Other Lives

January The Haiku Anthology, ed. Cor Van Den Heuvel (contd; reread) The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, ed. Robert Hass Not In These Shoes, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch (reread) The Dog in the Sky, Helen Ivory A Halfway House, Neil Powell Selected Poems, Christopher Reid Katerina Brac, Christopher Reid (reread) Black Cat Bone, John Burnside February Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, ed. Dennis O’Driscoll View with A Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, Wislawa Szymborska (reread) Zone Journals, Charles Wright (reread) The Water Table, Philip Gross For and After, Christopher Reid Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney (reread) Door into the Dark, Seamus Heaney (reread) Wintering Out, Seamus Heaney (reread) North, Seamus Heaney (reread) Field Work, Seamus Heaney (reread) Station Island, Seamus Heaney (reread) The Haw Lantern, Seamus Heaney (reread) Seeing Things, Seamus Heaney (reread) March Seeing Things, Seamus...

At the age of just five, Arlo Giovanni Butler (A.G., as his friends call him) is the youngest of the New Next Generation Poets. Butler won the National Poetry Competition while many of his contemporaries were still struggling with phonemes and secured a publisher for his first collection before finishing prep school. After graduating from UEA at the age of eight, he relocated to East London where he established the capital's premier spoken word club night which attracts edgy outsiders, hip mainstreamers and not a few bebrogued hangers-on who, when their friends aren't looking, will passionately explain that poetry is cool because it is 'free from the logic of capital'. Comparisons with the New York School of poets aren't entirely undeserved since, in the words of another commentator, 'they sometimes seem only interested in each other.' Once active online, Butler explains he stopped engaging with social networking systems after winning the T.S.Eliot pr...

Two more reviews: David Morley in the current issue of Poetry Review (ed. Charles Boyle) and Matthew Stewart at Rogue Strands.

Really pleased to discover my first collection with Waterloo Press 'Waiting for the Sky to Fall' has received another enthusiastic review, this time by Steve Spence in Stride Magazine (click to link). Copies are still available from the Waterloo Press website.

'I will say that learning how to write has to do in part with learning how to accede to yourself and your object, instead of writing what you think you ought to write, or what at that point in time the world thinks poetry is about. Or what you think you ought to be about. The moment comes, if it ever comes, when you have enough strength to give way, to give in to being who you are, to give in to your themes. Giving in to your obsessions, giving in to the things that you will be writing about over and over. And sometimes the things you’ll be writing about over and over are things that some people don’t find very nice.' Frederick Seidel, Paris Review Interview No. 95

Thanks to Peter Daniels for the second review of my pamphlet 'Spring Journal' in the latest issue of 'The Bow-Wow Shop' . Before reading that, though, you should head over to Christian Ward's blog to read some really enjoyable poems.

Thanks to Claire Trevien for drawing my attention to Angela Topping's review of my Rack Press pamphlet 'Spring Journal' which has now been published online in Sabotage Reviews .

Ok, so you're all Joyced out but I've just remembered this I wrote after I last read 'Ulysses' in 2001 when I was living in the North Laines in Brighton. It's absolute rubbish, I know, and deservedly unpublished, but I like it for the fact that it shows I was willing to experiment a little with the style of poetry I was writing back then, and I share it in the spirit of celebrating all things - high and low - Joycean. Just Nipping Out Rain in the air. Face. Cobbles wet. Who’s that? Hannah? No. Girl at school, left bike in her garage. Brother friends with her brother, listened to ska music together. Three saffron rice for price of two. Poor quality olive oil. Wouldn’t sell their best, would they. Perugina. Perugia. Bought selected William Blake there. Simple in Italian. Closed. That aloof young guy unpacking boxes, putting books out. O well. Bit cloudy for sunglasses. Great rack. Tight T-shirt. Wonder about her boyfriend. ...

