Monument

I scribbled this down as a teenager:

True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank; he'd gone down there to do some fishing;
He couldna see the other side, so he went down unto his optician.
"O see ye not that broad, broad road that lies across the lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness, though some call it the road to heaven.
And see ye not that narrow road, all thick beset with thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness, though after it but few enquires."
O no, O no, True Thomas said, the wicked road's too far away;
I can but see the gudely road, all clear as in the light of day.
"O, you're short-sighted, True Thomas, and you'll need glasses for to see,
And now you'll give me seven pounds, for we don't give these eye-tests free."

Here's me reading at January's Pop Up Poetry at the Bar des Arts in Guildford.

I randomly got into a conversation about poetry with an elderly woman in a bookshop in Bakewell a few months ago, and promised to send her a copy of my anthology. Well, I just got an email from her daughter and son-in-law: she collapsed and died from a brain haemorrhage shortly afterwards, and they found the book on the doormat on returning from the hospital. They wanted to thank me for writing poems that have helped them through their grief. I'm not sure of the word for my feelings about this: sad and yet happy.

I haven't been around much, recently.

I wanted to mention that I am going to make a print-on-demand book of about a hundred of my formal poems. You can download the PDF for nothing and read it that way if you like. At some point in the near future there will be a printed version of the same thing. I always welcome comment and criticism.

Thou who sent thine own Anointed
once for all the world to bless:
Should we make our windows pointed?
Should our deacons wear a dress?
Should our candles light the dark?
Lord, remain within the ark.

Should our priests be mild and matey?
Should our men be nervous types?
Should our women all be eighty?
Art thou fond of organ pipes?
Or dost thou, above the stars,
yearn for amplified guitars?

We shall sit around the fire, and
mumble of the Crucified,
preach his gospel to the choir, and
never mind the night outside,
where despite the rain and chill
winds are blowing where they will.

I finished the redesign over the weekend.

Would you all hit the random button a few times, and let me know your favourites? If you see any breakage, let me know as well, of course.

Thanks, everyone.

Rio has been learning poems by Eleanor Farjeon and A. A. Milne, and reciting them to me. Impressively, when she makes mistakes they are starting not to affect meaning or metre. I am very proud of her.

The spring is beginning to arrive, and I'm feeling quite a lot better than I was. I'm reminded of the stories about how a hundred years ago kids would be sewn into their winter underwear in the autumn and cut out again in spring; leaving the winter behind feels like finally getting free of your winter underclothes must have felt. I was talking to Sumana earlier about my poem May and how I think of it this time of year, and how people seem to like its description of seasonal change, even though they perhaps often miss the extra meanings about Revelation 22.

My grandfather was buried on Friday. They put my sonnet into the order of service.

We found his medal collection: I thought you might like to see it.

I spent far too long yesterday hacking: something I love to do, and in a way it defines me, but if left to my own devices I would spend the whole day doing nothing else. That would be bad. Yesterday I started adapting the imgur integration to use the new API, and built part of a test harness I had been daydreaming about, and made a start on debianising some fonts I need, and played around with an idea I had for a LiveJournal/Dreamwidth to Atom adaptor which allows you to read friends-only posts in a desktop feed reader. (I call it ljferea. I may be the only person amused by this.) I also tried to explain things to someone who was creating a new programming language, and told the story of where Firinel's name comes from.

There's much more I'd like to write, but little time, and it's only a half-formed wish anyway.

The Cambridge CAMRA newsletter printed my poem about the Carlton Arms, although this is slightly bad timing as it caught fire the other night. Word is that it will be re-opening in a few months, after they've cleaned up the fire and water damage.

When I'm short of poetry, I often find myself rewriting other people's. I was thinking about this incident today. Someone told me the river ran partly through the storm channels.

I remember, I remember
A childhood in the rain:
The rivulets and sparkles
That dance around the drain
All cut into a channel
Beside a Cambridge street,
And standing proud astride it
In wellington-shod feet;

I remember, I remember
Not knowing where I am,
And later telling classmates
I'd stood astride the Cam;
It was a childish ignorance,
But now it's little joy
To know I'm farther from the stream
Than when I was a boy.

(In similar vein, I remember standing on Tower Bridge as a child (not when it was opened up, of course), jumping from one bascule to the other and saying "I'm in London! I'm in Southwark!")

Oh, there's another thing I wanted to talk to you folks about.

All my poems (except ones which are very, very rough and scribbly), end up in one of two places: Blog and Reserve.

Blog is all my poems before this year, and any of my poems this year which I didn't think seemed particularly saleable, or were written for a particular event which required them to be Blog. These poems have been posted on LJ, on Hello Poetry, on Poetfreak, and on other sites. They are all (probably) unsaleable, even some really good older ones, because most places want first printing rights, and posting them on blogs counts as publication. (This wasn't something I worried about for a long time.)

There are currently a little under a hundred of these poems.

Reserve are all poems I've written this year which I thought were good enough to sell. There are about eight of them. They have been workshopped, or posted on some kind of filter on here, or both, but not posted publicly anywhere. I am attempting to sell these to journals. So far I have had a single success in about six months. I need to keep trying, even though it's discouraging.

The things I wanted to ask you were:

• I would like the Blog poems to reach a wider audience. Do you think there's any future for the Blog poems, other than being stuck on websites and so on? Do you think they might ever see print, other than in a self-published chapbook?
• I did send a book full of Blog poems to a press which makes chapbooks, about a month ago, with the caveat that they'd all been previously published online. I haven't heard back from them; I'm not sure how long to wait before assuming they're ignoring me.
• I have the idea of posting one of the Blog poems every day here, with some notes. Good idea?