Creative Conversations: David Hopkins

David Hopkins has recently published a collection of selected poems titled Four Wee Poetry Performances (Gnobilis Press, 2026) which attempts, in terms of its innovative layout and design, to replicate something of the experience of his live performances. He has performed his poetry over some forty years, reading at venues such as London’s ’Apples and Snakes’, Newcastle Upon Tyne’s Morden Tower, and Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery. As a professor of art history at Glasgow University he specialised in dada and surrealism and post war art and theory, producing numerous publications, including After Modern Art 1945-2017 (OUP, 2017) several books on Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, and, more recently, Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood’ (Yale University Press, 2021). He has long been committed to the practice of poetry as a spoken/sonic medium, having been deeply influenced by modernist, postmodern and avant-garde poetic forms. Prior to his recent collection, he has published in various venues, such as Hours (ed. David Connearn, 2002) or the CD accompanying The Order of Things: Scottish Sound, Pattern and Concrete poetry(Edinburgh: Pocketbooks, 2001).