Poets’ blogs – some recent finds

It’s been a while since one of my ‘three great blogs’ roundups, usually on a theme. The last couple of months I feel like I’ve lived and breathed writers’ blogs, and the experience has reminded me yet again how many great and well-established blogs still haven’t hit my radar. Even more so when I read Anthony Wilson’s recent ‘blogs I read’ series of posts. It’s all happening out there.

One of the things about being on WordPress or Blogger is that it’s much easier to follow and link to others on the same platform. Being on WordPress I notice how easy it is to hit the ‘follow’ button on a WordPress site and then see it in my Reader, or opt for a weekly digest. Other blog platforms sometimes offer a ‘follow by email’ option, otherwise I usually copy and paste the URL, open my WP Reader and paste them in. I then don’t have the option of email updates. This is a tad unwieldy and YES I know it would be far easier to use Feedly, which I did use to, until Google pulled the plug on Google Reader and I lost all my subscriptions. (Mea culpa, I was given notice but left it too late.)

Anyway – sorry – back to the point, which is that I don’t tend to see a lot of Blogger blogs unless I look for them, and on the occasions I do come across one, such as Vanessa Gebbie’s blog, it then leads me to a rich seam of others. Vanessa is a well-known poet and author who’s on my manor, so I’m amazed I’ve never explored her blog before. She provides a textbook example of how to vary your blog posts, inform and entertain at the same time. Vanessa doesn’t blog to a strict timetable but when she does it’s a very nice mix of interview, reviews,  news-musings and other quirky material.

From there I was pulled into Kate Dempsey’s Emerging Writer blog and found a trove (is that actually a word?) of info about competitions, submissions opportunities, events, reviews and all kinds of good stuff with an Irish bent (another question mark over this word) – a horn-of-plenty type blog spilling over with news.

And my third find from Vanessa’s blogroll was Rachel Fenton’s blog snow like thought. I’ve only just started exploring this one as Rachel is in New Zealand, and it’s funny how it takes me a while to adjust to blogs from other countries. Strange, isn’t it? The internet is said to remove national boundaries, we can hop from one continent to another in a click, but I often still feel jetlagged and culture-shocked when I first land on the pages of a ‘foreign’ blog. I don’t mean that in a bad way – I’m kind of blinking and trying to take in the unfamiliar references and it feels like the time I arrived in Perth in the Spring, after leaving home the day before in Autumn. But I’ve already followed a couple of links to yet more unfamiliar American poetry journals … I sense there’s another blog post entirely there.