Matters Arising: May Edition

This is my first attempt at scheduling. By the time you (hopefully) read this I'll be battling back on a train from London to read some poetry. My piece in the Unwhispered Legacy anthology is my third political publication this year. Yesterday saw my fourth, and yes, shit is finally getting real.

Marble, Wax, Horse: The Mould and the Metaphor in this Month’s POTM Selection

Presenting April’s POEM’s OF THE MONTH. The thread between all selected poems is breaking; a horse, from the status quo, the rules, a heart, marble into statue. It takes OOMPH to break open, or from.

VERVE Poetry FestivalVERVE Poetry

You'll find my SHORTLISTED POEM at the bottom. That will get talked about it AT LENGTH on Monday, and I will be annotating a physical copy over the weekend. This poem is significant for many reasons, which we will discuss in due course. For now, I'll let people find it and discover it and see if there is any response... because. The family love it though. That's progress.

I'm now writing this having come back from an evening with the Arts Collective which was... interesting. A piece of work was written on site, and I'm dropping off an anthology from Civic Leicester which includes a poem of mine before I leave for the Smoke (video for which below). It was a wonderful experience that has set me up nicely for a whole month of talking and living the ekphrastic response.

After that, there is some other Stuff that needs a look at. I am, I know, still in shock from Wednesday, and it is going to take some time to get my head around somebody else reading my work and considering it Enough. We'd largely written off any traction from the Trad Poetry world this year now I have a guaranteed outcome for 2026. To be honest, I still have.

The fact remains that I really have no fucking idea what's going to happen next. The assumption is always that it won't be success because of the amount of times that has happened previously but what is becoming clearer by the day is that successful is not the outcome I am now striving for. Happy is the real ambition. Right now, that is absolutely what we're being on a regular basis.

I REALLY hope it keeps happening that way.