aiko writes: poems

Sidekick Flicks - Reading of Kappa

2012-01-26T10:52:00.000Z

The amazing folk at Sidekick Books/Fuselit/Dr Fulminaire fame recently asked me to read my poem Kappa, originally published in their Obakarama anthology about Japanese mythological monsters.

They put it together with a wee video shot by Jon Stone, and it's now up on their youtube page, here!:

http://www.youtube.com/user/SidekickFlicks

Oh wait, check this out! Embedded!:

Definitely keep your eyes peeled for more videos and cool stuff coming out of the Sidekick Books HQ. I'm looking forward to Birdbook II, myself!

In other news, with less than 15 weeks until I get married, I am/have been super-mega busy with preparations, so apologies for radio silence these past few *months*. I promise to be back in top form after May. (Or likely June, when we return from our post-wedding Los Angeles trip.)

Wish us luck!

Best British Poetry 2011: Hitodama

2011-09-12T16:58:00.000+01:00

AMAZING news and also an invitation to a launch.

I was so surprised and flattered and honored to find out earlier this year that a poem of mine would be included in The Best British Poetry 2011, the first anthology in a new series being produced by Salt Publishing and edited by Roddy Lumsden.

The poem, 'Hitodama', was first published in the Japan issue of Edinburgh Review, for which I am very grateful to the then-editor Brian McCabe and to Jennie Renton.

More about the anthology, from the http://bestbritishpoetry.co.uk/ website:

"The Best British Poetry 2011 presents the finest and most engaging poems found in British-based literary magazines and webzines over the past year. The material gathered represents the rich variety of current UK poetry, including lyric, formal and experimental poetry. Each poem is accompanied by a note by the poet themselves, explaining the inspiration for the poem and why they decided to write the poem in that form. The format of the book will be familiar to those who have seen similar annual selections made in other countries such as Ireland, Australia and especially the US, where the equivalent annual book is a popular yet controversial landmark in each year's literary calendar. At a time when print journals still retain their significance and popularity and when new sites are flourishing on the web, this book offers a snapshot of current poetry practices in the country by offering a diverse selection of excellent poems."

I'm so excited and grateful to have my poem chosen for this anthology. I grew up reading the Best American Poetry books so it's pretty overwhelming for me to think I could be included in the British equivalent. I'm also excited that the poem selected has such a Japanese bias, as I am most interested in writing about Japan/my Japanese heritage, and often worry that this sort of writing might not find a home in the UK. As a young writer, and a Japanese-American living in Scotland, I am so proud to have been chosen for such an important and 'British' anthology. I want to shout it from the rooftops!

Therefore! You are cordially invited to the London launch of The Best British Poetry 2011 on the 23rd September 2011 from 7 p.m. at The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL.

Please RSVP to: Christopher Hamilton-Emery, or Roddy Lumsden.

Everyone is welcome so do please spread the word for this significant event.

I hope you'll go to the launch! At least pick up a copy at your local bookstore, or ask them to stock the book if they don't already! That'd mean the world to me.

The Best British Poetry 2011

Edited by Roddy Lumsden

ISBN 9781907773044

Paperback | 176pp | Demy Octavo

Publication date 1 September 2011

£9.99 $16.95

Birdbook Launch in London

2011-06-22T12:12:00.000+01:00

Hello friends! Just a quick shout to let you know about the Birdbook launch in London this week (sorry for the late notice!):

Birdbook I: Launch event
Thursday, June 23, 2011
7:30pm - 10:30pm
Phoenix Artists Club on Charing Cross Road, near Tottenham Court Road station, London
Dr Fulminare's most ambitious Sidekick Books project yet! The first in a four-part series of books celebrating every British species of bird (or thereabouts - you never know when science will beat us) through art and poetry. www.drfulminare.com/birdbook.html
Readers (so far!):
Rachael Allen, Rowyda Amin, Simon Barraclough, Dai George, Emily Hasler, Holly Hopkins, Amy Key, Roddy Lumsden, Edward Mackay, Matt Merritt, Kate Potts, Richard Price, James Wilkes, Chrissy Williams and more!

More info at the Facebook event page here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=127159004031783

Two poems in Birdbook I

2011-05-25T11:34:00.000+01:00

Very exciting news! Got my contributor copy of Birdbook I: Towns, Parks and Gardens in the post and it is AMAZING.

I'm very impressed! It's got a lovely embossed cover and colored endpages and is brimming with pairs of poems and art pieces on specific birds (of town, parks and gardens).

Dr Fulminaire says about it: "My most ambitious project yet, now come to full and bountious fruition! Over 50 British species of bird commemorated in word and image by such an array of talent as has rarely been gathered in one tightly confined space."

I have two poems in the book, for the Hedge Sparrow/Dunnock and the Buzzard. But my pieces sit alongside poems and illustrations by many other brilliant folk including:

Rachael Allen, Rowyda Amin, Hannah Bagshaw, Becky Barnicoat, Simon Barraclough, Julia Bird, Niall Campbell, Michael Chance, Tom Chivers, Hanna Terese Christiansson, Monika Cilmi, John Clegg, Dave Coates, Phil Cooper, Lois Cordelia, Lorna Crabbe, Caroline Crew, Nia Davies, Lizzy Denning, Isobel Dixon, Philip Elbourne, Dai George, Matthew Gregory, Cliff Hammett, Emily Hasler, Holly Hopkins, Nicholas Hughes, i-lib, Kirsten Irving, Andrew Jamison, Amy Key, Judith Lal, Alexandra Lazar, Natalie Lazarus, Katherine Leedale, Roddy Lumsden, Edward Mackay, Marion McCready, Siofra McSherry, Matt Merritt, Kate Parkinson, Saroj Patel, Kate Potts, Richard Price, Fiona Purves, Declan Ryan, Bethany Settle, Jon Stone, Jennie Webber, James Wilkes and Chrissy Williams.

You can see more samples of work and buy your copy for a mere £10 + p&p from the Sidekick Books website. Please do support this brilliant small publisher on their first 'macro-anthology' or full-length/size publication. It really is lovely and I can't wait to see the other 3 books in the series in due time!

