W1B 5LU.

A new Cornish publisher, Fal Publications, was launched on 26 January 2005 in Truro, with the publication of three handsomely produced collections by Cornish poets: Victoria Field, Olga's Dreams (£10.00); Bill Mycock, Keeping House (£8.00) and D.M. Thomas, Dear Shadows (£12.00). Further details are available from Fal Publications, PO Box 74, Truro TR1 1XS, www.falpublications.co.uk.

Andy Croft has launched Smokestack Books, which aims to champion 'poets who are unconventional, unfashionable, radical or left-field and who are working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority'. The first four titles to be published are Keith Armstrong, Imagined Corners; Alan Dent, Town; Katrina Porteous, Dunstanburgh (each £5.99) and Heinrich Heine, Germany: A Winter's Tale, translated by John Goodby (£7.99). Details from Smokestack Books, PO Box 408, Middlesbrough TS5 6WA, www.smoke-stack-books.co.uk.

In a well-attended event in Oxford on 12 March, poets and critics from all over Britain celebrated Edward Thomas. After lectures by Edna Longley and Jem Poster, seventeen poets read work of their own in homage to Thomas, with often fascinating commentary: amongst those reading were Polly Clark, John Powell Ward, Michael Longley, David Constantine, Andrew Motion, Jane Griffiths, Jamie McKendrick, Tom Paulin, and John Fuller. Poems and messages from U.A. Fanthorpe, Paul Muldoon, and Seamus Heaney also featured, before a concluding talk from the Poet Laureate. The organisers were Professor Lucy Newlyn (now engaged in an edition of Thomas's prose) and Guy Cuthbertson (recently awarded his doctorate for work on Thomas and literary geography). Tower Poetry, whose part-sponsorship of the event made it possible for many interested school students to attend, were represented by Peter McDonald. He spoke as follows:

'It is a matter of great satisfaction for Tower Poetry to have sponsored today's event. My present remarks, of course, are made entirely on my own account.

'In 1917, The Times reviewed Thomas's poetry, lamenting in his work the "materialism and naturalism which the tremendous life of the last three years has made an absurdity". We may be pretty sure that we are more alert to the infelicity of this -- not to mention its critical fatuousness -- than we could have relied upon ourselves to have been in 1917. Yet, in a sense, Edward Thomas was not for his time -- at least as "time" is conceived in remarks like those; and he is not for "our time", in that same -- and still prevailing -- use of the term. I would rather say that his is the kind of poetry that bides its -- and our -- time, and does not pace itself according to the political and cultural immediacies and imperatives, all those values which are dependent upon setting their own urgent pace.

'I believe that Edward Thomas was a great critical, as well as poetic, intelligence of the twentieth century. The achievement of his poetry cannot be separated from that of his criticism; Thomas was not somehow released into poetry from the bondage of reading in 1914, but his writing of verse then did produce poetry -- real poetry, with its own "tremendous life" - from the dense matter of a lifetime's reading, reflection, and judgement. These two things - creation and criticism - are not finally separable, and one is not to be estimated at the expense of the other: like all true poetry, Thomas's is full of, and made possible by, an intelligence at a special, and unsparing, pitch of commitment; as the grateful beneficiaries of this in our reading of the poems, we must not pre-tend that the intelligence has been over-ridden by poetical genius, as if by magic. If it is accepted that the quality of Thomas's poetry obliges us to take seriously the quality of his criticism, then we must be both cautious and scrupulous in our understanding of the relation between critical thinking and poetic composition in general.

'As evidence of Thomas's critical centrality, I would cite a passage from his Walter Pater (1913), which says almost all that can be said on the matter of a poet's "voice" and (that other great cliché of ours) "personality" in poetry:

Much good poetry is far from the speech of any men now, or perhaps at any recorded time, dwelling on this earth. There would be no poetry if men could speak all they think and all that they feel. Each great new writer is an astonishment to his own age, if it hears him, by the apparent shrillness and discordancy of the speech he has made in solitude. ... The more we know of any man the more singular he will appear... Literature... has to make words of such a spirit, and arrange them in such a manner, that they will do all a speaker can do by innumerable gestures and their innumerable shades, by tone and pitch of voice, by speed, by pauses, by all that he is and will become.

'Intelligence at this level, expressing itself thus, rebukes our own complacency - as great criticism must do - and it stands as a reproach to those who reserve their wholehearted commitment for the promotion of a bland consensus in poetry and about poetry, of what is reasonable, supposedly accessible, or otherwise familiar and deserving. The consensus, of course, is often a tyranny; and the masters who crave critical pro-motion of their products are now - as ever - charlatans and bullies. Against all this, I set Edward Thomas in his entirety; the full round of his creative and critical intellect; the diligence and integrity of his life.'