This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY I keep saying and thinking ‘when I’m settled in’. To living in Cambridge, that is. I use these words to defer certain expectations – this or that will happen ‘when I’m settled’. But I’m not sure what that will look or feel like. The opposite […]
Author archives: shotscarecrow
Discipline / Sandsnarl on Sale / The 2002 Academy Awards / Lyonesse
This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY My resolution this year is to write in a slightly more disciplined, less sporadic manner, and to use the internet to cultivate a space for the things I write – which is to say, I mean to publish more and react less. It’s […]
Teaching Poetry / Village of Eight Graves / Battle of the Sexes
This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY I’m elbow-deep in preparation for the new teaching semester, trying to work out how much I want to depart from those approaches to poetry teaching I’m familiar with. I’ll also be teaching plays and publishing, but here I’m more content to work within […]
Marble Broadsheet 8: Animals
Marble Poetry, edited by Aisling Tempany, produces both a journal and a broadsheet, as well as a number of pamphlets, all with a distinctive visual style – very impressive for a one-person operation. The theme of broadsheet #8 is animals, and features six poems, including Mandy Beattie’s charming ‘Catticus’, about an “emerald-eyed half-kitten and his […]
The Babel Tower Notice Board
The Babel Tower Notice Board is in its final month of publication. A shame – I’d only discovered it recently. I have an extract from a longer work published there as of yesterday. Lowly Gods is a rejigged update of material I wrote while on secondment in Hong Kong some years ago. It’s a combination […]
THE LIVE ALBUM by Kat Payne Ware
Few collections I’ve read provide – or even attempt – a more satisfying marriage of form and content than THE LIVE ALBUM. Its presiding subject is meat, and in particular meat production and consumption – the queasy horror of flesh being cleaved and compacted, over and over, by rigid, cold machinery. Language, like muscle, is […]
Diagram 21.5
I have some work in the new issue of Diagram, one of my favourite US journals – extracts from two small, in-progress books that are part of the same world as Sandsnarl and Unravelanche. Prose or poetry? Both are in that weird hinterland between – I could never get them published as stories, but they […]
(Good) Poems
This is a quickfire response to ‘(Good) Person Poems’, an op-ed by Rory Waterman published by Poetry London, and I’d like to start by saying that I’m glad this piece was published. It airs a grievance that is clearly deeply felt, and shared by others in the poetry community, and it’s better that such grievances […]
Sweet Mystress
Today is National Poetry Day. I don’t often manage much to coincide with it, but this year the organisers asked me for a poem on the theme of choice for their website, so I have given them Sweet Mystress, a ludokinetic poem with a few puzzles and a secret ending. It’s in pat a homage […]
Resonance FM, Saturday 25th September, 2.30pm
I’m going to be interviewed by Jude Cowan on Resonance FM this Saturday – we’ll be talking about Sandsnarl and poem-game hybrids. Tune in at 2.30pm, 104.4 FM.