The First Taste of Freedom For background there’s unbroken blue sky draped with red, white and blue bunting. A trestle table stretches the length of the cul-de-sac, which is unusual, but somehow fits in with the adults hobbling, legs tied, on the playing field. We’re all suntanned and freckled, except Jeffrey, who’s darker, and whose parents have stayed at home. We haven’t even heard of heavy traffic, but we know the rest of the world is celebrating the Jubilee. He takes a piece of cake out of the flag, chews it, and pretends to be sick. Someone’s mum shouts, Don’t do that! He splurts, It tastes of shit, the Union Jack . From 'Waiting for the Sky to Fall', Waterloo Press, 2010. ©2012 Dan Wyke

The Carol Ann Duffy-led project 'Sixty Years in Poems'  in which poets recall a year in verse, published in yesterday's online Guardian (always with 'the leading poets'), reminded me of this piece of juvenilia written years ago obviously with the help of a history book to commemorate my birth-year. 1973 Vietnam; Cambodia; Paris Peace – premature; Picasso dies; Auden after; Greek Coup; Yom Kippur. Oil Crisis; Cod War; Gary Glitter; The Exorcist; Jimmy Osmond; Roger Moore; Princess Anne weds Cpt. Phillips. Joe Bugner; Watergate; Gulag Archipelago; I.R.A.; Edward Heath; V.A.T.; Allende shot by Pinochet. Ulster Strike; Mainland Bomb; Internment; Dad’s sperm; Daniel – Elton John; Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. ©2012 Dan Wyke

Well, it's a start. I'll add others as and when I hear about them. Check back from time to time and please send me the names of any literary/poetry magazines and journals that accept email submissions that you know about. Many magazines still prefer postal submissions and will get pretty pissed off if you email them so check before. Some magazines on the list that accept email contributions also operate submission windows. Ambit Envoi Magma New Walk Magazine New Welsh Review Other Poetry Shearsman The Wolf Agenda (trial period) Weyfarers The Cadaverine (under 30) If you're submitting to U.S. journals, Blogalicious has an extensive list that accepts online submissions.

Here's something I wrote after visiting Dungeness on 8th February last year to mark the Centenary of Elizabeth Bishop's birth. Dungeness I think the people live here because the stone has managed to flower, and the way the land and sea and sky form a continuum vaster than the eye can encompass, must allow them to see themselves and each other more clearly. If one were Elizabeth Bishop, one would probably think of the line ‘awful but cheerful’. Scattered over the treeless pebbly flat are dozens of hammered-together temporary-looking bungalows, shell-coloured, hugging the ground, with washing-lines flapping bright loads, and the odd stoved-in, upturned hull. Perhaps as a gesture of solidarity, there are no walls or fences or boundary marks of any sort: only patches of strange, tenacious flora growing against the odds in shingle stretching from door to door: sea kale and sea cabbage, dwarf broom and dwarf hawthorn, twisted and stunted by the unrelenting wind. Above the steep shore...

Unopened letters on the floor in the hallway all afternoon. . A cold wind is scattering the cherry blossom – young newlyweds. . Black knickers flat in the dirt in the middle of the road. . Fly running all over a pile of dogshit. . Originally: Fly feasting on a pile of dogshit. . Ladybird on our bedroom ceiling all summer. . Unable to remember the word for squid in Italian. . Cold night – the warmth of my wife’s sleeping body. . rain bare branch two crows . Lonely night – enjoying the sound of my own farts. . Glimpsed from a train, an old woman in a blue dressing gown. . Winter sunlight, long shadows in the graveyard. . Keeping me awake at night – haiku. . Low-tide, gulls gather on the shoreline. . Even on my sickbed I am full of gratitude for the way. . Forgetting about the haiku I can’t remember, two more occur. . Old-looking homeless guy having a smoke on a sunny bench. . A young woman looks down at her breasts while talking on the phone. . The puttanesca sauce burns to the bottom o...

Here is a selection of haiku written over the holiday period, including the ground-breaking 'dogging haiku' that was deemed too risque for publication by the British Haiku Society. Christmas Presents Cold dawn… a car engine starting sends gulls screeching. . fox with the same face as me seconds before we hit it . How lonely outside the furniture shop our old sofa. . late home the moon the evening star . Dawn stillness… a heron practicing yoga by the river . Finishing the address, my father tears a page out of his notebook. . December cremation: my grandmother’s ashes settle on the windscreen. . My daughter plucks a pink rose from the wreath. . My wife walks across our bedroom, unties her nightgown. . Up before everyone – catching the first haiku of the day . Winter dawn… the postman’s red fingers squeezing envelopes. . Christmas Eve: Mrs Claus on all fours in the Asda car park. . Christmas presents: stripy socks; a different outlook. . Boxing Day walk – a strip of light along t...