Sun-bleached bunting

First things first..Have you ordered a copy of The Plum Review from Broken Sleep Books yet?
The royalties from this are all going to The Trussell Trust to support the excellent work they do.
Obvs, you can just donate to the Trussell Trust or your local foodbank, if you can…Or do it all.

We’re not hanging about this week. Too much to get done. Sunday lunch has just gone in the oven and I have a hot date with the Red Door Poets in couple of hours to hear Mary Mulholland, Tom Cunliffe and Katie Griffiths, Alex Corrin-Tachibana, Matthew Paul and Claire Collison reading. Can’t wait.

Before then I have to do this and answer some questions about my own work. I’ve been invited to do so for a magazine this week. It won’t be published for a while, but I don’t want to get behind on stuff. Sorry, I don’t want to get further behind. The invitation was lovely, it was a bit of a double-edged sword as it meant I didn’t make it into the print mag, but I think that in many ways this means my poem will reach further, but more on that closer to the time.

The only real developments this week was me sitting down to think about the running order of my pamphlet again. As you can see I got somewhere, but I think you will also see that my cats disagreed. So, we start again. And we lock the door.

Finally, a poem

It’s been a weird week for permissions. I’ve been asked by the folks at The Friday Poem to come up with a funny/serious poem I like as part of a series they are running. I know roughly what I want to include, but it’s not online, so I need to get permission. The poet is in the US. The poem(s) on my shortlist are all from the 70s and 80s, the New and Selected I have them in are from the 90s. I know there is no statute of limitations of copyright (well, there is, but hopefully you know what I mean) and so you’d hope I could put them up here and then link to that, but no…It’s not right, so fingers crossed the poet replies or I hear back from the UK publisher.

Anyhoo, that aside I do have permission to publish this by Louisa Campbell. Louisa was one of the poets that made me feel welcome and included when I went to read years ago in Oxford for a Interpreter’s House launch, back when they still had print copies. I was finding my way back then (still am, mainly) but she made me feel very included and introduced me to a few people. I’ve never forgotten that kindness.

I bought her most recent collection, Beautiful Nowhere, a while back now, but it’s taken a while to rise to the top of the TBR pile. It’s not a complicated read, but it is a difficult one, filled as it is with poems about mental wellbeing and trauma. I believe Louisa has a poem in the most recent Forward Prize anthology, but it’s not one from this book. Go, check that out once you’ve read this. And give her a follow on the Twitters.

I chose this poem as it’s one that feels more optimistic, and largely because I’m missing being near the sea.

Seafront, January

No need to talk. If we spoke,
our words would be drowned
by the thunderous waves,
carried away on the easterly wind
that sticks our hair to our faces,
flips sun-bleached bunting
at kiosks’ closed shutters.

Look how smooth the wide wave
moves steadily, rolling, surging
to shore, where it fizzes to foam,
flattens and lets itself fall
back, as if arriving is no more
than leaving again.

Look a the edgeless horizon:
a nothingness, simply
the furthest we can see;
a beautiful nowhere.

We disappear here, as if the sea
absorbs our watery bodies;
our thoughts pulled in, then out
by the tide, the silvery sun.

Posted with permission from Louisa Campbell. Published in Beautiful Nowhere by Boatwhistle Books, 2021

I can also link to my mate’s ep, written under the name A Sun-Bleached Industry

Caspian – Of Foam and Wave

THE LAST WEEK IN STATS

HEALTH STATS
10K running. Some running on Tuesday and Today. Fucking hell, this might be starting to get better !!!
2 days without cigarettes…I was doing so well..
0 Days since drinking.
0 sleepless nights:

LIFE STATS
2 journeys to work and back
1 trip to the pub on Friday to see a mate I haven’t seen for 3 years.
1 poorly wife

POET STATS
0 poems finished:
0 poems worked on:
3 submissions: Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2022, Potomac Review, Propel Magazine
0.5 acceptances: TBC
0 reading:
0.5 rejections:
27 poems are currently out for submission. NB some are simultaneous subs
79 Published poems
35 Poems* finished but unpublished
Twelvety poems* in various states of undress
554 Rejected poems* Eg I’ve decided they are not good enough

1 reviews finished:
2 reviews started: Well, read and thought about
0 reviews submitted:
4 reviews to write: How the fuck did that happen…somehow agree to another this week.

1 more week that I’m not having an affair with Eva Green

* To date, not this week. Christ!!

READ/SEEN/HEARD/ETC

Read
River Wolton: Indoor Skydiving
Anna Kirby: Where The Dead Walk
Louisa Campbell: Beautiful Nowhere
Seamus Heaney: Selected Poems 1998-2013

Zooms: Hilary Menos’ launch for Fear of Forks & Red Door Poets (or I will have by the time you read this, probably)

Music
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Ghosteen
Mary Lattimore: Slant of Light
Supergrass: ST/X-Ray Album
Hoyt Axton: My Griffin Is Gone
The Beths: Jump Rope Gazers, Expert In A Dying Field, Future Me Hates Me
The Archers
Minor Poet; And How!
Mono: Nowhere Now Here, For My Parents
Carly Rae Jepsen: Kiss
The Verb: from contains strong language
Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream, Gish, Machina, Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness
Mary Lattimore: Collected Pieces 2015-2020, Hundreds of Days
The Boo Radleys: Everything’s Alright Forever
Beth Orton: Weather Alive
Tim Burgess; Typical Music
Tallies: Patina
Owen Pallet: Heartland
Lisa Germano: Lullaby For Liquid Pig, No Elephants
Pharaoh Sanders: Live At the East, Moon Child, Live In Paris (1965), Welcome To Love