Upcoming:
Ingledove reviews
Phil's mystery award
Meanwhile:
from Roddy Lumsden,
Poetry in practice: mistakes poets make
There are heaps more of these funny, anonymous quotes from poets... go look.
*Never agree to stay behind and look at the folders or manuscripts of individual poets after teaching a workshop. This leads straight to boiling in pig's blood in hell.
*Many unpublished poets are as good as many published ones. They're just not different enough for a publisher to be interested. If you already have plenty tins of beans in the store, you don't order more.
*Be prepared for your minor competition win to herald ten years of arid obscurity rather than the sunlit uplands of the success you drunkenly imagined was then secured.
*Don't, as I was, be put off by the lofty way reviewers and academics write about poetry – think of it as the pidgin language of a far-away land you never need visit.
*Reviewing should be firm, kind and not more than one sentence cruel. If you can help it.
*Don't go to a dinner or drinks party where you don't know the other invitees and say you're a poet. Auden settled on 'Medieval Historian', I normally say 'Logician'.
