Tag: the lake

Angst/

Summer, busy, change, decisions…

home-grown summer salad

Oof! It’s a unusually busy summer this year. Family visits, a big trip away, stuff on my to-do list such as a book review for The Frogmore Papers and a note to self to ‘get some more poems out’. Then there’s admin for forthcoming singing workshops. 2026 readings to set/finalise. I’ve enjoyed the mostly dry, warm weather, but it seems to have hit some plants rather badly, including the majestic Marmande tomatoes (which I was looking forward to) contracting a nasty bottom-rotting disease. Ah well, that’s nature I suppose. At least we had some lovely home-grown salad leaves and peas quite early in the season, and the cucumbers keep coming!

I’m taking a summer break from promoting the book, although it would be silly of me not to mention being featured on The Lake‘s ‘One Poem Review’ section this month, as well as a forthcoming review in Orbis. My next reading isn’t until 16th September when I’ll be joining five other poets for a reading as part of the Hurst Festival.

I’ve been sending out a few pieces of new work, and some old work that I’ve been revising. I’m also putting the (I hope) finishing touches to a new mini pamphlet, in a similar format to Foot Wear (in other words hand-made and self-published).  Working title is Yo-Yo. I plan to sell it at readings from the autumn.

Usually it’s autumn when I get that feeling of needing change, or a re-boot, but it’s upon me already. Maybe because everything in the garden is ahead of itself so I am too. Peter and I have decided to make some changes to Planet Poetry. It’s now our summer break, and we’re still coming back for a sixth season, but the time, energy and costs involved have taken their toll. We both need space to work on our own projects and even spend more time with loved ones. So it will be a slimmed-down podcast that re-emerges in the autumn.

The quarterly spreadsheet is also crying out to be something different. I’m still working out what that is! Answers on a postcard please.

Anyway, I hope you’re having a good summer. I’m sure we’ll all emerge refreshed in September.

Blog/

On feeding The Lake

the lake

The spreadsheet of poetry magazines is forever growing, albeit slowly. Even though I’m adding perhaps eight to ten titles each quarter, there are those I have to delete. This is usually because they’ve stopped publishing; quite a few mags were set up hurriedly during the pandemic and never really got off the ground. Others have drifted away on a seemingly permanent hiatus, either for personal reasons of the editor or maybe loss of funding. Others I delete because they never update their website, never respond to my query emails or just generally offer an impoverished service to readers and would-be submitters. Sometimes a publication is resurrected from the dead, or at the eleventh hour, which is always good to see: the Fenland Poetry Journal, for example. Even Strix is planning a comeback after two or three years in the wilderness.

Sometimes I forget the original purpose of the spreadsheet, which was to help me manage my own poetry submissions. So recently I’ve been making an effort to submit to magazines that are less known to me, and online mags in particular. As a consequence I discovered The Lake, a serious-minded online mag that’s been quietly gliding along (sorry) since 2013. On its modest website, edited by poet and tutor John Murphy, The Lake publishes new work every month from around ten poets, together with book reviews and occasional tributes (for example this one on the death of Eavan Boland, written by Rose Atfield. The range of contributors is impressive, many from across the world, making for an interesting read. I find that print magazines tend to present more of a monoculture; much as I may enjoy (say) The Rialto or Rattle, they paint very different pictures of contemporary poetry. I guess it’s as much about editorial taste and cultural preoccupations as it is practical issues that may affect submissions from overseas (availability of the journal in question in the contributor’s own country, for example).

Anyway, The Lake: worth a dive in? (SORRY)