Roll on 2011!

2011-05-08T21:52:00.000+01:00

Things moseying along round here as usual. Flat hunting (to buy!) and wedding planning (venue sorted!). Still laying low as I get more life-admin sorted.

Firstly, I'd forgotten to mention I was featured in the Scottish Poetry Library newsletter, talking about what it's like to be a volunteer at the SPL and how I got involved. It's a great, friendly place to volunteer. You get to learn the basics about being a library assistant, plus all you can drink tea and the pick of the library to read while you spend the afternoon amongst the poems. Read more by picking up your free copy of the newsletter (before they run out!) from the SPL.

Next up - a huge thanks to lovely photographer-to-the-stars Chris Scott for including me in his Author Portraits Scotland project! He snapped my fancy author photo at the Botanics in Edinburgh. Please go check out his work and the other lovely portraits he's been taking of Edinburgh's literati.

Lastly, I've been lucky enough to have work included in an excellent project, Poetry Beyond Text, which will be exhibiting at the Scottish Poetry Library (5 Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT) starting 13th May. The exhibition will feature work from the Poetry Whispers (which I have a couple pieces in), although they haven't finalised which pieces will be on display.

The opening of the exhibition at the Scottish Poetry Library will be from 5-7pm on the 13th May. Please RSVP at reception@spl.org.uk

Info from the SPL newsletter:

POETRY BEYOND TEXT
14.05.11 – 15.07.11
An exhibition of visual-poetic artworks, showing the results of a two-year research project exploring our aesthetic and cognitive responses to concrete poetry, artists’ books, poetic prints, poem photography, text film, and digital poetry.

Also there will be a special event for the Poetry Whispers (which I shall be attending!):

POETRY WHISPERS
6pm Wednesday 15.06.11
Poetry Whispers is a creative experiment, run over the last two years, in which local artists and poets have responded to each other’s work, creating imaginative reiterations in their own medium. The works that have resulted shed light on the relationship between visual and textual reception and creativity, and form fascinating documents of how ideas, subjects and moods can be interpreted and transmitted. Join us to see and experience these works, and hear the artists and poets discuss the process of working across media.

Hope to see you there! Thanks for reading!

Oh wait! Lastly and not publication/project-related, I've been taking the most BRILLIANT bookbinding class with Isabelle Ting at Owl&Lion. I HIGHLY recommend this class to anyone interested in bookbinding. The beginners class I'm on is in 5 sessions (5 weeks); I'm in the middle of it just now and we've already completed two lovely, beautiful hand-sewn hand-bound hardback books with the prospect of making 6 more books in the next couple weeks! It's low-key and relaxed, with 8 or so people in the class, so you get a lot of individual attention as well as time to work on your projects. It just feels so good to learn a new skill and make something with my hands during the week, and to have an actual finished product to take away at the end of a lesson. I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommended it. Great value for money.
More info on future classes (filling up fast!) at Owl&Lion website: http://www.owlandliongallery.com/collections/workshops

First post in 2011! For shame!

2011-03-21T14:39:00.000Z

Hello! Apologies for huge blog-negligence. Everything has been quite manic and whirlwind the past couple months:

1. I got engaged! Handsome S proposed at the start of January so my head's been in the clouds since then.

2. I've been hibernating (ie. flat-hunting, car-hunting, visiting wedding venues & fairs, and dress shopping. WHEW!).

3. As you'll know, Japan had a massive earthquake & tsunami a couple weeks ago, which destroyed many cities in northern Japan. Unfortunately, the cities hit the worst (Sendai & surrounding areas) are where my family live. My mother's family home in the ocean-front town of Rikuzen-takata (Iwate-ken) was washed away, and we couldn't get in contact with my aunt in Sendai for nearly a week. I am so grateful that all of my family is alive and accounted for - but many of their friends and neighbors are not, and their home is gone. I've been quite out of it, to say the least, for the past couple weeks. Sendai is also the town that S and I lived in when we were in Japan, and we're so fortunate that we were not there during the disaster, but it's made me think a lot about my own mortality and how fragile life is. Our thoughts and well wishes are for Tohoku these days.

That said - there are a few exciting things which I should have mentioned much sooner:

For part of the thiscollection project, I just got word that film maker Jerry Dowd (Glasgow School of Fine Art) has made an AMAZING short film to go with my poem 'Going Home'. This film poem was made at a film factory workshop run in Edinburgh this January. Please check out the film at the link below:
http://vimeo.com/19254474

The thiscollection crew are screening all films collected to date at The Glue Factory as part of an art installation on April 30th-May 17th 2011. Hope you can attend the event!

I also should have invited you to the launch for Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text + Cognition.

The launch event was at the Dundee Contemporary Arts, Visual Research Centre. My poem 'Growing Flowers' was on display, along with a lovely photograph-response called 'Husk' inspired by my poem, and a poem-response by Russell Jones inspired by the photograph. It was really exciting and humbling to see people actually going up to the poem and reading it.

I think the exhibition is meant to be on display at the Scottish Poetry Library in summer 2011 and I shall most definitely be more timely about letting you know! And if you are Dundee-ways, the exhibition is still on until April 1st at the Visual Research Centre. Check it out!

Last, a wee shout-out to Peggy Hughes & the ByLeavesWeLive crew. Peggy was resident blogger for StAnza, the Scottish International Poetry Festival, in St Andrews which was on last week/weekend. I went up on the Saturday to represent Forest Publications and she snapped my pic at the Poets Market. Fame!

That's all for now. Let's see if I can be a bit more diligent around here, eh!

Korsakoff's Paper Chain: 'Dogged for the Last Time'

2010-12-13T17:58:00.000Z

Excellent news! Today in the post - my contributor's copy of Korsakoff's Paper Chain, the newest micro-anthology out from Sidekick Books.

