Issue 6 poetandgeek.com seeks content and images

We are already to beginning to develop our next issue and it promises to be the usual idiosyncratic mezcla of pandemonium and pansies, vim and violets, roses and raptures...

Don't get left behind on the quay, make a new year's resolution to send us something.

Full details and examples of the magazine in all its resplendence can be found here www.poetandgeek.com

poetandgeek.com happy birthday

2 years old today (or thereabouts)

Well done to us and all our editors and to you our lovely poet and geeks...

You may notice some changes over the next few months... re-branding no...but simplification yes...

Not wanting to write

We'll all have days like these. The paper stays white. We resent it. We complete myriad chores of the kind:

• rearranging our collection of tickets
• dusting
• finding and comparing and making new lists
• and so on.

The writing does not occur. In my case I usually hate the idea of writing. I am rarely indifferent to it and when that happens somehow it is even worse.

Lately I have been keeping a log of the commute to my geek work. This has been very satisfying in that no work day goes by at least without something written. Pressure off. I can then luxuriate in any poems I write.

Today I feel I don't care about the idea of writing at all.
And I have written this already.

It is a good trick if you can fool yourself.

It doesn't always work though!

Poetry statue

This statue is thought to have inspired Percy Bysshe Shelly to write another poem about a statue Ozymandias in 1817. The chronology is bit iffy but let's not worry about that now.

(btw the British Museum in London was a magnet to the romantic poets including notably Keats; seen as a dynamic centre of endeavour and new discovery unlike our own rather musty view of such places.)

He wrote in competition with his friend Horace Smith whose own less known poem of  the same title follows.


In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
      Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
      The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
    "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
      "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
    "The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
      Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
    The site of this forgotten Babylon.

    We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
    Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
      Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
    He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
      What powerful but unrecorded race
      Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Thank you to M.chohan for the use of this photo.

Shearsman reading 9th January 2013 London, England

A nice way to slide into the new year if you are in this big bad capital city. A free reading with an all-American female (and poet amongst many other things) line-up of Melissa Buckheit, Maxine Chernoff and Jaime Robles.

You may know Robles already from her work at Five Trees Press, an award-winning literary publishing house based in San Francisco which she co-founded.

This event is held at the Swedenborg Hall, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, WC1A 2TH. Did I mention already that admission is free?

You can find out more here http://www.facebook.com/events/548343065176737/

Empty room

Attending a book launch before Christmas, I was drawn up the staircase of the old house into empty rooms above. The furniture had been removed after the owner's death and subsequent auction. And the reading we were giving was one of the first money raising activities to save the fabric of the house which has now been left to (and claimed by) the community. The space was full.

There is nothing like peopling a place with your imagination. I think this was one of the great attractions for me in working as a guide at Abbotsford (Walter Scott's house) which at that time had just ended continued occupation by his descendants following the death of his last direct line relative.

It is something startling to wait for a tour party in the quiet of Scott's library and imagine him seeing the same light on the lion at the end of the bannister or letting his dogs out of the window or simply escaping visitors by using the stairs straight up to his dressing room above. Visitors felt the same showing each other secret ways to open cupboards, sharing knowledge or one tucked away Maori object among all the other paraphernalia of Scott the antiquarian.

Daniel Clark's evocative memoir of the Crossley Sanatorium in Cheshire, England is lit with the same revelatory lamp. It shows the ward rooms prior to any renovations in a state of encroaching dissolution. The gallery allows you to walk around the hospital seen through Daniel's eyes; detail, decay and form. Visual poetry.

You can find out more here http://www.daniel-clark.co.uk/crossleysanatorium/ or about the beautiful house and its grounds where I read at http://www.thehaining.co.uk/.

New Year 2013

With the dregs of hogmanay drained, we wish our users a happy and prosperous 2013. It will be p&g's own birthday in a couple of weeks; we are 2! Plus we are close to 20,000 visits made from 114 countries and counting.

We look forward to welcoming you in this new year for more computing, places and poetry. And if you haven't yet, check out our latest edition of the poetandgeek.com online magazine here http://www.poetandgeek.com/issue5/issue05.html.

Hogmanay: the Scots word for the last day of the year and the celebrations surrounding the beginning of the new year.

You can find out more here http://www.edinburghshogmanay.com/