Bees

Making tea is supposed to be a boring anchor to the morning, but on Friday there was a cloud of interesting visible through the kitchen window: a swarm of bees had found the slightly-open lid of our composter. It’s not a hugely exciting narrative from here: we found the owner, he came round to collect them, and told us they’d been there long enough to make four and a half inches of honeycomb, and there had been a queen and, what, fifteen or twenty thousand of the things in there. And that we shouldn’t be in that garden for a couple of hours in case there were any returning from foraging and growing confused and angry. [We obeyed in the pub.] I worry slightly that such a thing feels like a blessing; I’m glad we found a good home rather than pest control. J’s sad because there are a couple of bees that have been lurking there all weekend, one trying to get in the compost bin’s lid even though we’ve sealed it properly, the other guarding her as she tries.

Sadly I wasn’t brave enough to take photos.

Silver lining time

Did I get thirty poems from thirty days? no, but twenty-some isn’t bad. Of which I like a few, at least as starting points. That’s something. It felt a bit more of a chore this year than when I’ve done it before, which might mean I chose a bad theme as much as it not being the right thing for me to do any more. 

Napowrimo 2013

The deal, I tell myself, is this: if you do the poem-a-day challenge, it’s about quantity, and we deal with quality later – pull out unexpected good ones, or more likely good bits, or polishable things, in the months that follow. Just produce. Only this year I’m letting myself down on both sides. Still, I pressed send on the skaldic response piece for tomorrow a day early, and happy as I am with that bit it doesn’t fit the theme I’m trying to work to. And so back to it.

Aggressive Interview #3

Over at Gists and Piths I have been interviewed aggressively by George Ttoouli, and have, I hope, kicked back appropriately. The link is here: Andrew Bailey, Aggressive Interview #3. It’s the third in a series, alongside Carrie Etter and Rupert Loydell – you can see all of them through the tag, ie at http://gistsandpiths.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Aggressive%20Interview, which will also save this post from going out of date if they keep their labelling up to date. There’s an invitation on mine to offer yourself up for similar aggression, and I’d recommend it. I enjoyed this very much.

That George link, incidentally, is his appearance at I Don’t Call Myself a Poet, a collection of interviews that more than repays the time spent exploring them. He’s responsible for my reading The Gift. Carrie, who was aggressive interview #2, is responsible for me agreeing to do another April of poems. That, in turn, is responsible for me finally updating here rather than getting on with that, where I’m already behind.

'The Necropolis Boat' by Luke Kennard

Reblogged from Sabotage:

-Reviewed by Andrew Bailey-

Luke Kennard’s The Necropolis Boat has a subtitle that offers a handy way in to the sequence: “Five songs and a tortured context”. Let’s trust that. Let’s start with the songs.

Each is titled ‘The Great Necropolis Songbook’, from #1 to #5, and most use the kind of end-stopping rhymes that explain their hobbled rhythms as the result of hitting a chime that doesn’t arise naturally:

Read more… 709 more words

I am reviewing at Sabotage again.

'mimesis, synaptic' by Laressa Dickey

Reblogged from Sabotage:

-Reviewed by Andrew Bailey-

So it turns out one way to incline this reviewer positively to your book is to pack it like the sweets I used to get from the corner shop. We know this thanks to Miel, from whom a pamphlet arrived that I wanted to praise even before seeing it, simply because it came in a white paper bag with serrations on the opening.

Read more… 912 more words

Here's me over at Sabotage again, reviewing a set of prose poems I enjoyed in December. The email to the editor went missing over Christmas and when I was nudged for it I decided I wanted to change things as I had seen things I could fix at the start; fixing those broke the end. Like a Rubik's cube, hopefully solved now.

Axles

So someone who I know a little bit on Twitter
(hello Anna!) suggests that picking out the ends
of a sestina is harder than writing the sestina
itself; it’s true that you can dwell so very long
on picking out the words that will propel the work
like an interlocking set of greasy axles

you forget the engine and the fuel the axles
need to turn. I sent her back a link on Twitter
to McSweeney’s, which would only publish work
in sestina form until they chose to end
their poetry pages entirely, where the list is long
enough to fill the screen with several sestinas.

I’m particularly fond, there, of a sestina
that describes a sheet in Microsoft Excel
which makes it easier to know where words belong,
which is what I said while sharing it on Twitter.
That tweet was replied to by a second friend
(hello Carrie!) who’d set, I bet, the first to work

on troubadourial structures for tomorrow’s work-
shop and, a jealous worker I, I thought sestina
writing might well be a pleasing way to spend
an evening gearing up whatever unplanned axles
blundering in provides me with, with the Twitter
chat itself the fuel to drive the thing along.

And that brings us to here, the initial headlong
freedom giving way to lines that have to work
with what has gone before and with my Twitter
interlocutors logged off. I’m writing sestinas
for you, thinking of exciting ways that ‘axle’
can fit in twice more before the poem ends,

as if I had been asked to, and I can’t depend
on either of you helping me to take these long
last steps to the envoi or to link this final axle?
Fine. I persevere in my borrowed homework,
close the axles’ hexagon in this sestina
and complete the circle saying so on Twitter.

And on Twitter I shall write “Here’s a sestina
in which I try to make an awkward end-word  work,
namely ‘axle’.” With link, 100 characters long.

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edit: I’ve just spotted that’s the 100th post here.
edit: added a featured image by Tom Page http://www.flickr.com/photos/tompagenet/2110665105/