Unsuitable blog and HappenStance news

Last week I wrote about idolatry. This week I learned it.

This is what contemplation of one small poem leads you to.

‘Your car is never parked,’ my loved-one is fond of saying. ‘It’s merely abandoned.’

Maybe. It worked for Sharon Olds, for example, with Stag’s Leap, winner of this year’s T S Eliot prize.

I think of them as dragon-flies, some of the fastest flying insects in the world.

And is there a blogjam? Probably, yes.

What IS a poem? 

‘. . . is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.’ (Einstein)

From that Einstein quotation Fiona Moore’s The Only Reason for Time takes its title. It’s one of two pamphlets about to go into the online shop. The other is Chrissy Williams’ Flying into the Bear. They start a year of publications in which there should, for once, be as many female as male poets. Let me tell you something about these two - or at least try.

The trouble is, I don’t know how to describe Chrissy Williams’ Flying into the Bear. One page bubbles with mischief; the next topples into awe. The pamphlet features stage directions for a play that never was; there are bears in several senses; a retelling of The Terminator with a flock of sheep as protagonist; and a love poem for a computer game – I had to go to http://bit.ly/Vq3Lid to get it. I got it.  I love it when poems make you read in new ways. These do that.

The Only Reason for Time, Fiona Moore’s first collection, has been a long time in the making. To me, these are stunning poems: chiselled, poised and balanced achingly between this world and extinction. Some are responses to the death of Fiona’s partner some years ago. All probe the nature of that mysterious and haunting thing we call life. I've lived with these poems, and they have changed me.

Now that I've dangled these poets enticingly under your nose, I have to say you can’t order either of them online for a couple of days because we are reinforcing the battlements. It's busy here.

Attacks of hackers (successfully resisted) have necessitated a make-over of the online shop. It will go live in the next few days with the new publications in it. As soon as it does, there’ll be an announcement through the email newsletter and via FaceBook and Twitter.

If you’re not signed up for the email newsletter, it’s easy. Go to the main page for www.happenstancepress.com and run your eye down under the text. There’s a box at the bottom, in the middle. Put your email address in it and hit the orange ‘go’ button. It will send you an automatic email to confirm. That’s it. You’re on the list.

More soon. About everything.

Dear Santos38pe, Correia9g, Castro22cl and Oliveira30jw

The answer is no. But then the answer could be yes.

This is cheating. I am really thinking about StAnza.

I couldn’t even remember at first which poem it came from — it was the image that stuck.

Do you remember the smell? The redolence of the little tubes of ‘oil paint’?

Poems by heart. Should we?

In December, there were 77 submissions or, in the end, 76, because one turned out to be the same one twice.

From a creative point of view, it can be more interesting when things go wrong.

I have only just reached 29.

I have a Relationship Manager.

There are undoubted benefits to steaming broccoli. However, I prefer stamps.

The window is about to shut.