What is Korsakoff's Paper Chain, you ask? Why not let the good Doctor tell you himself:

"Just as a patient suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome, which affects the memory, may confabulate - create a false account in order to explain their solution and completely believe in it - and just as an act of architectural restoration may involve a certain amount of creative guesswork, so too goes the story of this wretched scrap of literature. Repeatedly destroyed, savaged, battered and blown to bits, only to be rebuilt from a few scattered remains by a different writer every time, it has survived long enough to be worth my presenting to you in bound form, with every past iteration having been reclaimed using sorcery, and the full story of its life painstakingly put back together. I, Dr Fulminare, give you the one and only Korsakoff's Paper Chain."

The A6 anthology features poems from: David Floyd, Charlotte Geater, myself, Sarah Howe, Edward Mackay, Richard O'Brien, Adham Smart, James Wilkes, Chrissy Williams and Tony Williams.

All of these were commissioned for the anthology as they are all linked together, built from one another.
The poems are threaded together by Dr Fulminare, who explains how each piece of text was destroyed in increasingly surprising ways (which are reflected in the shape of the 'ruined' texts!), and pieced back together by the poets. Below, you'll see the 'ruined' text I was provided:

And here, the poem I created from it: Dogged for the Last Time: The Great War:

A zombie poem, no less! It was a real, REAL challenge, writing to such a tight form (and I thought sestinas were hard!). The other writers in the anthology seem to make light work of it though. Robots, Greeks, aliens, Bastille Day, and more feature in the book. It's great fun to read. Very imaginative and ingenious. And brilliant to see how such different pieces were drawn from one another.

Korsakoff's Paper Chain is available to buy now from the Sidekick Books website JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS!:

http://drfulminare.com/korsakoff.html

I love this pitch from the editors: "If I may be so bold, it could make someone a unique and inspiring Christmas present. Along with all our other micro-anthologies, at £5 it makes an ideal 'Secret Santa' gift. If the limit is set at £5, your search has ended, whilst if the limit is set at £10 or more, simply combine the Sidekick Books micro-anthology with supermarket special offers or charity shop items to make it up to the total. Also, combine multiple Sidekick Books micro-anthologies to reduce average postage costs."

How can you say no to that? Besides, it's a great great anthology. Tis the season to help your local indie press!

Quotables - National Poetry Day 2010!

2010-10-07T23:44:00.000+01:00

Happy National Poetry Day! Hopefully I can manage to get this post out before the clock strikes.

I was kindly asked by Laura Grace of Quotables fame to write a blog post with some of my favorite poetic quotes for their National Poetry Day blogathon. Please do go check it out here.

There are posts up by my colleagues Caroline Crew and Colin Fraser as well, so definitely give Quotables a look if you're feeling in the Poetry Day spirit! (Quotables is growing into a great online resource for quotes as well as a community of quote-lovers, as people can sign up and add their own quotes to the site. In fact, "Quotables allows language lovers to share and discover some of the funniest, wisest and most memorable things ever said.")

Also for National Poetry Day, I headed over to the Scottish Poetry Library for their celebratory teaparty and poetry reading. Loads of folk were in attendance reading old favorites and new poems, as well as the poems from the SPL's poetry postcards. It even ended with a song!

I made the above-pictured cupcakes (photo care of marvelous Peggy! Thanks, P!), with wee poetry-flags with lines from a couple cake-talking poems I found online. This one, and this one.

Any excuse for baking!

You can check out the gorgeous poetry postcards the SPL made this year, or even send one to your pals as an e-card! And if you head into the library this Saturday, I'll be there volunteering with Kay so you can say hello and pick up some paper postcards too!

Gutter: How Salt can be a Man

2010-08-27T13:11:00.000+01:00

In the post today, my contributor copy of Gutter 03! Very exciting times indeed!

I've been really admiring Gutter since their first issue came out (about a year ago now). The quality of the print is as important to the magazine as its impressive contents. I love their color themes which change for each issue (red, teal/green, and now orange), and the reviews section in the middle is done all on orange paper (so cool!) with full black pages and hand-drawn art interspersed throughout the issue.Well done Freight!

The table of contents is not to be balked at either. I'd mentioned names like Rob A Mackenzie, Tracey Emerson, Sally Evans, Brian Johnstone, JoAnne McKay, and Ewan Morrison in this issue. But past issues have included the likes of Ryan Van Winkle, Rodge Glass, Ron Butlin, Anneliese Mackintosh, Colin Will, Jo Swingler, Kapka Kassabova, and more!

My poem How Salt can be a Man is a bit of a change up from my usual narrative poems, a bit more mysterious maybe. It is a poem for a good friend of mine who loves to swim.

I hope you'll definitely pick yourself up a copy if you're able. Gutter annual subscriptions go for £10 (UK) or £12.50 (Int'l) for a year (2 issues). Individual copies are £5.99.

It's an excellent magazine. I'm looking forward to reading through my new copy today. I'll post a note with my recommendations once I'm done.

Have a lovely day!

World Cup 2010 Poems: UPDATE!

2010-08-17T21:30:00.000+01:00

Hi there! Just wanted to post about the amazing World Cup 2010 Poem project I was involved in, now that I have the printed copy in my hot little hands!

The book is available to buy from the Forest Publications store, but here are some photos to show you what you'll be investing in:

I love the cover - Ericka Duffy designed it. It's a thin tracing paper cover with an interesting translucent image of a footballer kicking a ball. It'll hopefully encourage people to pick the book up out of curiosity even now that the Cup has passed.

Do go get yourself a copy if you like what you've read over at the site. The folk at Forest Publications have put a lot of work into the printing, and Dave and Al have done a stellar job putting the project together. Long live football poetry!

Gutter: How Salt can be a Man & Gutter at Unbound, EIBF

2010-08-11T20:51:00.000+01:00

Very excited to announce that my poem How Salt can be a Man will be in the next issue of Gutter Magazine! "Gutter is a new, high quality, printed journal for fiction and poetry from writers born or living in Scotland. The editors believe there is a need for an energetic, ambitious magazine dedicated exclusively to the best in new Scottish creative writing."

