poetry
New Poems: Dead Centre
DEAD CENTRE If England was a target and you were looking at cross hairsIn the centre of the cross hairs would probably be DidcotThe most normal town in England according to the pollstersThe 11th worst place to live according to crap towns My home town, the town my family still live in, die inA town…
Thames Valley Texas
I shall be reading from new Horseshoe Press pamphlet ‘Thames Valley Texas’ next Tuesday at the Organ Grinder on Open Books second birthday. Without the hard work of the T S Eliot of Bus Drivers there would be no Open Book so thank you Neil Fulwood here’s to the next two years… http://www.openbook.org.uk/
2nd Anniversary Reading at Open Book Tuesday October 3rd – better than Goose Fair
Date for your diary: Tuesday 3rd October 2023, from 8pm. Open mic, headline sets from Shaun Belcher and Tony Challis; plus special appearances from some mystery guests. So head to the Overlook Hotel, er, I mean The Organ Grinder, Nottingham and join in the fun. Anyone missing out will be “corrected”.
GRASS CLOUDS – COLLECTED POEMS 2002-2022
One of the fabulous things about the modern poetry scene is the hatred of ‘self-publishing’ as somehow amateur or not professional…a opinion reinforced by those with most to lose i.e. the publishers. GRASS CLOUDS contains everything I have written as ‘poetry’ since I arrived in Nottingham in 2002 so about 20 years worth Contains 80…
No Substitute: New poems…
The planned new poems in a volume called substitute was held back as I had another year’s teaching contract to complete. I am now officially retired from Nottingham College so can concentrate a tad more on the written word. To date I have written a baker’s dozen of new poems since last year’s reading and…
A BAD MAP OF THE POETRY WORLD
Having dipped my toe in Poetry World UK again I starting to get my bearings. Here a online statistics crib that may tell some of the story: Poetry book sales in the UK Source: https://wordsrated.com/poetry-book-sales-statistics/ It not great. The biggest news to me as a 65 year old male is that the demographics of actual…
The End of the Line for Books?
I recently posted a Ted Gioia substack repost of a Elle Griffin report on Major Publishing traits none of it good…’nobody buys books’ … https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books Before long nobody will even print them especially in poetry. For the paper poetry magazine the writing been on the wall for a while see my response to Wendy Pratt…
Coppard returns…
Like a bad penny this story never dies and after I had this photograph taken yesterday I thought similar and did some more digging and found two new articles on ‘Flynn’ and for those less squeamish that comes from the saying ‘in like Flynn’ about Errol Flynn’s legendary bedding of women. the full story in…