Skeleton Architecture

So this is happening!!!!! Due out in May, from Maytree Press, my first poetry collection! Maytree Press have written a lovely piece about it, so go check that out. Maytree Press post here .

I am currently reading Adventures in Form: A Compendium of Poetic Forms , Rules & Constraints, edited by Tom Chivers, and published by Penned in the Margins in 2012. It's such a good book, particularly because it shows you how people have done surprising, interesting, challenging things with their poetry, which I find both useful and inspiring. Buy Adventures in Form here . I love to use a form as a way to get my poems into shape, and I love the way other poets use form, I'm particularly excited about the way Terrance Hayes used the sonnet form in his book American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, which I may have raved on about previously on this blog. Google it, it's widely available and there are lots of the poems online. One poem that particularly caught my attention in Adventures in Form was You Wave Me by Chrissy Williams (the start of it - titles only - is in the image). It's in the Found Materials section and uses song titles to form a mixtap...

I seem to have been talking about rejection in one way or another a bit lately, so I thought I'd share a post with you. Personally I am of the opinion that you've got to give people the chance to say no, getting rejected is part of the process of getting published, and if you're not trying to get it published, that can sometimes be because you're afraid of rejection. That's OK, rejection sucks, but I was inspired by Kim Liao who, in this 2016 article  described her successful friend's technique, of aiming for one hundred rejections a year. As Liao points out, this isn't a new idea. In his excellent book, On Writing , Stephen King talks about collecting his rejection slips on a nail. Liao herself decoupaged a desk with her rejection slips, to encourage herself to move on, to revisit, revise, to find better fits for her work. I've got to be honest, sometimes you get rejected because your work sucks. Even very famous writers sometimes create work that s...

Lately I have been listening and re-listening to Joe Dunthorne's After I have written my important poem'  on the A Poem a Week podcast. You'll find the episode here . In the poem Joe discusses ideas for poems that he'll write after  he's written his important poem, which I find wildly, and joyfully optimistic (he is also really confident about capturing his reader's interest, which I also find fabulous). This poem is from Joe's pamphlet, published by Faber and Faber, O Positive, which I highly recommend. I'd lend you my copy, but I've lent it to someone. Anyway, Joe has got me thinking about important poems, and what makes them important. My first thoughts about what's officially important is the stuff we teach our children - mainly old (preferably dead) white guy's poems. Having spent January and some of February supporting my nine year old daughter in memorising a poem by Robert Burns (she got through to the Cronies, and got a certific...

Hey all, what a way to end a year. Brexit is coming, Tories are gobbling up the fat of the land, and lots of us are vulnerable. We need poetry right now, and poetry is under threat. I currently work in an underfunded library which is no longer buying from independent publishers, so we get hardly any new poetry books (but you can donate them, to help out, and you can request them to show the big suppliers we don't just want James Patterson books). I follow Maggie Smith (the poet), on Instagram . She's amazing, she gives out good advice like you might get from a wise woman in the woods, it's inspiring, it's magical, and it's a blessing. Her poem, Good Bones, deservedly gets a lot of attention, and is well worth googling if you've not had the pleasure yet. So I'm keeping moving, I'm checking what's working, reminding myself what's good. So many of us write poetry, maybe just for ourselves, as an act of coping, to defiantly make something ...

Well this election is scary. There are so many good people wanting to make an impact and do good things to help people. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could just elect people who could collaborate and find the best ways to do these things together? I fear that's not going to happen, but I hope that something pretty good will. You've got to accentuate the positive, right? I got to go see Amanda Palmer live in Glasgow (definitely not Manchester) recently, and one of the things she was talking about was how she got criticised for making light of a dark situation in her song, Oasis (it's a marvellous song with a joyous video here ). She does. She said to us that where there is darkness it's essential that we go into it and we make light. I'm all about the darkness myself (goth poet ahoy), but she's right, we need light, we need the volte, so if you've got some light to bring to these darkening days, or if you've just got a little black cloud that...

I am hardly new to the party in reviewing Fiona Benson's astonishing second collection, Vertigo and Ghost. It came out from Cape Poetry in January 2019, and has already been talked about a lot. Here's a good review from The Guardian back in January.  - (they were selling it at a discounted price then - worth checking). You don't need me to tell you it is an excellent poetry book.  Fiona has already won the Forward Prize for best poetry collection, giving her £10,000, and the book is also shortlisted for the 2019 TS Eliot prize. I only just got round to reading it as I have a bit of a book backlog - it's a hazard of working in a library! I got it on inter-library loan (thanks Newcastle libraries) because like most libraries at the moment, my local library has had funding cuts and now can't get much poetry at all, so it takes a little longer, but if more of us get poetry out of libraries, it becomes more cost effective to buy the books. Have at it! Anyway, Vertig...