I'm so chuffed to be included in an issue with so many great names: Rob A Mackenzie, Tracey Emerson, Sally Evans, Brian Johnstone, JoAnne McKay, Ewan Morrison, and loads more amazing folk are included. I'm really humbled to be sharing the same pages!

The new issue is due out August 10th, and I'll post photos as soon as I get my contributor copy, but I wanted to let you all know that Gutter will be having a free event at Unbound, in the Edinburgh International Book Festival, in case you want to buy a copy or sample the magazine up close, for free!

Event info:
McSex
Sunday 15 August
9-11pm
at the EIBF Speigeltent, Charlotte Square

This event is FREE and unticketed (just turn up) and features Michel Faber (The Crimson Petal and the White, Under the Skin, The Fire Gospel), Zoë Strachan (Negative Space, Spin Cycle), Ewan Morrison (Swung, Distance, Ménage) and Cheryl Follon (All Your Talk, Dirty Looks). They’ll be joined by newbies Helen Sedgwick and Allan Radcliffe and all will be reading from their own work and from some gems from Scottish literary history. Music is supplied by the sublimely gravel-voiced Grant Campbell. It should be a great night, with some real eye-openers... and there’s a bar!

It really should be a stellar event, and I'll be there! So say hi if you're in town. Hope to see you there!

World Cup Poems 2010: 'No Horizon', 'Moon Safari', 'Cork Oak', 'Mimi' and 'Estadio Nacional de Chile'

2010-06-17T23:11:00.000+01:00

Hello! Just a quick note between games to tell you about a project (and forthcoming pamphlet!) I'm involved in: World Cup 2010 Poems.

My good friends Dave Coates and Al Innes organised this project in advance of the 2010 World Cup as they wanted to fuse their two loves - poetry and football. The forthcoming project pamphlet will include 32 poems, one for each of the countries playing in the World Cup this year.

They got a handful of local writers together and divvied up the countries (5 each, give or take) and sent us off to write some poems. In addition to writing about the country, we were constrained to poems of either 11 or 22 lines long to represent players in a team, or in a match, respectively.

The World Cup started this week, and Dave and Al have been posting poems up to the website as the countries have been playing. Head over to http://worldcuppoems.wordpress.com/ to read poems by: Kona Macphee, Sasha de Buyl-Pisco, Ryan Van Winkle, Dave Coates, Al Innes and me!

I was assigned Nigeria, France, Chile, Australia and Portugal. The poems I wrote are: No Horizon (Nigeria), Moon Safari (France), Estadio Nacional de Chile (Chile), Mimi (Australia) and Cork Oak (Portugal). They're being posted online every couple of days, so I'll try to update this post with links to the poems as soon as I can.

I'm more of a basketball fan myself and knew very little about most of these countries and even less about their football teams to start with, but after spending some time with the poems I do feel a major sense of solidarity now with my poem-teams!

So please check out the World Cup Poems project page if you have a chance, and keep your fingers crossed one of my teams win the cup!

Edinburgh Review: 'Jizo Bosatsu', 'The Art of Folding' and 'Hitodama'

2010-06-06T20:09:00.000+01:00

I was very pleased to find my contributors copy of Edinburgh Review #129, the Japan issue, in the post on Friday. And boy was this issue heavy! The magazine is an extended A5 size, perfect-bound with glossy cover, and this 'bumper issue' has a whopping 160 pages.

The cover art (as well as the photography section inside) is by Ken Kitano, who transposes hundreds of photos of the same image (for example, women dressed in kimoni) to create a composite image. Interesting to see the way the images overlap in 'Our Faces' (the name of the series).

I've got three poems in this issue: The Art of Folding, Jizo Bosatsu, and Hitodama. I'll be reading these poems at the launch of the Japan issue in a couple weeks. I suppose I'm a little nervous about reading The Art of Folding at the Japanese Consul General's house as it is one of my few critical poems about Japan and my experiences there. The poem touches on hikikomori, origami, 'smile training', amae, and... I suppose, my opinion that many Japanese people feel compelled (either by society or personally) to adhere to order and follow rules despite their own feelings, to keep quiet if they disagree, and that their futures are decided for them at an early age. Maybe this applies in other cultures as well (it does for me to some extent as an American I suppose). But hopefully I don't offend anyone by it!

The other two poems are based more around Japanese folklore and cultural icons. Hitodama is about the Japanese equivalent of the 'will o' the wisp' (which is know by loads of other names in other cultures); I love the way so many different cultures all over the world have the same mythological creatures. So creepy! Jizo Bosatsu is about the Guardian God of Children. Maybe you've seen pictures of statues in Japanese cemeteries, wearing a red bib? That's the Jizo Bosatsu! This poem sort of tells the story about his purpose, by way of a personal anecdote.

I also have my very first ever review published in this issue! I wrote about 'Strong in the Rain: Selected Poems', a collection by Kenji Miyazawa, translated by Roger Pulvers. Writing reviews is not really my forte, I discovered, as I was quite reticent to say anything negative, despite my initial feelings. Honestly, besides the title poem, I didn't really care for these poems personally (although I can understand why critics might like it at present, and I know that Miyazawa's title poem is one of the most famous/memorized poems in Japan), but I thought there were too many different contributing factors involved (namely, the poems being in translation) for me to write them off completely. It seemed well-apparent that the translator is a major, major scholar and fan of Miyazawa, and I think maybe that took a little bit away from the poems, for me. I wasn't given the proper space to appreciate the poems myself, to work them out and discover them on my own. Every poem came with notes, the 'answers', and left no room for me to make my own judgments. Sorry, rambling! You'll have to read the rest in the magazine.

Still! It was a cool opportunity for me to try out something new. I wonder what other people would think of these translations, especially with no knowledge of the original Japanese. I'd be keen to hear what you think if you can get yourself a copy!

That's that then! If you're interested, please support the Edinburgh Review by buying a copy of the magazine. This and past issues are available in the University's Online Store, for just £5.99. Annual subscriptions are also on offer. And of course, do keep an eye on the Edinburgh Review submission section - next issue is on Scotland, so if you have anything relevant, send it in!

ps. I recently heard from a bird that the editorialship of the magazine will be changing hands soon. I'll spill the beans on who the new editor will be once I'm allowed! =)

June readings and a recap.

