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...