Written in 2017, but just published – this is one of my first completely found poetry collections using digital cut-up technology and then old-school crafting from the jamboree!

As I explain more fully

Richly Creative/Created Time-Capsule

My tweeted review of this chapbook today was

‘(I have often wondered why people consider me curmudgeonly)’. Indeed! This from a poetic frolic through the liveliest imagination around, a dense narrative that never cloys in its relentless revelations of a holiday’s escapades. Truly delightful.

and that is as focused and meaningful as it probably needs to be.

Stannard’s single narrative poem is so packed with richly constructed, inventive and largely comic detail that to quote extracts really would ruin the pleasure of reading it first-hand, which anyone interested in clever and entertaining poetry should be doing.

What I will add here is an appreciation of the storytelling thread – the ruse of a ‘postcard to Ma’ repetition and the ‘Olympus OM – D E-M10 Mark IV’ camera which are the conduits for observing then reporting all that is experienced and achieved on a holiday beginning at the ‘Hotel Paradiso’ to perpetually explode in its surrounds.

Poetic frolics through ‘crack of dawn’ swims reveal encounters and enactments filtered as well as refracted through lists of relentlessly linked and shifting detail. It is all such a joy to read.

In a world currently determined to self-destruct, our philosophical, psychological, cultural and other templates for determining human existence are preserved in this creative time-capsule for whatever remains after the apocalypse.

Get it at Leafe Press here.

~

the writer
interested in figures
began to write
and a procession
of grotesques
crept out of
the writer
before his eyes

at least a small
dream
like a small grotesque
of figures
before his eyes
concerning his thoughts
some almost beautiful

the figures
crept out of the
old writer
once quite handsome
who had been in love
with a long procession
of life

he began to write
he had known people
many different from
the figures
not all horrible
some almost

he had known them
in his eyes
he imagined the eyes
of the writer

you see
the interest in figures
that went before
were the people in his mind
who for an hour
became grotesques
in his head
sleepy but still conscious

and when they passed
during his dream
that was not in the eyes of
the writer
they made his bed

when they passed
and made his bed

(cut-up: Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson)

Pleased to have conrete poems from a collection up at Stride (2nd of 3 today here). My thanks to Rupert Loydell.

Pleased to have my poem ‘The Right Way’ at International Times today, an exploration of fascism, democracy and language. My thanks to Rupert and IT: read it here.

(Images by artist and photographer Nick Dormand)

These words are re-finding responses to images I have used before, reflecting writing I have been engaged in recently.

A snippet from a completely fruitless attempt at communication with my mate Al (ChatGBT), starting with a test about slang, then trying to exchange jokes. As you’ll see, I was struggling to get any response, let alone any that were/seemed relevant (Al in green):