2010-05-29T10:32:00.000+01:00

Apologies for radio silence! Am still mid-respite (much needed).

I've emerged from hiding to mention that I've got two readings coming up:

On June 18th I'll be reading at the launch of the Edinburgh Review, Japan issue. I haven't received my contributor copy yet, but I will post pictures of the issue once it has arrived. The launch is at the Japanese Consul General's house in Edinburgh, and I think I only barely swung a place for myself so don't have much more info I'm afraid...

THAT SAID! On June 27th as part of the West Port Book Festival, I'll be reading again at the Main Point book's Concise Ceilidh. It is at 1.00-2.30pm and FREE (with tickets to all WPBF events available from their site). Hope you'll come along if you're in town.

ps. The West Port Book Festival has loads more great events and readings on - all FREE - and I'm looking forward to trying to snag myself some bookbinding workshop tickets and hopefully watching Kei Miller read!

Again, apologies for the quiet here at aikowrites. Since last post, I've been helping Colin Fraser & Peggy Hughes with Anon magazine. As implied by the magazine title, the editorial process is completely anonymous. On their old system, they needed an admin person to strip the names and emails and any identifying information out of the submissions before logging and passing the poems on to the editors to review. Some intern transitions meant that they'd been left with no admin to log the submissions, so I offered to go in and sort things out (since obviously if they did it, that'd void the anonymity!). This took a couple months of organizing and emailing, but Anon 7 is well underway now and I can't wait to see the final product! I'm quite impressed with Colin's perseverance, and the new online submission system they've set up now means that no middleman is needed! Faster turnarounds and happier poets.

Besides this, I got a job! I'm working full-time under the Business Manager in the English as a Foreign Language department at Edinburgh University. This is a dream job (designing brochures, updating websites, making leaflets and helping with international marketing) AND it is conveniently located in easy reach of Forest Publications HQ (where I am still volunteering, currently working hard on Arts Council grants paperwork for an upcoming publication) and my old Creative Writing Uni tutors, which means I can easily attend all the free readings they have each year! Score.

I'm working on some poems for Sidekick books at the moment, as well as for a World Cup poetry series my colleagues Dave Coates and Al Innes are organizing.

Busy busy busy! Stay tuned & see you soon!

The Syllabary: FuP now online!

2010-03-15T10:24:00.000Z

Just got an email from Peter McCarey with an update on his Syllabary project!:

Dear Aiko,

Six months later, the collaborative syllabary site is up - called Cleikit, it's at scran.ch or cleikit.com, with cleikit@scran.ch as the e-mail address for anyone interested in it.

Best,

Peter.

I gave that link a whirl and WOAH! Great to see the project coming together!

I've explained the Syllabary a bit ago when I first found out about it: here. So do go check back if you need a refresher. There's also information on how YOU can get involved too! Just email Peter at the address above (cleikit@scran.ch) and he will assign you a phoneme of your own for the collaborative Syllabary. Ken Cockburn described the project in his post as, "An ongoing, accumulative sequence of short poems each based on a single phoneme (consonant+vowel+consonant)".

With this in mind, Peter assigned me the cell for 'FuP', which includes the words 'frump' and 'flump'. You can hear me reading my poem 'June, July or August' by spinning the phoneme wheel to F - u - P.

You can also hear Ken Cockburn's poem 'Norm' at N-o-M, and my good friend Ryan Van Winkle's poem at F-i-P.

Please do give it a spin and listen, and definitely email Peter to try writing a poem yourself!

Scottish Poetry Library Podcast! (and my next reading)

2010-03-13T01:04:00.000Z

Hello! Ages since I've been around. I'm gearing up for my final scheduled reading for a while (they make me so nervous, I need the break), which will be this Sunday at 'Poetry at the... GRV'.

I'm really excited about the event, especially because I'll be reading alongside Kona Macphee, who is launching her new collection, Perfect Blue, as well as Alan Riach, a great (and prolific!) writer I first met at The Syllabary event launch not long ago.

Event info:

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

at the GRV (37 Guthrie Street, Edinburgh - map it!)

7.45pm- 9.45pm

£4 / £3 concessions

It features some of the UK's top poets alongside new and emerging writers.

Plus, event coordinator Rob A Mackenzie has posted my poem 'At the Airshow' to his website as a teaser/taster before the event, so do go check it out if you have a chance! (And, besides the three main 15-20 min slots there are also a couple 3 minute slots each month. So if you fancy reading something, just email Rob!)

BUT! Honestly, what I'd meant to talk about here is the amazing Scottish Poetry Library podcast.

This week's podcast features yours truly, along with my colleague and friend, Dave Coates. We talked with ever-clever Ryan Van Winkle about what it is like to be a young writer in Edinburgh, discussed the city's literary scene, and we read some poems (I read 'Mary Celeste', published in Anon).

Listen to the podcast here: Reading Room... Poetry Podcasts

I'm horribly nervous throughout the thing, you'll see. But I'm so appreciative to Ryan (and producer Colin Fraser) and the SPL for giving me a chance to share my experiences in their podcast.

I suppose that (along with the nervousness!) is the connection to my upcoming reading. I've been really lucky here in Edinburgh for lots of generous opportunities to share my writing with a really receptive audience. THANKS EVERYONE! I hope to be able to pay it forward someday!

Do go subscribe to the SPL podcast series via iTunes so they can see just how much people love them!

Or subscribe without iTunes (RSS)

Ps. I highly recommend the interview with Stuart Kelly last week. He's a brilliant speaker. (I've got a lot to learn!)

Carry a Poem - cake!

