The penultimate edition of Burning House Press (soon to be reintroduced) was in March 2020 with the theme Sex & Death in the Age of Aquarius and with guest editor Joan Pope who posted my poem Sex of Death and provided a wonderful collage for this:

The January 2020 BHP ‘Vision’ themed edition was guest edited/curated by Reverse Butcher, and my poem Not the Waking was posted on the 12th:

(Cover Photo Credit: Kylie Supski)

For more about Reverse Butcher go to the website here: https://reversebutcher.com/

I perticulalrly recomend the Vispo Poetry section

My second guest editor was James Knight, and I love his banner image for my three poems (the visual presentations of eveyone’s poems were always superb)

Three persona poems, the third being Tom Phillips, author of the amaizing Humuments, and this erasure/humument taken from his source text A Human Document

To find out more about James:

website – https://thebirdking.com/

interview with Miriam Christie – https://marianchristiepoetry.net/visual-poetry-with-teeth-an-interview-with-james-knight-of-steel-incisors/

his books and publications (some free pdfs) – https://www.steelincisors.com/s/shop

Burning House Press posted poetry and images in a Guest Editors series from February 2018 to April 2020, pausing at this latter time because of Covid and its impact.

Their mission was to ‘facilitate a space for a diverse band of creative people to experiment, share, and hopefully forge new bonds and associations’ and it is pleasing to see them returning soon to continue with this journey.

I was pleased to have work selected and posted by four of the guest editors, appreciating that support and being a part of the growing BHP community, and have maintained in varying degrees that association, certainly following their own work as much as possible.

I’m posting and sharing work from these encounters over the next few days.

The first is from the start of the series with guest editor Florence Lenaers. I particulalry like the accompaning image by Alexandre Cesa using my ‘Liszt poem’ line:

The Magma cover baton has now been passed on. I was genuinely pleased to have my TextArt as the cover for Magma 90, and I enjoyed seeing it as the image for the magazine in any social media postings over the past few months of its residence.

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Further details here: https://literaturetodayjournal.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_11.html

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On this day in 1965, The Beatles’ Eight Days a Week single goes #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart and stays #1 for 2 weeks

In September of last year I self-published a small poetry collection of ‘caboose’ poems which I had great fun researching and writing. The cover and one other image inside were provided by ChatGPT – visual poems related to the booklet’s theme and content, and this a continuation of my occasional collaboration with this AI.

Over the last two weeks I have been writing further poems – still engaged with and enjoying the ‘idea/s’ around the caboose.  Using descriptions of types found online, the following is a list poem that pairs these up with alternative versions, linking also to a Derrida thread in the collection,

When typing in Word, the Microsoft AI Copilot logo is always visible to use as a possible prompt writing device/tool, and I have been exploring this over recent months since it first appeared without warning (for me): there are previous posts on this blog about those initial explorations; as are ones about ChatGPT going back.

At this point, I gave Copilot a prompt to rewrite my list poem, I think as a story (I need to copy and keep my prompts) and I do like the creative way it uses my alternative caboose types as well as imagines a ‘Caboose Deity’,

Having created this ‘fable’ of its own, I then gave Copilot a prompt to write another using the above and linked to the Trump/Vance ambush of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office (a leap, I know, but I was in the mood). Here it is,

It’s fascinating stylistically – though no surprise to ape/adapt from its vast dadtabase (!) of ‘fable’ models – but it didn’t actually bring out the horror/disgust/anger I was hoping for. I gave it another prompt with more explicit references to ‘President Trump’ and ‘Vice-President Vance’ in the hope it would draw on and use the emotive resonances of the encounter, and although there are elements of this, it’s still more genre over analysis/criticsm,

There is, I suppose, a rather twee moral tone of good triumphing over bad here, and I do quite like the notion of ‘sacred cabooses’.

It hasn’t helped me yet to write my ‘caboose ambush’ poem, but I’m working at it…