New Poems Published in Shot Glass Journal

Cambridge, July 2015. Photo by Clarissa Aykroyd


I recently had a few new poems published in the short-form poetry journal Shot Glass Journal, and you can read them here: http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/issue18/clarissa_aykroyd1.html

'Fryderyk Chopin and the Meaning of Space' was inspired partly by a documentary, and partly by a commission. Some months ago I was in Canada and one night I watched a documentary about Chopin - my favourite composer - with my father. In the course of the documentary it was mentioned that Chopin alluded to the mathematician Urbain Le Verrier in one of his letters. It was 1846 and Le Verrier had predicted the discovery of Neptune. Around this time I also had to write a poem about 'space' - in any of its meanings - for an upcoming reading with The Quiet Compere. This poem was the end result.

'Cambridge' came out of my visit to the city in July - and a piano I stumbled across - and 'Mise en scene' arose from work around my garden residency last summer.

New Poems Published and 2015 Readings

Norwich, November 2015. Photo by Clarissa Aykroyd


I recently had a couple of new poems published. One of these, 'Beekeeper', appears in the Mexico City-based The Ofi Press and you can read it here: http://www.ofipress.com/aykroydclarissa.htm

The other poem, 'Seventeen Steps', appears in Issue 10 of Lighthouse, a journal focusing on new writing by up-and-coming writers - and ah, the rarer delight of being published in print! You can purchase a copy of this issue here: http://www.gatehousepress.com/shop/anthologies/lighthouse-issue-10/

Both of these recent publications have been poems about (or inspired by) Sherlock Holmes. If this is starting to look like a theme, that's because it is a theme. Watch this space.

Another recently lovely thing was appearing on the list of the Best UK Poetry Blogs of 2015 at Matthew Stewart's highly regarded poetry blog Rogue Strands. You can find me in very good company here, with many other blogs that I would recommend: http://roguestrands.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/the-best-uk-poetry-blogs-of-2015.html

Finally, here's a list of the poetry readings I gave/took part in this year. I have a couple at least coming up in 2016, which I think will be another good poetry year.

• June - London: reading at Red Cross Garden as a poet-in-residence for the London Open Garden Squares Weekend
• July - Cambridge: reading at The Missing Slate anthology launch event, at the Judith E Wilson Studio
• September - London: reading at Red Cross Garden for their annual Flower & Vegetable Show
• October - London: reading with The Quiet Compere at the Hackney Attic
• November - Norwich: reading at the Lighthouse launch event at the Bicycle Shop

I hope that all poets, audiences and readers had as wonderful a year as possible. 

Chopin, Poetry and Anne Stevenson's 'Elegy'

Fryderyk Chopin - by Maria Wodzińska, 1835


Life seems to have been distracting and distracted of late, and I had to follow a thought down the rabbit hole to find something to write about tonight.

I played the piano pretty seriously for about ten years in my childhood and teens - starting with the spinet or harpsichord, because unusually, my parents had one at home. (It had been my grandfather's, and when my father's family lived in Calgary, the orchestra used to borrow it.) The harpsichord will limit you to Renaissance and Baroque music, as beautiful as it is, and eventually I moved on to the piano.

I was the piano student who had talent but would probably have done better had she practised more. I still did reasonably well, but I can't help wondering if my teacher slightly regretted introducing me to the great Polish composer Chopin in the last few years that I was actively playing. I already knew his music up to a point and was keen to trying playing it. As it turned out, I loved playing Chopin so much that I didn't really want to play anything else. (This wouldn't have been a problem but for the fact that I was practicing for exams where only playing Chopin wasn't an option.) The Nocturnes hit me particularly hard. Some of them were far too difficult for me, but I gave quite a few of them a go, and some with success - along with some Preludes and Etudes.

Fryderyk Chopin is the poet of the piano. It was his medium, like no one else's. There is an extreme purity of emotion in his music which often overwhelms me. It's the tightrope walk between beauty and despair, over the abyss.

My father and I were watching a Chopin documentary together when I was in Canada, and this led to me writing a poem which rather strangely was both about Chopin and about Urbain Le Verrier, the French mathematician who predicted the existence of Neptune. Chopin mentioned Le Verrier in one of his letters. I was already thinking of writing a poem on the subject of Space, which I had been requested to do for my reading with The Quiet Compere (which took place last week in Hackney). Chopin and Le Verrier proved to be the subject of my poem, in the end.

Tonight, I thought I would see if there is poetry about Chopin. There is, but perhaps not a great deal or not specifically about him. But then I found this very moving 'Elegy' by Anne Stevenson about her logical, rational father's passion for the piano. The tension - or the beauty of the balance - between logic and emotion is also something I have been thinking about lately.