~

On this day in 1945, Richard Strauss completed his ‘Metamorphosen’

Pleased to have a selection of my prose poems posted at talking about strawberries all of the time. My thanks to Malcolm Curtis.

You can read them here: https://talkingaboutstrawberries.blogspot.com/2025/04/mike-ferguson.html

On this day in 1843, William Wordsworth was appointed British Poet Laureate by Queen Victoria. Wordsworth initially declined the honour, saying he was too old, but later accepted when the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, assured him that “you shall have nothing required of you”. Wordsworth therefore became the only poet laureate not to write official poetry.

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.

~