Brain tricks and procrastination.

It's been too long. Again.

One of the problems I have in my life (relatively small compared to many problems around the world, I know) is that, quite often, I think something needs doing, and think about doing it in great detail - on my way home, say, or while I'm swimming - and then my brain is satisfied that this problem has been solved. Without me getting around to actually doing something. And even though actually doing something makes me feel really efficient and productive and good. It's like a strange trick my head plays on itself that gets worse the more time I have to complete something.

And so, yes, it's been too long. But in my head, I've updated with every single Herman that's been made (and some of them have gone down very well) and written loads and loads of poems. I have actually written, optimistically in terms of completeness, two or three; and you can see that I have updated my blog not at all.

Today I  have put my dungarees on and will try and do something about both.

So, Herman-wise, I've made: Honey, Ginger & Parson Hermuffins, Chocolate Fudge Herman, Cherry Bakewell Herman (for a birthday gift (delivered strapped onto the back of my bike), so duplicates were okay), Apple, Maple & Pecan Herman, Pineapple Upside Down Herman, Red Velvet Herman and I'm sure a few others that I can't remember. Basically, recipe-wise, there is no great mystery. Find a nice cake recipe on the internet, reduce the amount of wet ingredients slightly, add a Herman portion and cook for perhaps 5-10 mins longer to make sure it's done properly. Et voila.

I am thinking of going down the route of Herman Sourdough bread of some sort, actually using it as a leavening agent rather than just a taste sensation, but we'll see if I get time.

Poetry wise, I have actually been doing some stuff. I read at Durham Book Festival in October at the launch of our new magazine Butcher's Dog (Submit some work for issue 2! Buy a copy! etc.) and at the launch of Magma 54, which I am in as an Eric Gregory winner. I've also had a poem out in Poetry London, and am applying for a few things (of which more word later) and sending work out. It's just that writing them is a bit slow at the moment, but I will get around to fixing that. Once I've stopped knitting things for Christmas... Oh, Christmas! What a glorious procrastination time-sink you are. I love you.

Whit agitation.

I learnt the word whit when I was writing a poem and researching other words to describe dust particles hitting our atmosphere to make shooting stars. You've probably guessed by now that this is another Shake the Dust post. You'd be right. But it feels like dust shaking is all I ever talk about so I thought I'd mix it up a bit... and I've failed.

Last weekend was the epic Thursday-Sunday national finals and Shake the Dust weekend at the Southbank Centre, and boy was it a busy one! With workshops, evening events, travelling, meetings, eatings, rehearsals, letting-off-steams and all sorts of other bits and pieces to do with nine groups of eight 13-16 year-olds it was a hectic few days - made only more hectic by the fact that I did a reading at Ledbury Festival on Friday with five of the other Eric Gregory winners, travelling there and back in one day.

Needless to say, I'm knackered. But a good sort of knackered, full of enthusiasm for poetry and the 'new' generation (though who's to say when one generation begins and another ends) and current generation of performers and writers. One of the highlights was seeing Kate Tempest and Saul Williams on Thursday evening, performing their hearts out (albeit for a little too long, perhaps, though that's not their fault but a misjudgement in programming); another was the look on the faces of our Slamming Saints at their arrival in London and first sight of the big city. The main highlight though, of course, was seeing our two teams doing the best performance of their poems they've ever done, on the main stage at Queen Elizabeth Hall at Southbank. Wow. My heart bursts with pride for all of them - they really did themselves and the North East proud!

So now, I have sleep to catch up on (still) and ponderings to ponder about the performance of poetry vs. performance poetry. Perhaps I'll get back to you with some conclusions about that one later on. In the meantime, sleep tight! Don't let the bed bugs bite!

The dust is well and truly SHAKEN

After a long and action-packed day of rehearsals, workshops, rehearsals and more workshops at ARC in Stockton, our fabulous Shake the Dust team, the Slamming Saints, won the award for highest scoring team at their regional final on the 16th June.... and so will be travelling to London for the national finals in July! I'm so SO proud of them and their achievement and so had to post this picture of their glistening trophy.

