three great blogs – Robin Houghton

Bloggers/ 21/05/2014

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.

Inspiration/ 20/08/2013

Another three great poetry blogs

Thought it was about time I shared a few more blogs, one I’ve been following for a while and two that have come to my attention just recently.

Clare Pollard's blog — Clare Pollard’s blog

I’ve particularly been enjoying Clare Pollard‘s ‘poetic journeys’ – most recently through Kent, from Broadstairs and Margate to Canterbury and one of my favourite places, Dungeness. The journeys are part-travelogue and part-personal pilgrimage, illustrated with poetry extracts. Clare also blogs about everything from gardens and lullabies to writing children’s fiction, her own poetry and that of others, and her day to day life as a working poet. A rich and interesting read.

Surroundings - Rob Mackenzie's blog — Surroundings – Rob Mackenzie’s blog

Rob Mackenzie isn’t a prolific blogger, but he always seems to put an effort into his posts – so I guess he comes under the ‘I’ll only blog when I’ve got something interesting to say’ category of blogger. Quality not quantity. There are some neat posts here – Rob’s musing on the nature of celebrity, the music of David Bowie and the real truth about what a poem in the Guardian gets you. And check out the sidebar – his blogroll is phenomenal, and there are masses of links to poetry magazines & webzines, poets’ blogs and resources, as well as to his own poetry publications, articles and reviews. This must have taken a lot longer to compile than a few blog posts. Respect.

Very like a whale - Nic Sebastian's blog — Very like a whale – Nic Sebastian’s blog

I think I have Rob Mackenzie to thank for pointing me in the direction of Very Like a Whale.

Although the most recent posted is dated May 2013, don’t let that put you off. I was very excited to find this blog – not least of all because of Nic’s interest in nanopress publishing (“aka alternative poetry publication, with gravitas”) something I’d not come across before. See this post about what it is, and Nic’s interviews with three nanopress publishers.

And that’s not all, Nic has written a ‘ten questions’ series in which he poses key questions to people in the poetry biz. I have only read a couple of the interviews in the ‘Ten questions for poetry editors’ series, and there are about a dozen more to feast on. I am glutton for this stuff – good thing it has no calories. I dare you not to enjoy it.

Inspiration/ 07/07/2013

Three more great poetry blogs

Thought I’d share with you three more notable blogs that I’ve come across recently.

1. Tweetspeak Poetry

Not, as it sounds, a site devoted to Twitter poetry (is that actually a genre now? I think George Szirtes is doing his bit to promote it anyway) but a magazine-style blog with regular features such as ‘This week’s top ten poetic picks’ and series such as ‘How to read a poem’ and ‘Take your poet to work’ (in the run up to ‘Take your poet to work day’ which is apparently on July 17th.) Every month the team behind Tweetspeak Poetry hosts a Twitter party (although it’s at 9pm EST, which makes it more of an early-hours lock-in for us Brits).

I was intrigued to know who was behind Tweetspeak, which is a very professional set-up, and indeed turns out its sister site is Every Day Poems, a subscription site (price seems to vary from between $2.99 and $5.99 a year, depending on what page you’re on). Every Day Poems describes itself like this:

Read a poem every day. Become a better writer. Participate in our writing projects, so we can see your work. If one of your poems is a good fit, we might feature it in this newsletter, with your permission.

The idea of creating community around the reading of poetry in a user-friendly and social (media) way appeals to me a lot.

Twitter: @tspoetry

2. Book of Kells

Kelli Russell Agodon is a poet, writer and editor whose blog is a collection of musings, happenings, book reviews, favourite poets … very much a personal record and written in a relaxed and easy style. I suppose I would compare it to Kim Moore’s blog in that sense. As well as writing about her life and professional experiences, Kelli has interesting things to say and share on related topics including photography, creativity and marketing. This is a blog grounded in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, a part of the world where I lived for a short while so perhaps that adds to its appeal.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/agodon
Twitter: @elliagodon

3. Ron Silliman’s blog

Those of us who talk too much on our blogs need to take a lesson or two from Ron Silliman. Simply subtitled “A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics” this is a super and ever-growing collections of interviews, reviews, videos, recordings and links both contemporary and historic, with very little added verbosity. This felt like a real find.

Ron has an impeccable pedigree as an educator and writer (over 30 books, with poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages). From his photo there’s also a striking resemblance to Ernest Hemingway.

This site also has a formidably long archive which goes back to 2002 – respect!

Inspiration/ 31/05/2013

Three featured blogs – writing and ‘X’

It’s funny how writing often goes together with a second passion or skill, and the ingenuity of bloggers in combining them in just one blog is often surprising and interesting. This week’s three featured blogs are to do with writing & gardening, writing & swimming, and writing & animals.