2010-02-22T14:07:00.000Z

A quick (non-publication) post -

I'd mentioned previously about the awesome Carry a Poem campaign currently running in Edinburgh this February. My lovely friend Peggy at the Scottish Poetry Library kindly saved me a copy of the FREE Carry a Poem book being given away (as I was away in Los Angeles when the campaign started). In thanks, I made her (&co. at the SPL) a red velvet chocolate POETRY cake!:

The photo is Peggy's, posted to the SPL's blog, Our Sweet Old Etcetera - where you can read more about the Carry a Poem campaign. The line on the cake is from Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market', a food-filled but creepy poem to say the least. It's my favorite recipe, & I hear they liked it alright. Always happy to bake for friends! <3

The Carry a Poem campaign is still on, so check the website for events, and don't forget to tell them how YOU carry your poem!

I am really looking forward to THIS event, on the last day of the campaign. Should be the Epic Scottish Poetry Event of the season.

newleaf 26: Things You Told Me and On the day the streetlights went out

2010-02-21T11:02:00.000Z

Stellar news! Got my contributor copies of newleaf 26 in the post today! It is lovely!

newleaf is a perfect-bound magazine, about 60 pages. I've already posted a bit about newleaf #26 here, so click back to find out about submission guidelines and to read from past issues. They publish (at least!) twice a year and run out of the University of Bremen.

I was pleased to note a few familiar names on the Contents page: my colleagues Nick Holdstock and Russell Jones both have pieces included. Likewise, there are tons of great poems and short stories by many others I can't wait to read!

My poems Things you Told me and On the day the streetlights went out are included in this issue. I've been eager to get the latter published (it's one of my favorites) and am so stoked to have it in newleaf.

My favorite touch though in this issue has to be the flip-book style art in the corner of each page! When you flip it, the rain falls!:

Do check out newleaf when you have a chance. The magazine is just €2; information on how to get it is here.

Carry a Poem!: Aiko's story

2010-02-01T12:40:00.000Z

A non-poem but poetry-related publication here!

Carry a Poem is this year's UNESCO City of Literature reading campaign. They've teamed up with the Scottish Poetry Library, and starting February 1st, they'll be giving away thousands of free books & poetry pocketcards, and there’ll be a month of poetry events.

A while ago, they asked people how we carry our poems & they are sharing what we've said on their Poem Stories page.

My submission is here: for Emily Dickinson's 341 'After great pain a formal feeling comes'. I really love this poem.

And I think this campaign will be such a good way to get people thinking about poetry, carrying it in their heads and in their pockets(!); it's great to see people using things like iPods or the internet to 'carry' their poems with them everyday.

You can follow the campaign on Twitter: @CarryAPoem

Submit your own Carry-a-poem story or: "...send us a picture of you carrying your poem – on your T-shirt, as a tattoo, stuck to your fridge. Email it to carryapoem@cityofliterature.com."

Check out photos of the lovely Carry-a-Poem posters, books, and supplies: Carry A Poem Flickr page

Or visit their website for information on more fun events!

Can't wait to see the books just as soon as I am back in Edinburgh!! Somebody save me a copy!

Check out the AWESOME Carry A Poem campaign trailer:

newleaf: 'Things You Told Me' and 'On the day the streetlights went out'

2010-01-25T12:18:00.000Z

Hello! I was hoping hoping hoping to get one more photo post in before my trip back home on Wednesday; unfortunately it's looking like this will have to do until I return in a couple weeks.

I got GREAT news just before the end of 2009 that my poems Things You Told Me and On the day the streetlights went out, would be published in Issue 26 of newleaf, a magazine out of Bremen University.

It turns out we just missed the issue launch, in Bremen on the 21st, so apologies for not letting you Bremen-locals know about that sooner.

But newleaf does have some really great stuff on offer from the website to tide you over until the issue is out. Check out their fancy downloadable Wallpapers!:

I've got this new one for Issue 26 on my desktop right now! Lovely isn't it?

Past issues of newleaf have featured hometown favorites Ryan Van Winkle, Nick Holdstock, Julia Boll, and Claire Askew, plus many more international and local writers, both new and established.

Submission guidelines are available online here: http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/newleaf/about_us/submission_guidelines.php

They publish twice a year so be sure to get your writing in soon!

I'll be back in a few weeks, and will be sure to post photos from my contributor's copy with info on how you can get a copy. See you then!

'Hands', 'Vodnik' and 'Malá Strana' in Edinburgh Review

2010-01-12T16:17:00.000Z

Hello! Things are starting to kick up again. Got my contributor's copy of Edinburgh Review #128 in the mail today. I've posted about what my poems mean to me/what inspired me to write them, and the (prestigious!) history of the magazine a bit already, here. As I said, I just received the book today so haven't had a chance to choose my favorite pieces yet, but here are a few pictures to give you a taster:

Such striking cover art! Variable interpretations of the 'white canvas' of his mind/head. Is it empty? A void? Or does it represent something new? Ripe with potential? Really topically relevant I thought.

My name on the back cover! Nuts! The magazine is an extended A5 size with 132 pages. It's perfect-bound with a glossy cover.

A couple pictures of my poems on the page:

And the artist featured in this issue is Michal Macku:

Such stirring images, all of them. Most deal with the human body; they seem to come right out of the page.

Okay! That's all for now!

Please support the Edinburgh Review by buying a copy if you can.

This and past issues are available (or will be soon) in the University's Online Store, for just £5.99. Annual subscriptions are also on offer (and I believe there is a deal on now where if you get a subscription, you can gift one to a friend for FREE! 2 for 1!).

And of course, do keep your eye on the Edinburgh Review submission section - next issue is on Japan, so if you have anything relevant, do send it in!

Obakarama, 'Kappa'

2010-01-06T13:02:00.000Z

Akemashite omedetou! (or 'Happy New Year!') The new decade has just begun but already tons of stuff is on!

Best gift of the New Year? Hands down, OBAKARAMA, one of the first two anthologies out now from Sidekick Books.

I've already posted a bit about the book, but here's more from the back cover:

Sounds exciting, eh?! I just received my contributor copy and I love love love it. I really hope you'll all go grab yourselves a copy before they run out, because they are fantastic.

