Authors Electric

I’m a little shrinking violet, really. Avoiding conflict at all costs, not showing off (‘drawing attention to yourself’always disapproved of mightily at home), but here goes: I’m going to show off and be controversial, all in the one blog, so there. First, the showing off. I’ve already Facebooked and Twittered this, but I haven’t finished yet: I have three poems in the current issue of The Blue Nib! Yes! The editor commented, ‘I like these plangent poems and the acute way you deal sensitively with what can often be very clichéd issues.’   Cor blimey! (that’s me, not the Editor). I’m blushing as I write, but only a little bit.  Now the controversy, which is about poetry – or not-poetry and not-art and not-music. William Carlos Williams started it with his note about eating the plums from the fridge. That’s what it is, a note left for his wife telling her that he’d eaten the plums. It’s been anthologised all over the place. Is it a poem? And who am I to ques...

This is a well-worn topic, but then I’m a well-worn writer. I have spasms of sending ‘stuff’ out. Sometimes new stuff, sometimes stuff that’s been the rounds before – on the little flickering wings of hope that this time, this time, it would find a home. Here, dear Editor, is my precious child, a drop of my heart’s blood, a small shining piece of my soul. Take it and cherish it. What?? It doesn’t fit your publishing needs? Thanks but no thanks? Not even that, but silence? I look again and see, now, the taint in my heart’s blood, the deformity in my precious child, the smear across the piece of my soul. How could I have thought anyone would want it, let alone love and cherish it? I am a deluded fool. I will slink off into outer darkness and never show my sorry head again. Thought I could write, did I? Hah!  Black hole of despair (Fingal's Cave, really) Or...what was the matter with the idiot who failed to see the worth of my precious child, the life-pulse of my ...