This post is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin. Part one of a mega February-to-May catch-up. Saucy Seaside Postcards I’ve published a large number of poems over the last decade which have never been collected into one single-author volume. Some are part of Sidekick anthologies and very happily nested there, while others are intended for future books […]
Author archives: shotscarecrow
Frayed Ends: On the Longevity of Digital Poetry
Change, change — that’s what the terns scream down at their seaward rocks;fleet clouds and salt kiss — everything else is provisional, us and all our works. — ‘Fianuis’ by Kathleen Jamie This paper was originally delivered as a talk at Poetry, Representation and the Archive, a symposium hosted by the University of East Anglia on 25th May 2023. My practice […]
Still Life With Octopus / Tania Hershman
The poems in Still Life With Octopus slip down very easily — sometimes a little too easily, like they’re elastically escaping their tank. You think you’ve got them in focus, and then they’re gone. Not literally, of course; you can head back to the top of the page and comb them again, looking for the […]
On Frogs
Link to audio/podcast version of this post. This poem was first published in issue 19 of Gramarye, the Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. ‘Gramarye’ is an archaic word meaning mystical or magical learning, related to the word ‘grimoire’, which refers to a spellbook. Frogs in folklore seem to […]
Long Poem Magazine #28
I’m finding most, if not all, of the poems published alongside mine in the latest issue of Long Poem magazine instantly appeal to me, before I’ve even started reading them, and I think it’s because of the length stipulation. As its name suggest, Long Poem is for poems of 50 lines or more, and this […]
Playing Poetry Exhibition
The Playing Poetry exhibition is on display at the National Poetry Library from now until 15th January, and includes one of my digital ludokinetic poems, Erratum (a work in progress), as well as Adversary, a prototype poetry card game I made with Abigail Parry, pictured above. There was a neat write-up in the Financial Times […]
End of a Fantasy: The Panic Behind Literary Reactionism
“Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night “[Contemporary] fiction is about society,” says Clare Pollard, in a short essay asking how writers can respond to the present moment. I wouldn’t have thought this […]
Lyonesse by Penelope Shuttle
Lyonesse (Bloodaxe, 2021) presents a problem. On the one hand, it’s tricky to talk about because I don’t feel able to map out the book’s depths. Parts of it remain sunken and mysterious to me – I can claim no commanding vantage point, despite having browsed it on-off for a couple of months and read […]
I’m Naming the Swifts
Added a new version of this old (2010) poem to the website’s gashopon machine/lucky dip today:
On Starlings, with Caleb Parkin and Holly Hopkins
How does a poem mimic (or capture, or transmute) something so visual, so kinetic, so unliterary, as the sight of a murmuration of starlings? And is there any point in it trying to, when we can see the spectacle for ourselves at any time, via a brief internet search? Where is the sense in using […]