A little bit about me: I like all kinds of coasts, peculiar things, and the scent of ice-cream freezers. I live with my lovely wife in North Wales and I enjoy throwing the shawls that she knits into the air and photographing them. I am delighted to be asked to answer some quesions here and if you want to keep up to date with my work I do have a website.
Each month I record a poem for my YouTube channel and one that particularly pleases me is ‘I Hate You’. On the day I chose to share it I also found out it had been nominated for #BOTN (Best of the Net) by Alan Parry from The Broken Spine. This made the sharing of it feel wonderfully celebratory. Here’s the YouTube Link
‘I Hate You’ will also be published in my second collection which comes into the world in 2024.
What does your memory smell like?
Sometimes my memory smells like sun-warmed stones on a pebble beach and sometimes it holds the scent of supermarket ice-cream freezers.
The sense of smell is highly evocative for me and when I started a weekly blog in September 2023 I decided that the first thing I would take note of would be what the world smelt like wherever I was. Setting up a blog came at a time of change in my life where I had made the decision to pursue a different career. It felt important to form a new relationship with Mondays. Getting up early and starting the week in this way was part of this. I was marking the beginning of the week by acknowledging that I was awake and ready for my next steps. This then enabled me to build in time for reflection so I could keep track of how I was doing on my new journey towards becoming a coach after being a head teacher for so long.
Prior to this I had been finding pleasure and ‘me time’ in noticing small things on the drive to work each morning. This enabled me to mark time and to introduce an element of poetry into my day. In those times I would challenge myself to write a tweet to describe my observations in the time it took for me to get my computer switched on and be ready to start the day. These tweets were sometimes poetic in themselves and sometimes formed the basis for my writing for Top Tweet Tuesday. I liked making poetry from my journeying.
The ice-cream freezer thing is so very fixed in my early memory, and I can vividly recall the times I would spend on tiptoes with my head as far into the supermarket freezers as I could get it. Breathing that scent right down by the ice-lollies and ice-cream was magical to me. I wrote a poem based on this and the time I once got separated from my mum in a supermarket and it captures some moments in time that I wanted to set down. The poem was published by Fevers of the Mind.
What do you want your future to taste like?
I rather like the idea of my future tasting of jam doughnuts and candy floss. Mixing in a tinged of chip shop chips, hot chocolate and garlic butter would be good too. And then my future would taste of satisfaction with the welcome twang and tang of vivacity.
I definitely don’t want it to taste like elastic bands, but I do have an interesting passion for them which will continue into my future!
Here is one of my favourite #ElasticBandPhotos. It has now become the cover art for a ‘coffee table’ book I have worked on which puts together a year’s worth of full moon poems alongside a selection of my elastic band photographs. I loved being able to work with Jason Conway to bring this book, Vortex Over Wave, into the world.
Favourite line of a poem right now?
“I am standing in this field”. This is the first line of I Am Not A Falconer by Caroline Bird. Here’s the whole poem from when it was featured in The Guardian.
The poet/the poems that give you life?
I love to reread the collected works of Elizabeth Bishop at least once a year and this usually happens in the summer for me. I absolutely adore and admire the work of Caroline Bird, Pascale Petit and Selima Hill so if you were to find me completely in the moment with poetry I would be reading one of their books. And I absolutely love the fact that my wife, Kath, and I adore ‘I Swear’ by Imtiaz Dharker and the way we will say lines from this to one another at random moments. You can listen to Imtiaz talking about this poem here.
I enjoy attending poetry workshops and then working on drafts that have started their time in that planned space. I also absolutely love writing the poems that emerge from a spark in the air, a remembered moment or a dream. Writing gives me energy and a feeling of being truly alive.
What is your why?
To make something of my time in this world. To make a difference.
To spend time being. I think this poem is also part of my why:
poembypoem 