The Spring edition of Poetry News (the newspaper of the UK Poetry Society) features an article by Robin Houghton about blogging based on interviews with seven poets who also write blogs- Sarah Westcott, Abegail Morley, Josephine Corcoran, John Field, Anthony Wilson, George Szirtes and me.

Winter 2014 copy of Poetry News

Robin has selected poet bloggers who use their posts for a variety of reasons and she’s done a good job of collating the answers.  Here are a few reasons the interviewees have given to the question ‘why blog?’

George Szirtes says it is a “space to work out some thoughts.. to act as something of a diary…to talk about poets I like.”

John Field writes ‘intelligent, in-depth poetry book reviews’ because he feels poetry is “poorly represented” and that his reviews give exposure that might lead to  book sales.

I’m sure most people reading this will have, at some…

I am pleased to announce the publication of my third full collection, Undisturbed Circles. It’s composed of a series of double-acrostic sonnet crowns. The acrostics run down the left hand margin of each sonnet, and continue down the right, adding another layer of complexity to the narrative.

If that’s not confusing enough, here is the Form Key:

Forward and Form Key

Fox Cycle is a traditional sonnet crown; adorned with a continuous double-acrostic that runs down the left and right margins of each sonnet and which, taken together, form another poem. It details the life of a vixen as she (being trickster) slips between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

The Labyrinth is a heroic sonnet crown. This piece is technically intricate. Each sonnet is prefaced by a brief narrative prose-poem that I used to set the tone for the grouping. The sonnets themselves…

Boiling a Frog

It’s lovely here in the cauldron.
When the sun rose, I saw the water,
the blue green ripples, on the stove
leapt straight in.

Now I float on my back, inflate/deflate my belly.
I croak in Ribbet Ribbet glee.
Bubbles begin to rise
burst slow against my skin.

Actually it’s getting warm in here.
Relaxing, I suppose, but just a bit
uncomfortable and hot. Steam rises,
spirals into air.

I see a face appear, look down at me,
sharpen a knife, prepare to spear me
with a fork, slice me into
tasty well-cooked morsels.

Susan Castillo Street is a Louisiana expatriate and academic who lives in the Sussex countryside. She is Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor Emeritus, King’s College, University of London, and has published a book of poems titled The Candlewoman’s Trade (Diehard Press, 2003).  Her second collection, Abiding Chemistry, is forthcoming later this spring from Aldrich Press. …

Here’s what our education secretary said recently at a conference to promote science and technology learning. Here’s my reply.

Dear Ms Morgan –

I left school in 1986. I did two humanities degrees. Jobs, as you may recall, were not thick on the ground. I did a business course first, not because I wanted to but because, oddly enough, I didn’t know what else to do. I thought it would give me a solid, useful career in which I could contribute to the national economy and make my father happy.

Then I came to my senses. I ran away from the business course, which made me want to kill myself and a number of other people, and did two humanities degrees. I spent eighteen happy, poorly-paid years in archaeology. My specialist field was – as it happens – the archaeology of industry, and particularly of mining, which was so vital…

Good Friday, 2013: Driving Westwards
On this shared road westwards
where Donne thought deep into faith,
the car kicks down a gear and the
A5 unspools its tune like ferric tape,
the tyres’ slow hymn on tarmac,
perhaps I dare to think of hope;
on the cusp of winter’s long tenancy
wondering if, when, spring come again;
if, after this austere new ice age,
we can ever know what’s really been lost.

The Roman road’s shattered spine
now arches through a wayside hinterland;
small towns pick-pocketing each other,
stripped of their old callings and clinging
to name alone; the setting sun shatters
between pylon and gantry, local colour
bled out into warehousing valleys,
artics shunting a service economy
from hub to hub, supplying demand
in a strategically-decommissioned landscape.

Into the westerly sunset – at Donne’s back
the weight of imagery, of blood and thorns,
he almost dared not to turn…

David and the Hummingbird
For Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)
Joyce tells a story of the day
the bird flew into the shed
and would not leave;
it beat its wings until it fell
exhausted to the floor.

But it didn’t end like that,
nor was this the beginning—

The morning of the Kill,
the hummingbird flew through the open door
and circled round and round the blood
“It was not interested to feed,” she said,
but just to see and understand.

It went up into the rafters,
and then down again
towards the cement floor.
Its blues and greens dancing in
the light and dark;
the corners hiding it and then
like magic, letting it be seen.

David tried to make it leave;
first, sugar feeders lured it outside;
then, when it was noon, the
darkest noon they’d ever seen,
the thunder began.
He set the sugar water inside the garage…