Once upon a time my family owned a house on a block of land in Anglesea, on the southern Victorian coast. We spent most school holidays there, the long holidays over the summer, when we'd swim and bushwalk and sometimes sail the dinghy my father built - if I remember correctly - with help from …
Category: writing
first Tuesday, second Wednesday
So my new year's not-quite-resolution to do less, to go out less, got off to a flying start this week when I went to two poetry events on successive nights. It was my second visit to Beyond Words in Gipsy Hill, which takes place on the first Tuesday of every month. January's star attraction was …
lost poem
it was about sweetcorn. it was about hidden layers. it was about changing my name starting the process of becoming myself my own person. it was a statement before i knew what a statement was. i may have used husk and silky threads. grade one or grade two. stay there poem about sweetcorn with the …
I am not Frank O’Hara
but sometimes I write poems in my lunch hour. Or, to be more accurate, I muse, jot, fiddle with a poem coming-into-being. Most of my poems have a long gestation. They're a gradual accretion of words, phrases, images, and a honing and chipping away to get the shape, the movement, that I is buried somewhere …
wine, women, words
That's a recipe for a convivial and enriching evening, and that's exactly what we got last Thursday at the launch of the fourth Loose Muse anthology, downstairs at Cottons on Exmouth Market. Once again, Agnes Meadows and her co-editors have put together a varied and top-class collection of writing by women who have attended one …
poetry panic attack
I spent Saturday morning sitting at my desk, thinking about a new poem, jotting down words and phrases, delving into dictionaries and reference books, nurturing that little knot of something in the back of my brain that I hope will evolve, take shape, emerge slowly onto the page. So I was already in a rather …
Souvenirs de France
Paris 5th-8th July Hot and sunny throughout. We're based in the 10th arrondissement. It's lively and vibrant, especially along the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, which are thronged with Parisians picnicking, rendez-vousing, imbibing and conversing late into the evening. I feel at home. It seems that Parisians have been starved of good weather as much …
big up for a little mag
Issue Fifteen of South Bank Poetry magazine is a bit of a cracker. The strapline is 'London and Urban Poetry', and the current issue features many Scottish themed poems alongside the London contingent. A fitting blue and white cover, and just under 40 pages of fine poems, given room to breathe and interact with each …
muses aplenty
Thursday 4th April. Outside, the bitter easterly wind continued to savage awnings, umbrellas and most people's spirits. We'd had snow flurries and sleet all day, and London's pavements spattered a thin muddy muck on everyone's boots. In the downstairs bar of Cotton's Caribbean Restaurant in Exmouth Market, nearly 30 women writers, plus friends and supporters, …
humour me
It took me a very long time to realise it's possible to be a serious (dedicated, life-committed), writer/artist/creative person and also to be funny, humorous, light-hearted (some of the time, at least). This doesn't seem such an astonishing discovery, but for years I was Very Serious, and the flip side of this was to be …
Hilaire 