Words with music

Although I didn’t get anywhere in the recent Build Africa (Excel for Charity) Poetry Competition, my two poems “Fid. Def. Ind. Imp.” and “Bringing them back to earth” have been selected for inclusion in their anthology “A’ Freak Yer! and Other Poems”.  Should be good.

Just to say that “Till death” has now been placed on the Northampton Literature Group website, at: http://www.northamptonliteraturegroup.org.uk/2010%20prizewinners.html

Unfortunately, it has lost its formatting here. It’s written in couplets. This changes the flow of the poem somewhat, but I expect it’s an html problem. Formatting poems in WordPress is a similar problem, as it removes blank lines.

The Poetry Library runs an excellent web resource, amongst other things: listing magazines and competitions and archiving a range of sample magazines. Recently I’ve had a couple of requests for magazines which contain my poems, hopefully to appear there in the not too distant future: Matter 9, which contains “On the Edge of Something” and “Snapshot” and Purple Patch #124, which contains “Chains” and “Thread”. Previously, I’ve only had one poem in the whole archive (I think), a very slight little thing called “Sparks” in The Ugly Tree (a magazine now sadly passed the way of all small poetry mags): http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=22349

Made it onto the cover of the latest Orbis (alongside Ben Wilkinson, another excellent Sheffield poet). Here’s the proof, if you doubt such a thing is possible (Click on the image to expand it):



Northampton Literature Group run an Open Poetry competition. They’ve awarded me second prize in the free verse category for my poem “Till death”, and “Satan’s gift was also shortlisted in the rhyming category.

“Till death” will go on their website, but I don’t think there’ll be any other publication.

Adjudication is on Thursday (17th). Still unsure if I’ll get to it or not, to read.

A couple of days later also heard from the Southport competition that “Eclipsed” had been Highly Commended, which is pretty good (in the top 6), I guess.

Here’s a really great idea: a wesbite on which children tell stories for other children to listen to. The stories are written by grown-ups, and read by youngsters.

My story, “Jigstory”, is read by a charming young lady who really puts herself into it. It’s fabulous. But many of the other readers are entertaining or cute or lovely, too. I can see this really catching on.

My story: http://www.smories.com/watch/jigstory/

The home page: http://www.smories.com/