Some Recent Publications

A short blog entry on a couple of recent publications. At the beginning of the month, I had poems featured on both The Compass and the Proletarian Poetry sites.

It's been very exciting to have two poems in The Compass because it's a brand new magazine with some wonderful poems and reviews. The editors have a slightly different approach to most on-line magazines, in that rather than publishing the whole thing in one go they're spacing out poems and reviews over the course of a week. For me this has meant reading nearly everything on the site, simply because there's more time and space to do so. At the time of writing there's still another day's worth of poems to go live. I'm very chuffed to have two poems in The Compass. One of my poems is from the point of view of Virginia Woolf's half-sister Laura Stephen. You may not have heard of her. By our modern standards she probably had a form of autism, but by the standards of her day she was considered to be a suitable patient for an asylum. I wanted to explore the family tension and possibly (artistic license) the sense of a resolution, albeit an unsettled one.

There are also poems from Ian Duhig, Philip Gross, Pippa Little, Martha Sprackland, Hannah Lowe, Jonathan Edwards, Charlotte Gann, Katie Hale and others. Please click here to have a look at the contents for issue 1 and then have a look at the other things the magazine has to offer. The editors are Andrew Forster, Lindsey Holland, with Kim Moore as Reviews Editor. 

I also have a new poem on the Proletarian Poetry site. It;s not really a new poem, but one I wrote a few years ago. PP (as it's known for short), is a fabulous site edited by Peter Raynard, This site's focus is on poems which focus on the working class and working class lives.  How's this for dedication - every week Peter publishes a poem which is accompanied with his own written commentary.  Recent poets featured have included Richard Skinner, Catherine Ayres, Daniel Sluman and Jonathan Edwards. My poem is all about the bookies and you can find it here. Peter has written a lovely, thoughtful piece to accompany the poem. I've really enjoyed reading the poems and the commentaries.

To me, both sites are excellent examples of where we might be going in terms of the future of on-line publishing and how flexible the medium can be. Stay tuned.