APRIL SUBMISSIONS New Policy no USA and Canada mags reduces overall numbers and frankly wasting time. Here’s this month’s chicken head on the chopping block list…after vetting left with very few opportunities London Grip: XXX Been asked to re-submit a poem here for June issue so will do my best to write or find two…
How to Be Rejected ( to tune of Alice Cooper’s I wanna be Elected) Pt.2 – March – 2024
Submitting poetry to magazines these days seems to be akin to buying a lottery ticket or as I remember as a child filling in the football coupon with Xs…. Here are March Xs on the coupon… So far the score is not good Magazines Submitted to Jan- February- 10 Rejections – 10 However the average…
HOW TO FAIL AT POETRY No.1 How to be Rejected Jan/Feb 2024
This is how it feels to be back on the poetry pitch…. I creating a useful guide on How to Fail at Poetry as so many seem to effortlessly succeed these days going by the drivel being pumped out by little presses invented by poet’s mates so here how to avoid all that and really…
WICKERLAND: poetry as middle class lifestyle choice
WICKERLAND? It’s like MOTHERLAND but without the humour..more AMANDA writes poetry…..god help us all. The above states chance to talk about real things like connection, love ,loss, creativity, purpose…. thats so nice not fake things like Iran, Gaza, Ukraine…at least it makes Class War seem so less futile.. IF THIS IS POETRY then POETRY IS…
Cold Spell: Poem for Windrush Day
Cold Spell A pretend farm lies within these borders,hedges, fields and muddy tracks.One un-harvested by contract machinery,unbounded by electrified fencing. As I stand on a grass vergea mile of tarmac bubbling behind me,the horizon buckling in the heat haze,I begin to build.Wood for concrete, timber joists for steel.In my head a new farm appears.The old…
How Not to be a Poet
Shaun Belcher gives some excellent advice on how not to start a poetry career. July 1991I had just completed an interesting but fruitless temporary post at The Poetry Library on the South Bank through 1990 and had my poems and songs illustrated by my sadly deceased friend Laura Stenhouse at St. Martin’s College of Art…
SUBSTITUTE: Poems 2023-25
This pamphlet collects together all the poems written since my ‘re-birth’ in the font of poetry at Open Book. I have to thank Neil Fulwood for splashing the Eu de Blue Monkey on my face and waking me up to the possibility that poetry was not dead in Nottingham…well not yet. I have come to…
THAMES VALLEY TEXAS – The Photobook
This PHOTOBOOK WITH POEMS will be about my hometown of Didcot, Oxfordshire. I am a Working-Class boy from a council estate in Didcot, Oxfordshire which is the wrong side of the tracks from Oxford and all it stands for. This is a kind of auto-biography of myself and my hometown of Didcot where I lived…
CHALKLAND: The Collected Poems 1984-2024
This is an ongoing project I just started and will take time to complete. I began writing poetry in my hometown of Didcot in 1981-2 after a few perfunctory ‘poetry’ lectures at Hornsey College of Art introduced me to Larkin, Heaney and Hughes. Then a slightly tipsy Adrian Mitchell joined us under a tree in…
Writing Poetry on an Old Laptop
I have descaled, decluttered..dissolved my old Sony Viao laptop back to basics literally. It has Xubuntu on and basically set up like a basic wordprocessor or electric typewriter of the early 1990s. I also set all type to run courier so looks like typewriter text. More imortantly it ‘OFF GRID’ cannot really run other shit…