Thanks to Michael Bartholomew-Biggs for publishing this poem in London Grip. It begins with two events recalled from childhood: an excruciating misidentification and an act of entrepreneurialism happily unrepeated since. Over time, as I chipped away at it, 'Stone' became what I usually hope to avoid writing: a poem about a poem. The tone changed too. Perhaps the speaker, whom I meant to be sympathetic, risks seeming insufferable. So, things aren't always as they appear to us. We can laugh at that fact, try to make something of it, or do both, as I think the speakers' parents knew.
I have contributed a chapter on 'British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary' to the volume The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life edited by Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos and published by Indiana University Press this month. Focusing on examples from the late eighteenth century onwards, my essay considers not only the travel diary but the uses of the diary in other forms of travel narrative, for example to provide a sense of authority, authenticity or immediacy. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the volume and to thinking further about the subject for future work.
I'm pleased to have a new poem published in issue 16 of Noon: The Journal of the Short Poem. Readers who have travelled over Nottingham's Dunkirk Roundabout on the A52 will recognise what inspired it. Thanks to Philip Rowland for taking the poem and to Andrew Taylor, whose (much superior) work is an influence. Andrew has two poems in issue 14.
|
Tim Youngs
|