Four months of fun

Ah, it's been a while, but I can report that I have, in the time away, managed to make my 2021 performance debuts in the real world, first in la belle France at Paris Lit Up last month and then at the very beginning of October for the European Poetry Festival European Camarade at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester. For this, I invited Lydia Unsworth to team up with me, and we had fun creating a collection of 'grams for each day of the week. I've since been busying myself while suffering from a poorly back following a fall (I'm getting on a bit now, after all) with a few additions, including messing around with anagrams about Barbara Hepworth sculptures and calligrams about a comet I claim to have seen while en vacances. I've also been writing some ekphrastic pieces about the work in Dez Rez Projects' visual art exhibition GALA, which finally got shown at Victoria Baths at the end of September, when I read some of my poetry from the bottom of one of the pools, and I'm currently compiling all these new bits and bobs into a third pamphlet. My debut poetry pamphlet, cache-cache, has found a home with Netherlands-based Contraband Books and will be out in the spring; my prose pamphlet, Marine Drive, is chalked up for an autumn publication with Broken Sleep Books. I can't tell you how delighted I am to have been accepted by such amazing publishers, and I'm really looking forward to working with them both. One of my concrete pieces, Navigation Is Difficult, More Now Than Ever Perhaps, just came out in the hold-in-your-hands lovely magazine that is Firmament from Sublunary Editions while The Interpreter's House has another visual piece of mine, Will Finches Inhabit Me?, creeping up on us very shortly. Upcoming live appearances include being one of the first to hit the new stage of Verbose as it moves into the King's Arms (next Monday), then joining the fabulous Sophie Herxheimer as she launches INDEX with Tom Jenks' zimZalla at the Peer Hat, alongside Nell Osbourne of No Matter fame (14 November). Phew, it's all go and right now I'm in the audience for a Centre for Poetry & Poetics evening beaming out of Sheffield, so I'd best make tracks...