Every team that performed at the final were good enough to win. It really was an honour to be a part of such an inspiring event. It may sound cheesy as hell, but you really do hear it all the time from the mouths of the young performers and poets themselves - they had no idea poetry could be like this, so fun, so engaging, so relevant to them and their world. I've lost count of the ways in which this project has positively impacted the poets we've been working with, and so it proves itself crucial time and again and with every smiling face. So yes, anyway, a massive congratulations to every individual young poet that was involved in this project. They were all absolutely bleedin' brilliant!

You should come along and see The Slamming Saints, and all the other regional high-scorers, in action in London at the Southbank on the 7th July. It's going to be a cracking event - in fact, that whole weekend is jam-packed with some great spoken word, so you should just hang out there the whole time. And come and say hello!

Eric Craven Gregory

...was not only in possession of a rather wonderful name, but was also an extremely generous man who believed in encouraging young poets so much that he set up a Trust, in his name, for the annual support and recognition of their work. I am very grateful to him for this rare gift - not just because his Trust has awarded money to some of my favourite poets since 1969, but that it has also - marvellously, inexplicably, startlingly - awarded some to me.

My heartfelt thanks also go to The Society of Authors and this year's judges, Moniza Alvi, Polly Clark, John Greening, Sophie Hannah, Adam O'Riordan and Carol Rumens. And my warmest congratulations to my fellow winners: Joey Connelly, Holly Corfield Carr, Caleb Klaces, Rachael Nicholas, Phoebe Power and Jon Stone.

The other winners will be reading tonight, in London, at the Betsey Trotwood, though unfortunately I can't make it (it's Shake the Dust tomorrow so I had to be back in time!) We'll all be reading at the Ledbury Poetry Festival, so do come and see us if you get the chance.

It still hasn't quite sunk in, but it's getting there. Here's me with the certificate and a rainbow muppet face gurn on.

Shaking that Dust.

Well, it's the last session at Our Lady & St Bede's tomorrow, working with our young people who will be practising their performance pieces and fine-tuning their stage directions for the North East regional final taking place next weekend at the ARC in Stockton. (Are you coming along? Come along!)

It's very exciting to be reaching the end of this project and being able to see our Slammin' Saints onstage. It feels like Alfie and I have been resident poets at the school for aaages, and it's been really good fun working with the teachers and a fabulous bunch of young people who seem to have got a lot out of writing and performing their work. I can't say I'll miss the 5.30am starts all that much, but it will be weird not to be thinking about delivering workshops and playing Giants, Wizards and Elves.

I've really learnt a helluva lot when it comes to working in schools - not least that you can't underestimate how important it is to have teachers working with you who are as fired up about the work as you are - and I'll certainly be incorporating more of a performance aspect to my own work, both creatively and in an educational way. Getting people up and moving about is a great way to keep the imagination fired, and to get reluctant writers to realise that poetry is fun.

Because it is, you know. Really good fun.

Come and see for yourself!

It's all go.

I am now firmly entrenched in the wonderful Shake the Dust initiative as a poet shadow working with the marvellous Alfie Crow, and though we haven't gone into the school yet (first session on Tuesday!) I am already excited to be a part of it all. In fact, I've just spent the last hour reciting a poem in order to memorise it for performance - for the first time ever. I'm quite excited and scared about the prospect of freezing and forgetting everything at an inopportune moment, but hopefully the story of the poem and the mental map I've sort of created as I've been doing it will help.

Actually, no, who am I kidding. Memorising and reciting a poem isn't something I've done since I was about 10. I'm terrified! And to test this new practice in front of 150 12/13 year olds?! Oh my. Ohhhh my.