The book is perfect-bound, A6 size (similar in size to Fuselit, their sister magazine), and loaded with excellent writing AND full-color artwork to accompany each piece. Have a peek at my poem 'Kappa' here:

And be sure to check out the AMAZING Kappa drawing by Mary Graham!

Obakarama, as well as Coin Opera (a book of poetry about video games! WIN!) are on sale at the Sidekick Books website for a measly £5 each (plus shipping - discounts on multiple purchases).

Definitely support the small presses this year and get yourself a copy! HOORAY!

'Kappa' in Sidekick Books' Obakarama anthology

2009-12-06T23:16:00.000Z

Hello! Just thought I'd give a quick shout about an event next Sunday (Dec 13th). It's at the Betsey Trotwood in London, so a bit far for me to get to, but if you're in the area, it should be an AWESOME day of new-writing. AND, it will feature readings from the first two collections out by Sidekick Books (the new press from the people who bring us Fuselit magazine).

They've kindly published one of my poems, Kappa, in their Japanese folk monster anthology, Obakarama.

The 'kappa' is a river-imp and a trickster; he looks like a cross between a frog, a turtle, and a very small human. People believe that if you wander too close to a river, you will get lured (or pulled!) into the water by the kappa, who will EAT YOU! They're also used to explain drownings ('oh he must have gotten eaten by the kappa' type thing) ... and although it's just folklore, I remember seeing signs along the riverbanks with pictures of kappa on them warning people not to get too close. I think he's quite an interesting character. And as I mentioned in the last post, I'm really really keen on folklore in different cultures, especially Japan, so I jumped at the chance to write about the kappa for Obakarama.

You can read a preview for Obakarama at the Fuselit blog. Excerpt:

"Long-necked and long-tongued demons, winged dogs, mysterious children hiding in umbrellas, amphibious tricksters, killer scarves and cloud apparitions are just some of the characters you'll encounter inside.

Features poetry by Adham Smart, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Roddy Lumsden, Ian McLachlan, Aiko Harman, Chrissy Williams, Richard Watt, Kirsten Irving and Amy Blakemore, and artwork by Mike Stone, Hanne Härkönen, Seb Manley, Mary Graham, Darnae “Crimsonwolf” Sobolewski, Jd and Jon Stone."

(Also check out the preview for their other new anthology, Coin Opera - poems about video games! Awesome!)

More about the event on Sunday:

The Christmas We Get We Deserve, an all day event at the Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London on Sunday 13 December.
3pm till 11pm - £5 suggested donation - the whole pub is open just for this event.
Your hosts: Rising magazine, BroadCast, Fuselit magazine and Donut Press.
From 3pm onwards... times approximate, of course.
3.15: Ashna Sarkar, Sophia Blackwell, Sabrina Mahfouz, Suzanne Andrade reading;
4.30: Coin Opera and Obakarama: Fuselit magazine and Sidekick Books present new video game and Japanese monster themed poems, featuring Amy Key, Adham Smart, David Floyd, Chrissy Williams, Roddy Lumsden, Amy Blakemore, Simon Barraclough and others, hosted by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone;
5.45: 15 to 1 - Fifteen poets test their trivia skills in the TV show format;
6.30: Best of 2009 - Luke Kennard, Tim Wells, Kate Kilalea, Roddy Lumsden, Patrick Brandon, Tom Chivers and Lorraine Mariner read from some of '09's best collections;
8.15: Xmas Number Ones! - 22 poets read new poems related to the seasonal hits of their birth year, with Jim Dowd, Gale Burns, John Citizen, Matthew Caley, Jacqui Saphra, Matthew Saxton, Jackey Smith, Patrick Brandon, Tim Wells, Dominic O'Rourke, Niall O'Sullivan, Hannah Lowe, Rachel Smith, Chrissy Williams, Sara Byrne, Emily Berry, Sophia Blackwell, Tamsin Kendrick, Nia Davies, Helen Mort, Lizzy Dening and Kayo Chingonyi;
9.30: Tim Turnbull on a rare visit from the North reads from his latest collection;
10.15: harmony singing, old style and new, from the La De Dahs.

I wish I could be there! Please check it out if you're in the neighborhood & let me know how it was! I'm looking forward to the new books and will post again once I've got my contributor's copy. I'm sure it will be gorgeous!

Aesthetica Creative Works Annual

2009-12-01T19:53:00.000Z

Guess what arrived in the post today? My contributor's copy of the 2009 Aesthetica Creative Works Annual! I posted not too long ago when I got the good news about being selected as one of the Finalists for the prize. I don't usually submit to things which require me to pay, but Aesthetica gave student submission discounts, so I thought I'd give it a go. I'm glad I did! Check out the snazzy 'Finalist' award sheet that came with my copy of the Annual! Something for the literary fridge.

I found out a couple days ago that, alas, I didn't win - but after reading Sally Spedding's poem 'Den', which took the prize, I'm just happy (and lucky) to be in such talented company! The Annual is an A4, 130-page glossy magazine, with poetry, fiction and art. Over 90 artists contributed to the book - 40 poets - and my poem, At the Airshow, is on page 15:

As I said, this is a 'creative works' annual, and so in addition to the literature, half of the book is also filled with really stunning full-color visual art:

You can still get your copy of the Aesthetica Creative Works Annual today in Aesthetica's online shop but I suggestion you hurry because last year's issue ran out quite quickly - you wouldn't want to miss it!

Also, they're running a film competition right now, which is open for submissions, and of course the creative works contest will run again next year.

Three poems in Edinburgh Review: Czech (#128)

2009-11-27T22:22:00.000Z

It's been a big day - this morning I graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a Master of Science in Creative Writing. Exciting! But it's also sadly the last time I'll see many of my coursemates who live in other countries. A bittersweet day of events.

SO, I thought I'd cheer myself up by posting some Edinburgh-Uni-related huge news! Three of my poems have been accepted for the upcoming Czech issue of Edinburgh Review.

My poems are titled 'Malá Strana', 'Hands' and 'Vodník'.

