Name Miguel Cullen | Role Poet | |
 | ||
I'll Tell You This For Free, a poem by Miguel Cullen
Miguel Cullen is a British poet and freelance journalist who lives in London.
Contents
Background
Cullen is of mixed British and Argentine heritage. His grandfather was Michael Berry, Baron Hartwell, ex-proprietor of The Daily Telegraph. His great-grandfathers were William Berry, 1st Viscount Camrose and F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead.
Poetry
Cullen’s first collection of poetry, Wave Caps, was a The Times Literary Supplement ‘Book of the Year’ in 2014. The TLS praised its “streetsmart ventriloquism”, while an interview in Vice (magazine) described it as “full of the lawless energy of late nights and early mornings, hop-scotching London’s jungle raves”.
Cullen is an avant-garde poet who uses frequent references to drum & bass and other urban music, using stream-of-consciousness style to weave together a fragile, interconnected world. The critic Ian Thomson (writer) compared him to Ezra Pound, citing his "allusions from Greek mythology (colliding) with sound system culture (and) pavement pounding street demotic".
The book was published under Odilo Press, for which Cullen collaborated with Alix Janta-Polczynski, publisher of the Artists' Book of ABCs.
Journalism
Cullen is arts editor for The Catholic Herald. He has also published music journalism in Vice (magazine), Wonderland magazine, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, including four cover features and in-depth documentary articles on Dub music, the Bristol underground scene, and the history of Black cinema in the UK for Clash (magazine),