Talking of new experiences, I am also in the process of creating my own website! I've picked up quite a bit of html over the years, enough to decipher and amend pages and make existing designs do what I want, but I'm determined to build an xhtml and CSS website from scratch this time, so it's a very steep learning curve to get things looking how I want. Even though all I want is to keep things very simple! There's something very satisfying about learning it on the fly and getting links to change colour when you hover on them, or moving your sidebar so it floats left and leaves enough room for the main content to appear next to it.... no? Just me? Oh well...

In other news, I am getting rats at the beginning of March! Squee!

Not taking my own advice.

I have been honing my collection into a shorter pamphlet so I can enter some upcoming competitions. In editing all of the poems I think are worthy I have realised a truth: though my collection is called How to speak to your mother, I am yet to write a poem that does.

The more I think about it, the more of an oversight this seems. How did I not notice this before?

Pegasuses, and taking flight.

I feel a poetry reboot coming along. Pegasuses have been plaguing my mind... and I feel the need for a load more work and a load more poems to send out and a general increase in poetic energy. And poetic focus.

All this, and I am still in training, with my first race (10K) on Sunday. It turns out, too, that I am not the only poet doing the Great North Run this year! (Not that I thought I was, but it's nice to find some other self-identified poet-types also taking on the physical task). Kate Fox, Sheree Mack and Scott Tyrell are all running, too, and probably much faster than me. I sense a most poetical exertion, and wonder how many other writers will be in the midst, without even realising that they are not alone!

Ah, Summer.

I miss very much the convenience of being able to run in the cloak of darkness at a reasonable hour, whilst the temperature is maintained at a very agreeable level of coolness to prevent such redness of cheek as to stop traffic.

In other news, I am enjoying poetry quite a lot at the moment, though not necessarily writing very much of it. It's proving much fun working with Well Versed (via New Writing North) and with teachers and children in schools. It feels very worthwhile getting involved in the teaching of poetry without sweeping into a school and delivering a workshop - and then invariably sweeping away again, leaving teachers with their classroom objectives and no relevant outcome to apply to the curriculum in a lasting way. Really getting involved in how teachers teach the writing of poetry feels like a longer-lasting, and confidence-building, exercise, for all involved. Including me.

There's definitely something to be said for professionalising poetry. I was discussing this the other day with the teacher I am working with: that sitting down to write a poem, especially when you have a full time job, feels self-indulgent and as if you're slacking off something much more important. Doing a course has given the teachers that sense of professionalisation, and my MA did that too, at the time. Taking part in some professional development like this is having the same effect on me now. I like it.

Sometimes I wonder if the self-doubt and debilitating over-thinking that accompanies being a poet ever goes away, or diminishes with an increasing output of published work. Having attended the Poetry Society annual lecture on 'On Being Old' delivered by CK Williams (author of 14 collections, a 'Selected' and a 'Collected'), it seems that this is not the case. Even he often wonders if he is really a poet at all, or can claim to be called one, when he's not writing. Though mildly alarming, this is also somewhat comforting.

He also had this brilliant advice: "Wisdom is basically poop, except for patience." Indeed.

Nanopowders and Assembler Breakthroughs

Reading about science stuff in order to inspire poems is a joy. I got a book of Modern Science Writing for Christmas, and should really get around to reading the books on Quantum Physics I have, because there's nothing more spectacular to write about. I'm really looking forward to the nanotechnology-themed workshop I'm attending tomorrow. It should be brill.

In other news, I haven't been writing much because of how incredibly busy life seems to be all of the time. I really need another project to inspire time prioritisation - but I can't help feeling that if I make time to write every day, it will mean not being able to read the Guardian every day, and I take a lot of pleasure in that, so it will be a shame. There's not much left to give, though. And I don't even have kids, or dependants, or any other practical responsibilities outside of work! I don't know how many writers do it at all.

Oh, it is Elevenses! How quickly this spectacular changing of the seasons and of time has crept up.

I haven't been writing very much, hence not much posting. Christmas lead-up is just so busy busy, isn't it?? So much making to do, and baking to do, and enjoyment to have. Needless to say, 2011 brings creative challenges and some more goals my way. Here's to at least getting my work on a publisher's desk in the next couple of months...

