PAMPHLET!: There it Is!

Last time on this feature we considered Project 1668, which is in submission.

It seems sensible therefore to now contextualise the journey that Forest Management (its creative predecessor) has had until now. It was shortlisted by Live Canon in 2024 and I spent a lot of time for the rest of that year feeling hugely sorry for myself. Having it win with Hedgehog last year was simultaneously great and terrible. Taking ownership of it back in September gave me closure.

I learnt a lot last year about how genuinely terrifying poetry publishing has become in this country. As I sat and waited for news, I heard horror stories from friends, watched real-time fist fights break out on social media, and wondered what things might be like if work was treated with far more respect and publishers were held more culpable for their professional decisions (or indeed the lack of them).

This piece of work presents several legacies I would like to fulfil.

I announced to a roomful of people in June last year my intention to make this pamphlet into a series of short films. This will still happen, just not as I had intended back then. Most of the heavy lifting has been done, and I have some time coming up into which this project would ideally sit. After that, this could end up becoming a crowd-funder. I have friends I can talk to about this, and I will.

This sequence has also altered quite significantly the way I approach long-form work. It has coloured a renewed desire to not be suckered in by other people's ideas of what poetry should be and what it instead represents in my heart. This is one of the main reasons why I chose to take the Art Trail gig this year, which has subsequently resulted in a shift in the approach to how ALL my work is formed.

Before all that, however, I’d held out hope it would be published...

October 23rd is my 60th birthday, and this has become a gift to myself that I am genuinely excited to share with a wider audience. The youngest is designing a cover as I type, and I already have both Real Life and Virtual Launches in the planning stage. I also need to say a massive thank you to Barbara , who now solo runs Flight of the Dragonfly Press, for approaching me with the offer.

I know how rare it is for publishers to do such things with poets. It is very much a buyers market right now, as both my economics-trained husband and elder son will tell me. On that front, there will be pre-orders, which I’m hoping to make a bit special with some bells and whistles on top of the normal stuff that happens with launching new things. We'll talk about that more tomorrow.

Beginnings are always exciting. This one will also serve as a form of closure.