National Poetry Day 2020: Vision

 

Today is National Poetry Day in the UK, and the theme for 2020 is 'Vision' or 'See It Like a Poet'. There are many wonderful resources and poems available on the National Poetry Day website, and a lot more out there generally on the internet (even more so than usual this year, of course...) 

Wandsworth Art has done a 'Wandsworth is poetry' feature to mark the occasion, and delightfully, I am included as a Battersea/Wandsworth poet, alongside excellent contemporary poets and the greats of the past such as Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy. You can read it here: https://wandsworthart.com/wandsworth-is-poetry/ 

(Thank you so much to Hilaire, another poet who lives locally, for getting me on this list!) 

Black Bough Poetry's 'Deep Time Volume 1' issue, published in print during the summer, is now also online and includes my poem 'Open Ocean'. You can download it here. Buying the print issue is also highly recommended, particularly as the artwork is beautiful and more so in print. You can buy it here in the UK and also on Amazon in other countries. 

Muse Pie Press, who have published several of my short poems over the years in Shot Glass Journal, recently crowd-sourced a 'pandemic poem' from writers who they have previously published. We were asked to contribute a line responding to our feelings about the COVID-19 pandemic, which could then be woven into a long poem. You can now read the ambitious and startling result here. I could ask you to guess my line, but rather than do that, I'll tell you that it's 'Waking to light's anxiety - the distance of all things'. 

Dear readers...all my recent poetry updates

It's hard to believe that it's over two months since I last posted, but also not hard to believe. I've moved house and returned to work (though soon again to be not working, for a while), which technically are my excuses but I think that a lot of us have found it difficult to concentrate enough to write much during the pandemic, even though (in some cases) we have more time than usual.

I also feel that a lot of my blog posts have been very self-focused lately, and this one will be no exception. I'm not entirely happy about that and really feel that I need to start making more of an effort again to write about poems, rather than just what I've published lately.

That said...here we are with my updates, all of which happily do concern other poets and publishers as well.

Colin Bancroft has recently set up a new website called The Poets' Directory, where he generously and usefully posts information about journals, publishers, events and so forth in the UK and Ireland. There is also an extensive list of Collections, Pamphlets and Chapbooks by poets in the UK and Ireland, which includes my Island of Towers.  And there is a showcase of poems from these collections, which now includes my poem 'As though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul'. This website is really a remarkable resource and is well worth your time.

I've just had a new poem, 'Open Ocean', published in the latest issue of Black Bough Poetry. This special issue is Volume 1 of a theme around Deep Time, inspired by the work of Robert Macfarlane in his acclaimed book Underland, and it will soon be appearing online but for now is only available in print. You can find all the details on this website, including several wonderful reviews (one of which specifically mentions my poem!) and information on how to buy the print edition: https://www.blackboughpoetry.com/deep-time-project
I highly recommend buying the printed version, partly because of the wonderful poetry by so many poets including Paul Brookes, Ankh Spice, Matthew M.C. Smith (also the publisher of Black Bough), Jenny Mitchell and Robert Minhinnick, among others. But the artwork by Rebecca Wainwright is absolutely stunning and beautifully reproduced in this edition.

The superb iamb website, which features poetry read by the poets and which included a few of my poems in its 'wave one', has gone from strength to strength. It was shortlisted in the prestigious Saboteur Awards, and its 'wave three' is just about to appear - you can already see which poets are featured, including the likes of Aaron Kent (my publisher at Broken Sleep Books!), Jorie Graham and Victoria Kennefick. iamb's publisher Mark Antony Owen was also kind enough to nominate my poem 'I dream the perfect ride', which appears on the website, for Sundress Publications' Best of the Net 2020.

Finally, I had an acceptance which won't appear for a while but which I'm excited about. My publishers Broken Sleep Books are preparing an anthology to be published in 2021, featuring poems based on vintage video games, and I'll have a poem about a classic role-playing game in the anthology. We've already been informed that the anthology will appear in two slightly different versions/editions, with covers in Mario Red and Luigi Green...

I hope that you and yours are staying as well and safe as possible.

New Poem in Black Bough Poetry, & Alison Brackenbury Review in Magma

Recently, my poem 'Canada' appeared in the new Wales-based micropoem publication Black Bough Poetry (publishing poems of up to 10 lines). You can download the whole publication as a PDF here (it's Issue 1, Summer 2019): https://smithmatt1.wixsite.com/blackbough/publications

There's a fine variety of poems, by new and more established poets, in the first issue of Black Bough Poetry, and I recommend having a good browse through.

'Canada' is, in part, a poem about imagining how other people imagine. Being Canadian and having spent the first 23 years of my life there, I have a particularly intimate connection to the concept of Canada, and I know that often when others ask me about my country, they're picturing something quite different from what I see in my mind, and feel. I have to say that the poem is also partly about how big Canada is geographically, and how that adds to its "bigness" as a concept. I think it's too big to be understood, in a way that is different from most other countries. (I probably would think that, being Canadian...) So of course, I wrote a very short poem about it. The poem is also partly about night flying - something I find nerve-wracking, but sometimes beautiful in an elemental way. How this all came together, I am really not sure.

My other recent publication came a few days ago - a review of Gallop by Alison Brackenbury, for Magma Poetry. It's an excellent new collection (a Selected Poems from her whole career, actually) and I highly recommend it. You can read the review here: https://magmapoetry.com/review-clarissa-ackroyd-reviews-gallop-by-alison-brackenbury/


Photo by Robert Nelson. Used under Creative Commons license