Verse Festival Poetry Forum, Stamford - self-publishing

2nd May - Poet Ross Ayres, poet Philip Dunkerley, and novelist and short-story writer Helen Claire Gould, plus panel chair columnist and broadcaster Pete (Cardinal) Cox discussed some of the many self-publishing options available. The meeting was in the Art Room, which had an interesting set of drawers.

Philip Dunkerley said that nearly all the poems in his books had been published elsewhere, peer-reviewed. His 80-page books work out at £3.17 each from lulu, PoD. Economies of scale kick in with postage - 50 books cost £15.99 to deliver.

All the writers said that it's difficult to proof-read one's own work. Ross Ayres said that he uses chatgpt to help with his proof-reading.

AI wasn't recommended for creating cover illustrations - the results are never quite right, and little changes require long dialogs.

There was some talk about marketing. The majority of the panel weren't too concerned about selling copies - they produced books so that they had something to give to friends, or take to their readings.

Cambridge Writing Centre: Short Story Micro-Festival

On 30 April I attended a workshop run by Chris Beckett ("The Turing Test") then listened to a panel discussion with Naomi Wood ("This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things"), Karen Stevens ("Brilliant Blue") and Nicholas Royle (BBSS editor, etc), chaired by Alison MacLeod.

• Naomi Wood said she'd spent 15 years writing novels and failing to write successful short stories before studying examples of the form, which she thought closer to the poem than the novel.
• Nicholas Royle thought that his pieces often began with an idea rather than a character. With the short story he could be experimental without taking too much of a risk.
• Karen Stevens' recent collection has linked stories. She thought intimacy was a characteristic of the form.

I wouldn't disagree with any of these comments. I think the statement about the poetry/story connection needs modernising though. Poetry has "moved on" since there was a UK poetry mainstream where the comparison made more sense. In the US, the situation's murkier still. In what sense is (say) Jorie Graham's poetry more like stories than (say) David Means' novels are?

I think CS Lewis in 1961 was onto something when he wrote "poetry is now more quintessentially poetical than ever before; 'purer' in the negative sense. It not only does (like all good poetry) what prose can't do: it deliberately refrains from doing anything that prose can do" ("An Experiment in Criticism").

Free verse, 2026

I liked the Poetry Society's Free Verse event on April 25th, where dozens of small press publishers had stalls. One of the talks was "AI in Poetry and Translation".

I bought "A Z-hearted guide to heartache" by Charley Barnes (V.press, 2018), "checkout" by Kathy Gee (V.press, 2019), "This Lexia & other languages" by Helen Kay (V.press, 2020), and was given "Patterns in the dust" (Foyles Young Poets of the year anthology, 2025), "Always another twist" by Sarah Leavesley (Mantle Lane Press, 2018), and "Kaleidoscope" by Sarah Leavesley (Mantle Lane Press, 2017).

I popped into the LRB bookshop too, buying "One sun only" by Camille Bordas - short stories (Serpent's tail, 2026).

Pizzas of the world

Spain. Somebody has tried to cross out the Hawaii pizza

South of Dublin

Cambridge

Swanage and history, 2026

Hardy called Swanage Knollsea. In this photo there's a concrete pillbox, crab and lobster pots, and a folly from London. The ships that took Portland stone to London were ballasted with odds and ends for the return journey - bollards, etc.

This "Great Globe", on the edge of Swanage dates from the 1870s. It's about 3m in diameter and was made in Greenwich.

Dancing Ledge is a terrace of rock that's covered at high tide. A cuboid hole was cut into it to make a swimming pool. My mother's school used it to teach the children how to swim. I never saw my mother swim.

When this shop was Woolworths there was a ballroom on the first floor. My parents met there. My cousin owns the shop now. Their storeroom is upstairs.

These Dinosaur prints are in a field far from anywhere.

Religious poetry, and a review of a prize winning poem

About Religious poetry, from Horace & friends (Victoria Moul) -

• Why is it that so many of the best contemporary poets in English are (broadly speaking) religious? In the US (but not in the UK), there’s a recognised tendency for “formalist” poets to be religious, especially Roman Catholic.
• the average highly-fêted poetry collection is now much more shallowly rooted in the literary culture than used to be the case, and that high-profile UK poets, in particular, now quite often sound like imitation-US poets, without the roots in the distinctive American tradition to be heard in the best American writers.
• Scripture and liturgy are, in literary terms, a shared canon.
• religious practice may also offer at least some sort of encounter with another linguistic world. ... The pronounced monolingualism of much Anglophone culture is also extremely unusual, historically and geographically, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s doing its poetry much good.

Victoria Moul and Hilary Menos discuss 'The Gathering' by Partridge Boswell, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Competition (from The friday poem) -

• Victoria: I’ll be blunt and say I think it’s a terrible poem. It seems to me to have almost all the vices of the typical ‘poetry magazine’ poem and no real redeeming features
• Hilary: feels like borrowed ballast ... it’s virtue signalling ... Lots of big league references, but so little feeling.
• Victoria: I have lost confidence at this point that the poet has really thought about his references.

Italy - Florence, Potter's Bar, Swanage and ice-creams

Back in the 1990s I managed to photograph a bird flying along il ponte vecchio (it's just above the people's heads).

Near Potter's Bar, this stone is on a piece of grass. It reads "Near this spot at 3.30 in the afternoon of September 15th 1784, Vicenzo Lunardi, the Italian balloonist, made his first landing whilst on his pioneer flight in the English atmosphere. Having handed out a cat and dog, the partners of his flight from London, he re-ascended and continued north-eastward."

This is the "great globe" in Swanage, Dorset. It was made in Greenwich in 1887.

It features an eroded Italy

In a Swanage restaurant I went to the toilet and saw this air freshener - showing where I was married.

This dates from 1993, before the euro. I brought it home as a souvenir.