Almost at an end.

But hopefully this doesn't mean the end of productivity!

It's been brilliant having some dedicated time to think about my writing - and also having the space to spread 45 poems all out over the floor without having to move them to go to sleep or let other people use the space. I've been wandering over them clutching a cup of fresh coffee and speaking them outloud to the pond. It feels very indulgent to walk about in socks in my warm little cube, pondering the best order for my poems to go in, and editing ones that aren't quite working, and taking some time just to look and watch through the two sets of french windows. I saw a woodpecker yesterday, a great spotted woodpecker I think, and some sort of bird of prey swooping very low over the site today, flustering the resident crows and jays into an awful lot of noise.

It's going to be hard getting home and having to go back to work - though talking to the other writers here makes me realise how lucky I am to work where I do. It's amazing what people have to put up with in order to make space for time to write, and I feel disproportionately privileged to be where I am, so at least that's nice. There are so many hours in the day that could be spent writing, though, and that's a difficult thing to lose now I've realised I am actually capable of sustaining creativity for a prolonged amount of time.

Saying that, when left to my own devices in the evening the other day, I did go to bed at 10.30pm. 10.30! Ha... that's very early indeed. I think it's got something to do with the lack of noise and telly distraction...my, how I haven't missed telly! (Though I am looking forward to catching up with tonight's Strictly, Casualty, and Merlin. And this week's Holby City. Oh dear. I shouldn't have started thinking about it.) Radio 4, however, I have missed. The radio I brought with me doesn't like to find radio stations, so to stop myself having to listen to white noise, I've been downloading Radio 4 podcasts... and not enough programmes have podcasts!

Anyway, yes. Going on a retreat is a marvellous thing to be able to do, and I would recommend it to anyone who writes/paints/sculpts/draws but who doesn't normally have the time at home to pursue it for a number of days. Even staying this one week has improved my poems no end - especially with Polly's guidance and encouragement - and made me much more confident in what it is I'm trying to say. And much  enthused about the possibilities for saying it. And, perhaps most importantly, almost convinced that other people might be interested in hearing it.

So, I'm going to go back to it for the rest of the day, and try to write a poem on the theme of 'naked' for a zine I'd like to be involved in. There's been a lot of editing and reading aloud, but not that much writing this week. This is good, as it's what I was aiming for, but it would be nice to have a couple of new poems to take away with me too. Wish me luck!

Oh questions. Poemy questions.

Okay, so when I decided to go on a Fielding Programme retreat, I thought great. Some time away to work on my collection. I'll have all my poems, and I'll edit all the ones I don't hate, and something will emerge. I do still think this, but it's dawning on me how much work editing actually is - and why I go to such seemingly great lengths to avoid doing it, without even realising until hindsight kicks in. I am more than a little daunted about sitting in a room with Bookbook and 'putting a collection together'. I actually have no idea what this actually, minute-to-minute, involves.

Also, I have questions. Questions that I know don't really have definitive answers. Like, what's the deal with adding new poems? When is it too late to add new ones, which haven't had as much time as the others to settle and mature? Does it run the risk of becoming disjointed, if you keep old ones as well as adding new? Does anyone's voice really change enough for anyone but the author themselves to notice? Should I just save new ones for the next collection? What if I want some of the poems to be gathered together in subject-matter in a pamphlet-length collection? Should I try and get something like this published before a collection? Is it okay to have poems in both?

I'm sure Polly will be able to help with these questions, but for now I feel like I'm about to leap into some sort of poemy abyss of indecision. I guess I'll have to have a good go at discovering my own answers to these questions next week, even if it's just for the sake of getting my money's worth. I am taking my running shoes, and my swimming costume (in case there are any tempting-looking lochs and half-decent weather) for physical, worthwhile thinking-time distraction. And my camera, for non-related creative distraction.

And Teach Yourself Writing Poetry - just in case.

Well crikey.

I am humbled, and slightly embarrassed, but this is my writing blog so I guess it's okay to post this here...