All Blogposts

  • Keeping a poetry reading journal

    Keeping a poetry reading journal

    Dashing off a quick post to try to keep to my weekly blog plan as part of the Poet Bloggers 2018 Revival Tour.  I’m knee-deep in old notebooks this week, as I flounder inside the messy and muddy quagmire that is my poetry manuscript.  I’ve spent the past two days holed-up inside my house, as… Read more

  • Towards a poetry collection

    Towards a poetry collection

    I had my very first real life meeting with Jane Commane from Nine Arches Press on Friday.  Nine Arches is based in the Midlands and I live in West Wiltshire, on the border of Somerset in the west of England, so we met in the cafe of the Friends House, by Euston Station in London.   It’s… Read more

  • Writing poetry with secondary school students: using cut ups #writerinschool

    Writing poetry with secondary school students: using cut ups #writerinschool

    As I mentioned before, I liked the collage feel of both Anthony Wilson’s notebook posts and Julie Mellor’s post about Cubomania, in which Julie cut up blocks of text and placed them together in a random way to create new poems.  With this in mind, I started a new term at St Gregory’s Catholic College, Bath,… Read more

  • Posts from poetry blogs I’ve enjoyed reading this week

    Posts from poetry blogs I’ve enjoyed reading this week

    I like this contemplative post by Charlotte Gann about the reasons she’s drawn to Stevie Smith’s poem ‘Not Waving but Drowning’. The poem ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ by Stevie Smith is only twelve lines long. Yet, the first time I read it, it created in my mind, for evermore, a whole world – and life story. Not… Read more

  • Poet Bloggers 2018 Revival Tour

    Poet Bloggers 2018 Revival Tour

    I’m a pretty regular blogger but I have let things slip a bit recently, mostly because I’ve been busy doing other kinds of writing.  In a bid to up my game,  I’ve been kindly added to this list of poet bloggers who are trying to blog weekly in 2018. You can also add yourself to… Read more

  • New Year’s Eve Musings

    New Year’s Eve Musings

    I was about to tweet a happy tweet and post a happy post about my happy year, when our washing machine broke down and our boiler stopped working.  It was eerily uncanny, as if the Fairy who stops you feeling too smug had flown into my house and sprinkled some of her glum magic over… Read more