Frequency of blog posts? You may have noticed the drop. Suffering a pretty heavy attack of the busy. Likely to remain so through June into July…
This wall of post-its comes via It’s Nice That - for no reason other than maintaining a theme…
Currently in Birmingham, spending the weekend working on a poem with twelve poets from around the country. The final poem will be installed in the Olympic park. Deadline tomorrow, 4pm. Spent part of this afternoon exploring a form for the piece - very important with twelve poets to hand where each one should have some input in the final piece.
Note: the “turn” bears Michael Theune’s theory of structure and surprise in mind.
Made with Paper
“We’re all quite frightened of that space. We rush in to fill it, and when we rush we often fail to fill that space deeply.” Notes from a sharing session in a PAL project, from the mouth of Kathy Pimlott (Taken with instagram)
“Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.” — How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet (via interestingsnippets)
(via roomthily)
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget,’ Didion writes. ‘We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.’ She ignores that to forget can be a supreme grace. I treasure all of the diaries I kept when I was a child precisely because of the distance I feel from the girl who wrote them. Seventh grade Alice: ‘It’s totally cool because it’s like we’ve moved on to another level of flirting.’ Eighth grade Alice: ‘You know I’ve been thinking way deep things lately.’ First grade Alice: ‘Dear Alice, I don’t know. Love, Alice.’ ”I have always been a person who is ‘sensitive,’ and I take too long to get over everything. Reading old journals and notebooks, I am reminded that feelings are, in their essence, immediate, and they pass over us like shadows. All the words I collect are artifacts of sentiments that do not exist and could not even be conceived of again—ideas that once desperately needed to be expressed disappear, leaving husks of language that I save, I care for.”
— Alice Bolin, with thanks to leopoldgursky
(via growing-orbits)
(via growing-orbits)
From ‘Deep Fried’, Sid Miller #poem (Taken with instagram)
“2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.” —
6 tips on writing from John Steinbeck (via explore-blog)
The full list is geared more towards writers of prose than poetry, but there are obvious parallels. Consider ‘scene’ as ‘image’, for example…
(Source: , via explore-blog)
You have your orders. Perform! (Taken with instagram)
“After everything it’s like the tune
we keep humming over and over
mostly for how it makes us remember
somewhere back in our shimmering youths,
before the household and the furniture,
before the children and the mortgage and the pets;
back when it was only the two of us,
only each other to abide, obey,
suffer and satisfy, endure, survive;
only one another to have and hold
and that hush that would sometimes settle between us,
and the light—how it turned silver in the dark,
till everything we touched turned into gold.
In time we came to know that tune by heart.”
—
—Thomas Lynch, ‘Alchemy’ from Walking Papers: Poems
Via W. W. Norton
Got a copy of Kayo Chingonyi’s ‘Some Bright Elegance’ last week, from the man himself. Recommended. One of the bright new voices of Black British poetry, via Salt Modern Voices. Taking it in to my Speaking Volumes workshop today. (Taken with instagram)