Update, January 2024

It’s out! The 7th poetry publication is on the listings at www.centralbooks.com and available to be bought through the local indie bookshops. Five Leaves in Nottingham is a reliable stockist of Shoestring Press titles and a big supporter of poets in this region– in a few weeks’ time I will be doing the launch there [23rd January – ed]. Thanks as always to the press, the reliable typesetting team @BookTypesetters, and Imprint Digital (down in Exeter) who do such a grand job on regional press publishing; and to any prospective readers out there who might want a copy. This time it’s all about the workplace. The toxic workplace. Welcome to the circus….  If you are not yet convinced, there is a very nice promotional piece on the Creative Writing at Leicester site, dated December 17th 2023.

And now I have to help with selling the book. It means I’ll be contributing to all that background noise out there, of poets squeaking their wares and hoping to be heard above the crowd. While working out what I could do about the problem, I saw a post on Twitter which really helped me think about it in a slightly different way. It came from Aaron Kent, the one behind Broken Sleep Books, where he described working on a submarine and hearing the background clicks of tiny sea creatures in his sonar headphones. It’s shrimp noise, apparently. But what you have to do is concentrate on what’s important, listen out for the thing you are looking for, and ignore the shrimp noise. So, the cool/well-connected person who always seems to grab the review space? Shrimp noise. The small mags who focus on a narrow range of mates for their contents? That poet who has the residencies you keep reading about even though you can’t recall anything they’ve ever done? Forget them, it’s shrimp noise. Does the constant babble of promotion make you worried about your arts ‘career’? It certainly does that to me, because I’ve been in the slow lane plenty of times. But it’s shrimpnoise all the same. In the world of the shrimp, be a lobster. Or a hermit crab. Whatever you like. Be yourself. Just focus on the real stuff as you see it, and stick to that.

Of course, those who follow Steampunk might like to know how it went. Well, I was frozen silly in the vast & echoing National Space Centre, clumping around in my big boots and a velvet tunic with stars on, wielding my Airship Hat. And there were lots of Steampunks wearing the regulation garb, and others who were performing in the spoken-word-type events, which are similar to improv nights and theatre studio work. I found out a bit about the publishing scene, and a couple of people even talked to me, which is quite a breakthrough. And soon after, I went to the Newark on Trent Christmas Fair – but not for the whole day, because it was pitching it down and freezing again, with most people crammed into the Buttermarket building in an attempt to stay dry. I mean, those velvets and furnishing fabrics can ship in quite a lot of water, and you don’t want to be dragging a hundredweight of wet fabric around. Thankfully there’s another weekend in May 2024, and I hope it’s not so…. er…. inclement by then. Be Splendid! Yes, even when everyone else seems to be wearing custom-made gowns fit for the House of Worth, and you’re in a converted pinafore dress that cost £2.50 from a charity shop in Whitley Bay.