Two folklore poems in Gramarye Journal
Two of my yōkai poems pop up in Issue 18 of Gramarye, the journal of the University of Chichester’s Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction. I wanted to praise the journal on several…
Why can’t artists admit they have jobs?
Maybe I’ve been watching too many old Midsomer Murders episodes, but recently I’ve been thinking about blackmail. Specifically, how one might blackmail different people using their fears, their vices and the public image they desperately…
Poem: New North
New Year’s fear and Quantum Hotness
There’s a brilliant vignette in Adam Warren’s graphic novel Empowered in which the insecure hero’s boyfriend Thugboy lets us in on his theory of quantum hotness: It’s a prime cut of comic book truth that’s…
Play-poems and bardbots!
Advent is upon us, and we’ve been celebrating over at Sidekick Books! Every day we’ve opened a new window of poetry mishmashery, featuring: i) Hybardrid Twitterbots, mixing famous poets with other poets and other texts…
Poets Are So Excited – but does anybody care?
You can’t sit on your laurels as a writer, they say. Get out there on social media, they say. Plug your work. Brag your achievements. Promote promote promote. And they’re right. Sort of. Poetry doesn’t…
What a piece of work: poetry and technophobia
About a month ago, a contact on LinkedIn posted a link to a TED talk by writer Oscar Schwartz, titled “Can a computer write poetry?” Schwartz is one of the co-creators of the site Bot…
Chain reactions: Found in Translation at Club Inegales
Thursday 17th March 2016 saw one of the most exhilarating poetry performances I’ve ever witnessed, let alone taken part in. Club Inégales in Euston hosted Found in Translation, in which poets, illustrators and musicians came together…
Does poetry need genre boundaries?
In a book shop, poetry is at most divided by single author v anthology, or by time period. Most times, it is not divided at all, simply arranged alphabetically by author, which means unless you…
Haul Monitor: Collage, Tomboys and Crows
I’ve received a couple of fantastic things through the post of late, and thought I’d share the excitement. Pamphlet: Tomboys by Jon Stone. The pamphlet is an ode to three anime heroines: Utena from Revolutionary…