I read somewhere that 2014 is the year of the death of blogging. Whilst I don't think that's true - there are loads of regularly updated excellent poetry blogs out there - the role of blogging, for me, has changed over the last couple of years.I initially set up this blog under a pseudonym as an outlet for my writing with the hope of meeting like-minded readers and writers and the hope of improving my writing. The results were far beyond my expectations. I found a creative community of people who inspired, encouraged and taught me so much. However because of magazines' stricter conceptions of 'publication' and not being able to post up first drafts of poems, the blog has turned into an irregular newsy update on poetry publications etc.
I'm not sure of the future function of blogs like these as Facebook and Twitter have taken over the creative community aspect of blogging.
Anyway, my dream start to 2014 of having poems published in this month's Poetry magazine alongside such poets as Jane Hirshfield and Emily Berry has come true, much to my continuing utter amazement. You can read this month's mag here and listen to the podcast here where my poems are described as Homeric (!!!!!!) with reference being made to Yeats (!!!!!!!!). Always embarrassing hearing yourself read and I was pretty nervous but I'm so completely delighted at Don Share's and Lindsay Garbutt's
lovely comments on my poems. The rest of the year can sink into oblivion and it'll still be the best year ever!
8 comments:
Lovely poems - well done. Wild Poppies is beautiful (sigh. Have a great writing year!
Hi Heather, thanks for reading them! Wishing you a great writing year too! :)
Beautiful poems. I love the ending of "Roses", among many other excellent things. I would have to say that your poems are better than the editors' discussion of them!!
Wishing you such a good year that this turns out to be one of the lesser joys by comparison:-)
Thanks James! It'll take a lot to beat this for me this year :) Happy New Year to you and yours! :)
Happy New Year. At least speculations as to the end of blogging give us something to blog about.
The weakness of blogging as a medium is that an old post is no more attractive to read (for some reason) than an old newspaper. It's strengths, I think, outweigh this. It's certainly a good counter to the old fogies argument that the internet is undermining literacy.
Happy New Year, Dominic! I'm thinking I may start posting occasional poetry reviews, give the blog a bit more of a purpose and focus.
I nearly forgot about this one (got buried in a list on Evernote which is how I keep track of things to do), so a belated Happy New Year to you too. I’ve got the wee audio recording from Poetry to listen to further up the list which I will get to in due course (trying to be good and deal with things in sequence) but I just thought I’d ship in my tuppenceworth on the death of blogging. There are so many times people have come along and announced the death of something (e.g. poetry, the novel) but things get their second and third winds; apparently they had platform shoes back in ancient Greece. That said I don’t read nearly as many blogs as I used to because I can’t find many that interest me. A lot of the good ones have either folded up shop completely, only post whenever they can be arsed or have lost direction somewhere along the line and spend more time talking about their pets or new recipes they’ve been trying out. That said it’s been a while since I’ve made a concerted effort to find new people because it takes such an effort. I used to devote hours and hours in the beginning to trawling through blogs looking for people to pally up to but not anymore. So maybe blogging isn’t dead but it is wasting away gradually I think. Time’s the problem. No one has any. Even I never feel like I’ve enough hours in the day (which is why I’m sitting here at 5:30 in the morning writing this comment after having spent an hour writing a book review after spending an hour finishing the book I then sat down and reviewed). You eke out the moments of clarity when they come. I’ve actually been thinking of doing a general appeal: Who should I be reading? There’ve got to be blogs out there, interesting, thought-provoking blogs that because of the nature of life online simply aren’t attracting readers. Look at mine! I’ve been at this for six and a half years and I still haven’t hit 250 followers. I used to promote like crazy but it takes up so much time and the return on investment is simply not worth it.
Your methodical dedication to keeping up with it all has always been impressive, Jim, I don't know how you do it!
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