Past Blogs for October 2012

I first had the idea for this anthology about a year ago  As a poet and a teacher of creative writing, I have always loved hearing writers talk about their writing; about the differences and similarity of process and craft.  I mentioned it to George Szirtes and he said he would be interested in working on it with me.  I had a meeting with Chris Emery at Salt the day after and abracadabra, we had the makings of an anthology. I can’t believe it has all been turned-around so quickly – I was expecting, if anything for it to come into publication next year.

As ever, it was a joy to work with George on this project.  It was remarkably easy to collate. The book is by no means comprehensive and not everybody we asked took part, as we say in the Introduction.  Not everybody likes writing about about their own writing, and some didn’t have time to turn the piece around to meet the deadline. As we say in the blurb ‘This book is not a retrospective but a representation of poetry as a living breathing, evolving art.’  It is a celebration of variousness; an attempt at mapping poetry in the UK today and we are grateful to everybody who contributed to it and made it such immensely exciting  and enjoyable read. We are delighted with it.

Here is the link to the book on the Salt website for more information about our 56 wonderful contributors.

Oh, Lordy – where does time go?  When I first started writing this blog in January, I thought I wouldn’t want to be one of those people who updates it once a year, or even less.  There is documentary evidence to the right of this that I used to be very good at writing something every day, then a couple of times a week, and as the romance wears off less and less….

Ok, it’s not just the romance thing.  It’s more to do with only posting something postworthy, and wondering who really cares about my random ramblings, and suddenly getting all self-conscious on you, dear reader.  At first the things I thought postworthy were new poems – somebody might be interested in those.  But it turns out you cannot post new poems on your blog if you want to send them anywhere for publicaton, so I stopped doing that.  Then I thought, I would post new artwork.  Since I was making quite a lot till about June, I considered those images postworthy.  And then it all got rather busy and I had nothing, zilch, zero, zip  creative to show for my time.

But hear this!  Two things of postworthy merit!  Firstly I have updated the ‘Images’ gallery on this site to archive all of the images I have been posting on this blog.  Also here is a link to a film made by Tom Bloor based on my book ‘The Breakfast Machine’ http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/helen+ivory.  Also, Crow has arrived.  I’ll tell you more about him later.