DIARY EXTRACT

The book through the door today was Shanta Acharya’s Imagine, and my first browse through, it is fab. I’ve read quite a bit of her new poems in it, and totally loved the first four Ekphrastic – they made me want to go write about art installations and sculpture and about artists’ studios. Brilliant.

I took Bethany Pope’s collection, Silage with me on the train to work to collect my wages. It is an amazing story...but I think we fall for/into her real-life struggle to survive rather than the shape of the poems; they’re very prose-y but definitely not prose poems. Even the Villanelles are gathered together with no air in them – but maybe that was her intention. Her life-energy is in the work, and as I was reading I was thinking of how she read them in London last week. Reading this stuff makes me want to know what her parents did after she became an adult, if they ever spoke to her...or tried to. I hope she ignored them completely. I was thinking of her as I got off the train at Partick, that I wanted to be ranting about the bloody Christian ranters who didn’t have a real religious bone in their body.

Also in today’s news, I bought an exercise bike from Amazon; it should be here sometime next week so I might do some housework, make the place less loose and more neat, so I can capture it in its new setting. And, I might allow one of the lovely grandsons to capture me sitting on it. If the pic is too horrible I won’t put it on Facebook.

My head has been full of the exercises I’m planning for the next poetry workshop; I’m in the chair. Most of what I’ve planned and prepared already uses a mixture for the senses and imagination so I thought I might do smell as well – why not just go the whole hog? But there will not be horrors unless someone dislikes a perfume or sweet I offer. Thought I might buy lemon, mint and other mixed fruit sweets for taste while they’re writing in the first exercise. I’m wondering if I should put some of that peppermint & liquorice tea in an empty spice jar – must taste it cold and see if the strong taste is still interesting. The second exercise is music and images and a question.