Tag: clarissa aykroyd

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Ah! The business of poetry blogging

Oh no!

It’s been a few weeks since my last post, and yet Matthew Stewart has still generously kept me on his list of ‘Best UK Poetry Blogs of 2019’. Matthew observes that 2019 was ‘far from being a vintage year’ for blogging, and his suggestions of why this might be are interesting: keeping a blog going can be a chore at times, once you stop it’s hard to get going again, sometimes you can’t help wondering if you’re writing into a vacuum.

I’d rather be bog-snorkelling  bragging  blogging

In some ways, writing this blog is no more of a chore than writing actual poems, in that I prefer not to force either of them, but to let them happen when the inclination hits me. Having said that, I know it’s not good to leave a blog hanging for too long. I do from time to time give myself a goal, such as ‘write a blog post a week’ or ‘start a poem a day for a month’. I haven’t done either of those for a while, but I’ve been gee’d on by others lately. Heather Walker has been blogging every day recently and it’s been fascinating to read. Josephine Corcoran shared recently that she’d written twenty new poems. Lordy! That’s probably my annual output. And Mat Riches has been blogging every week for some time, AND he sent out 161 poems this year – BLIMEY.

Coming soon – the stats of shame

Actually Mat’s post reminded me that my annual roundup of subs/rejections/acceptances is due. I doubt I’ll be offering any natty graphs. Somewhat a visual feels like it might be a detail too far. But hey! Let’s see…

I do know that even if I’m not blogging, I’m reading other people’s blogs. They come at my inbox every Monday morning and I never cease to be amazed at how much thought, energy, creativity and generosity goes into blogs. And with the boot on the other foot, I’m eternally grateful to my readers, aka YOU, for taking the time to read this.

Current reading list

My poetry books-to-read pile currently includes the Winter issues of Rattle and The Moth, Clarissa Aykroyd’s Island of Towers (Broken Sleep Books), Hubert Moore’s The Feeding Station (Shoestring) which I’m reviewing for The Frogmore Papers, Katie Griffiths’ My Shrink Is Pregnant (one of my fellow Live Canon Pamphleteers) and Robert Hamberger’s Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo). Recently I received a copy of Sarah Windebank’s super first collection, Memories of a Swedish Grandmother (Myriad Editions). I was lucky enough to get a review copy, and wrote a short testimonial for the book.

And so this is Christmas…

I only got 6 out of 18 in the Guardian’s Christmas Number Ones quiz – although I think it was a swizz as there were only one or two questions about the seventies! Come on, Christmas was invented in the 70s! Can you do better??

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Vanguard Readings – Six Poets & Anthology Launch

Richard Skinner’s excellent Vanguard Readings at The Bear in Camberwell generally hosts both poets and prose writers, but last night was a poetry special. Somehow I managed to arrived only just in time, but I’m pleased I did as the first reader was my friend Josephine Corcoran.

Josephine’s first pamphlet is ‘The Misplaced House’, out from tall-lighthouse at the end of this month and I think it’s going to be a corker (no pun intended… well, maybe). Reading first (or last!) isn’t always easy but Josephine did a fine job. She was followed by Josephine Dickinson, a poet who I’m not familiar with, but I enjoyed the sense of magic she created in the room and and felt I wanted to know more about her and her work. All the way from Alston in Cumbria, a place I know (and I know how far it is from anywhere), an impressive way to come to entertain the Vanguard audience.

Vanguard Readers 20-11-14

The final first-half reader was no less than Michael Symmons Roberts, reading mostly from his amazing book Drysalter which won last year’s Forward Poetry Prize and Costa Book Award as well as being shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. It was a shame that Michael had to leave for his train back to Manchester as I’d like to have spoken to him. I liked his reading style and was fascinated to know more about how he went about writing Drysalter, 150 poems each 15 lines long, over 5 years.

In the second half I moved down the front and consequently the photos are a bit less fuzzy, although I seem to have captured some shut-eye moments in the readers – sorr-eee! Not only did we hear from Matt Merritt, legendary blogger and the official bird watching poet – great to meet him at last – but also Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton who I last saw performing flamenco in Swindon.  In Matt’s reading I particularly enjoyed the poems from his ‘unpronounceable’ collection hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica from Nine Arches Press. Good thing it’s available to buy online, as I’m not sure I’d be able to ask for it in our local bookshop.

3 more Vanguard Readers 201114

When Cristina took to the floor she commanded it as usual, petite as she it, her personality is ginormous and she recited two of her long poems, entirely from memory, with electricity and panache. Very hard to take one’s eyes off her! The final reader of the evening was our host Richard Skinner who read three poems from the first anthology from Vanguard Editions, by poets who couldn’t be present – the last of which was by Marion Tracy, from her excellent pamphlet The Giant in the Doorway (HappenStance). Richard gave Marion an amazing introduction and announced her to be ‘one of the least well known poets around but one of the best’. Are you listening, Marion?! Hope so!

vanguard #1anthology

It’s always nice to put faces to names at these events, and I was very pleased to meet for the first time blogger poet Clarissa Aykroyd, and to chat with her on the bus back towards Victoria about the various merits of Vancouver vs London and knowing someone from Kamloops.