i was rather delighted to be informed that my collection ‘ a lazarus’ had been shortlisted for the qarrtsiluni chapbook prize. thanks then to qarrtsiluni and all associated with them. it’s fair to say that, in the shape of two of greek poems, they’ve published work i don’t think would find much of a voice here and i think a lazarus continues this with a vengeance. if you’ve not visited their site i would highly recommend it and the sites around it esp dave bonta’s video poetry site moving poems which is an ideal place to while away the afternoon.

i should also thank peadar at tfe for getting the notion of the collection together by publishing the title poem and claire askew who published i am furies at just the time i was needing it. all of which might sound a bit like so much blah blah blah but it just goes to show you’re never really on your own even when it seems that way.

i like rewriting poems. i find it a good way to get into the language, copying it out, longhand or typing, it doesn’t matter (tho i prefer longhand). so what then if i took the words in poems and only those words and fashioned it into something else. so far so oulipo(esque!). the most obvious method would just be to do a cut up. which is fine for one poem but what if you’re going to do a bunch of them? in which case you have to do something like unwiring the grammatical side of your brain and then hook it back up again in the wrong order so that the resulting work has some sort of internal sense. and everybody has to be dead…

by the time i was done, and to be honest a chapbook length thing was about as long as i could manage, my brain was thoroughly fried. so much so i had to take some time off, write nothing at all but, at the end of it i had a thing that i’d seen through, that i was happy with. i guess what i’m saying is it’s worth it, to purse these notions, to do the thing for no other reason than because you want to, to see what it’ll look like when you’re done.