I’ve hardly submitted anything anywhere this year. Work pressures, lack of belief in my own writing, time spent on other activities. The usual excuses. But as I start to write again, I am starting to look out for new opportunities to submit poems. I follow a good few magazines on Twitter, so am watching out for magazine open submission windows. There are also a few listing sites I use. But it can be a bit…
Three poems added to my page of published poems. All 3 poems previously appeared on the Acropolis Journal website, (issues 1 & 2), last year. Two are from the sequence of poems I wrote with the general theme of running around Portsea Island whilst training for marathons. They are among the darkest poems I have written, which is why I won’t share them in a post. You’ll have to go looking for them – they…
That time of year again. A blackbird sings from a vantage point in a back garden somewhere along the street. And I feel a little more alive. Someone has lit a barbecue. And I don’t mind. The sun is shining. I used to view my life with a sense of disappointment. Compare myself to others who had made a better fist of it. Who had bigger houses, better cars, more glamorous lives, more exotic holidays.…
The deadline for this years’ poetry has been extended from April 14th to April 19th – you need to post your entries, so if interested, bear in mind it’s a bank holiday weekend coming up. Link follows. https://www.binsted.org/poetry-comp-22
I’m going to start sharing events , competitions, local news etc on my blog. Currently my day job is taking up a significant amount of time, so my ability to post long and thoughtful articles is limited. Basically I’m knackered. Currently I’m recruiting in Singapore, Amsterdam, Budapest and Frankfurt, and have recently been working in Melbourne and San Francisco as well. All remote of course, but the timezones can be a challenge! Anyway, first up…
I was an ornithologist when I was a kid. I say was. Once a bird-watcher, always a bird-watcher (I’ll leave others to supply the punchline). I still get a bit of a thrill when I see something unusual in our small city garden, not that we get many birds here – even the Magpie that perched on our fence this morning was a bit of a rarity. We had Peregrine Falcons nesting in the church…
Do we need to explain the meaning of what we write, or should we let the reader work them out for themselves? Does it matter whether they fully understand what we are trying to say? What if they come up with their own interpretation that the writer hasn’t considered? Obviously lots of poems, including many fabulous, famous and regularly anthologised ones, have a meaning that is easily understood. This doesn’t diminish their power or worth.…
….that the country entered into the first lockdown? When I say the country, I mean most of us. Some who disobeyed the rules received £10K fines. As we know, many of those who made the rules just carried on partying. But that’s for another post. I’m writing this whilst looking out into our garden. It’s a little too cold to sit there for long, but it is a glorious blue-skied spring morning. During that first…
Finally! My first success of 2022 (I’ve been focussing on existing projects and manuscript work primarily rather than sending stuff out so far this year). My prose poem At the Landfill of Memories has been selected for this year’s anthology (out of over 1,300 poems submitted). Dempsey & Windle are my publishers, so I like to enter this competition to support them (I don’t enter that many contests). It doesn’t mean I automatically get work…
I’ve just been reading an article on the Open Democracy website about concerns over Russian money being pumped into the Conservative party, and how those donations, both to the central party and individual constituency MPs, might be a bit of a security concern. It’s from 2019. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/revealed-russian-donors-have-stepped-tory-funding/?utm_source=tw Another article (and there are plenty of them) from 2020 names a range of government ministers whose constituency parties have taken Russian donations; https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-report-donors-boris-johnson-conservative-party-2020-7?r=US&IR=T Our Prime Minister proudly…