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…
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The Impossibility of Producing a Print Literary Magazine.
A link to this article was shared onine by by Martin Malone former editor of Interpreter’s House which pre Martin I helped survive as a paper edition by creating a basic website.The price of progress is that the magazine now now exists only online. https://theinterpretershouse.org/ The article by Wendy Pratt of SPELT magazine https://speltmagazine.com/ available…
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…
Michael Longley and ‘The Fallow Period’
Looking back at those difficult years now, do you feel that the silentstretches were detrimental to your work? If I hadn’t been fighting battles on other fronts, I might have been scribbling boring middle-aged verse – like MacNeice who twittered on for a decade until the miraculous final poems. It seems that the Muse favours…
Burning Books – hiding in plain view?
Last year I did a reading for Nottingham Poetry Festival in which I produced a small ‘polemical’ pamphlet called ‘Burning Books’. The pamphlet was a one off and most of the poems after ‘outing’ in paper form were then hidden away as ‘too political’ for my readers by myself! I censored myself which crazy but…
Substitute : New volume of poems 2018
Sometimes all it needs is a trigger and Kit de Waal’s excellent piece in the Guardian yesterday brought together a lot of things for me that been bubbling under the surface. Her article ‘Make room for working-class writers‘ touched a nerve….. read it here https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/10/kit-de-waal-where-are-all-the-working-class-writers- Also she made a comment about how the Proper v Performance…
Blurred Fences : Thames Valley Texas
A Christmas Poem in November? I wrote this poem in 1995 and had omitted the key line about poets for fear of offending my father. Now he has been gone 13 years so probably safe to reveal what the poem about. After my father died in 2004 my mother confided to me that he had…
Contemporary American Poetry – 55 years on
Picked this up in a second hand shop recently. Was first edition (1962) of a book I had encountered in a travelling shelf of ‘American Poetry’ in my local Didcot library in 1981 when I had returned home after art college. It (in the flag cover version below) and a book of William Carlos Williams…
The Drifting Village: Collected poems 2000-2015 released as pdf
The Drifting Village Released into the wild today as a downloadable pdf. The first of an irregular series of pdf pamphlets released as and when I feel like it.Basically a resume and calling card showing the fairly small output of the last 15 years and hopefully leading to more poems in the future. I have…
Skeleton at the Plough…my Scottish Ghost.
I took on this present nine month career break (ends Friday) in order to confront some ideas I had about myself. Number one was that I was a poet. Correct only in terms of the statement ‘I was’. However, despite the RIBA Edwin Smith commission, I am no nearer resurrecting that particular career than I…