OK so I’m not a great gardener. I used to love looking through my mum’s gardening magazines but mainly for the garden plans. Planning (on paper) was my thing. Nurturing living plants and learning their names has never worked for me. I don’t know what that makes me: a virtual gardener? However I’m very happy visiting or sitting in a lovely garden. More a garden reader than a writer.

But that’s not true of the first of this week’s bloggers.

Sarah Salway was the Canterbury Poet Laureate last year and is famous for her photographs of benches, among many other things! Living in Kent, the ‘garden of England’, she has an appropriate love of gardens. So much so that her recent project is Writer in the Garden, which she calls ‘an idiosyncratic literary tour around the gardens of England.’

Sarah’s enthusiasm and energy are wonderful and her adventures in gardens are clearly a strong creative inspiration.

The second ‘Writing and X’ blog is the simply named Writing and Swimming by someone calling herself rather coyly ‘Aquamarina’. Dear Acquamarina, I couldn’t find your real name anywhere on your blog, so if you want to make yourself known to me please leave a note in the comments, thanks!

Aquamarina’s sidebar is a clever compilation of ‘Books featuring swimming’, ‘Films I like with a watery feel’ and even ‘3 swimming poems by Sharon Olds’. Clearly the blog’s author is a poet, and her watery writing-related posts are entertaining. (I was reminded of poet Clare Best‘s recent fundraising swimathon – maybe the swimming-poetry connection isn’t so unusual?)

Sheila Boneham is a prolific author “best known for her writing about dogs and cats for the past fifteen years” as well as an experienced creative writing tutor. Her blog, Write here, write now, features guest posts, writing prompts, author interviews and all manner of musings and articles of interest to writers and/or animal lovers.

write here write now — Write here, write now

A quick search brought up some quirky blog posts, such as an article on photographing dogs and another about New Year writing goals. My only quibble with Sheila’s blog is the navigation – most of the main menu links take you to her main website and away from the blog, and within the blog each time you click on a new post or search result a new window opens, so I ended up with rather a lot of tabs on my browser. But hey! That’s just the website pedant in me I suppose. I was interested enough in the content to keep clicking around, and that’s pretty important. Plus there were all those cute kitties.

if you’re interested in writing the odd guest blog post (great idea if you’re a writer looking to build your reach on the social web) then you may be interested in guesting on Sheila’s blog. Submission guidelines are here.

Inspiration/ 22/05/2013

Three great blogs – poetry

It’s always nice to get those ‘congratulations, another blogger is following your blog’ emails from WordPress, and even nicer when you check them out and discover a real gem of a blog you’d not come across before. That’s how I found John Field’s excellent blog Poor Rude Lines – “I’m just another reader, rather like you, curled up in bed with a book or two.”

It made me think it would be fun to have a regular feature where I could share interesting blogs with you. I expect you’ll already know at least some of them, but who knows, maybe not. Blogrolls are great, but a proper introduction is even better – I’m hoping you may reciprocate and tell me about other fab blogs that I’m missing. Anyway, three is my favourite number, so I may as well call it ‘Three great blogs…’

Let’s start with poetry, and indeed with Poor Rude Lines. Like Josephine Corcoran I tend to err towards blogs about poetry rather than blogs where an individual posts his or her poetry, although I quite like a mix of the two.

The first thing I love about Poor Rude Lines is that stunning masthead – go on, name all the poets depicted – and John’s use of photos to break up the text and enhance the reading experience. I was immediately drawn into his review of Fiona Moore’s The Only Reason for Time and quickly realised this is a marvellous reviews site, as well as much else. Check out the archives. John also appears to be a high quality Tweeter – worth following.

I’m suitably embarrassed to admit I’ve only recently come across Cliff Yates. What can I say? This poetry world is a big ‘un, and I’m but a lowly ant picking my way across its vast acreage. How Cliff finds the time to blog I don’t know, he’s clearly a busy working poet and tutor and his ‘about’ page is inspirational. There’s a comprehensive blogroll, lots of resources for teaching poetry, useful links, details about Cliff’s books, workshops and other activities and yes, some of his poems too. The site is built on WordPress and has a workman-like visual theme, but for me it oozes generosity, warmth and down-to-earth-ness.

Established Australian poet Graham Nunn’s blog is Another Lost Shark, which is also the title of his publishing imprint. Graham’s blog documents his many collaborative poetry projects, most recently haiku walks and experiments with other Japanese poetic forms. I loved this post about how famous poems are being pasted on the side of garbage trucks during the Sydney Writers’ Festival (going on at the moment). Watch the video short, it’s brilliant. Cue a couple of workers in their hi-vis jackets taking a break from rubbish collection: “What are you reading, Barry?” “I’ve always been partial to a bit of Lord Tennyson…”

Tag: three great blogs

Poets’ blogs – some recent finds

Another three great poetry blogs

Three more great poetry blogs

Three featured blogs – writing and ‘X’

Three great blogs – poetry