I've not been to the Czech Republic myself, so instead did tons of research in anticipation of the theme, exploring folklore (my favorite!) and the contemporary Czech writing I could find online.

The Vodník in Czech folklore is very similar to the Kappa in Japanese folklore (which I've written a poem about for Sidekick Books' new Obakarama anthology - more on this later). Both of these are similar to nixies, sirens, water sprites, rusalka or Naiads in various folklore, and I just thought it very interesting how so many cultures create the same stories/creatures to explain away the mysteries of the sea. We're all thirsty to create meaning to make sense of what is unknown or threatening.

I'm really lucky and pleased to be included in the Edinburgh Review. More about the ER from their homepage:

"Essayist and critic William Hazlitt once commented: 'To be an Edinburgh Reviewer is, I suspect, the highest rank in modern literary society.' Numbered among our nineteenth-century contributors were Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle and William Ewart Gladstone; more recently, James Kelman, Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy, Kei Miller, Tom Leonard, Meaghan Delahunt and Tracey Emin have all contributed to the journal.

The current editor, Brian McCabe, continues the practice of presenting work by established and emergent writers. Under his editorship which began in 2006 while he was Writer-in-Residence at Edinburgh University, each issue offers a view into a particular culture or region."

Recent issues have focused on Iraq (with Andrew Philip's translations of Sinaan Antoon), Scotland (including Jennie Renton's interview with T.S. Eliot prize winner Jen Hadfield), Turkey and China. Each issue offers a really neat peek into a different slice of the literary world.

The issue following Czech (#129), will focus on Japan and I can't wait to see what they'll have in store for that!

Of course, all issues, current and past, are available to buy online from the Edinburgh University online payment system: Get your copy today for just £5.99! Just in time for the holidays!

The Fine Line Consultancy

2009-11-24T10:30:00.000Z

I probably should be filing this in my News section, but thought I'd post it here as well as it is my 'published writing' of sorts.

Kate Gould, a young up-start and the new Chief Editorial Consultant at The Fine Line (editorial consultancy), contacted me recently about her new business. She said, "The idea is to give would-be/wannabe/writing writers a taste of what people who are out there doing it are up to. Not so they can purloin things from you, but so that they’ll lift their heads from their laptops, and realise there’s a world out there. There are quite a lot of editorial consultancies out there so, to give mine an edge over theirs, I’m making the site as much about writers and writing as about the service I provide..."

I thought this sounded quite interesting and inviting so wrote her a short piece on 'how I write', which, as you'll hopefully see... is quite fledgling compared to some of the other greats up there. I'm just starting out myself so don't have much advice (and appreciate resources like this), but hopefully someone out there will find something useful in what I've said.

Anyhow! Read my piece here at The Fine Line.

And check out this fancy one called 'Smitten By the Art' by my old tutor (& good friend!) the brilliant Robert Alan Jamieson.

About the site:

The Fine Line is an Edinburgh-based Editorial Consultancy, committed to helping new, burgeoning, and established writers realise their literary potential. Our aim is to inspire and assist. We provide advice to get you started, lessons to download, insights into the methods of working writers, and an editorial service designed for your individual needs.

HEY! And check this out! Looks like they're having a caption-writing competition! Prize is a free Moleskine notebook to the best 5 captions! Contest information here. Deadline January 31st.

Aesthetica: At the Airshow

2009-10-20T10:39:00.000+01:00

Great news in my Inbox today! An email from Aesthetica Magazine:

Dear Aiko Harman

I am writing to let you know that you have been selected as a finalist for the International Aesthetica Creative Works Competition. Category: Poetry, Title of piece: At the Airshow was highly commended by the judges. Congratulations on this massive achievement. We had over 3000 entries this year.

A few more details:
Winners from each category will be announced just before publication.
As a finalist, you will receive a complimentary hard copy.
The Aesthetica Annual will be available from Borders nationwide on 1 December and from www.aestheticamagazine.com

Again congratulations on your success!

Best wishes

Alexis Smith
Aesthetica Magazine

HOW COOL IS THAT!

I'll post again with pictures once my complimentary copy arrives. Do go check it out at Borders in December! It should be available to buy in the Aesthetica Magazine shop by then as well, in both digital and hard copy. AND BETTER STILL, I just found out my good friend and colleague Kate Charles has also been selected as a finalist, so there'll be even more good stuff inside - I guarantee it!

Just as an aside, I'm not usually much up for submitting to prizes since they tend to include a hefty reading fee, but this year Aesthetica offered a discounted submission rate for students, so I gave it a go. I'm really appreciative of magazines and contests that offer cheaper (or free!) rates, especially to students, and am happy to support when I can. Aesthetica is a great-looking magazine, and I can't wait to see the contents of the Creative Works annual.

Edit: Another colleague, Russell Jones, also shortlisted! Check him out!

And of course, get your copy of the Aesthetica Creative Works Annual today!: Shop

Letting Up: Pause - available now!

2009-10-15T15:33:00.000+01:00

Hello! I posted a short while ago about a music/lyric collaboration I did with my good friend Mike Lee, of Letting Up Despite Great Faults. And now I just wanted to post again with pictures, as - WOOHOO! - I've received a couple contributors copies of the CD, as well as a stack of Letting Up stickers!

Above: on the left are the front and back of the stickers; on the right are the front and back of the cd. The cover image is by Rhiannon Adam.

This one shows the CD and the insert - they've written all the album lyrics onto a single side of the insert, which I think gives an interesting read! It's like the album tells a story which you can hear along the way.

See the bits I wrote for Pause, in the middle!! "..i blew into it, i dreamed it real..."

On the bottom right of the insert below the tracklist is a list of all the contributors; I'm so chuffed to get a mention in there!

As before, please support Letting Up by ordering their album:

From InSound: click here! (just $9.99!)

From Amazon.com: click here!
From the iTunes store: click here!

Open Magazine: Things You Can Learn How To Be, etc

2009-10-08T12:57:00.000+01:00

Things are happening fast these days! Open Magazine has just published my poem, Things You Can Learn How To Be (by doing a search on the internet), in their weekly update, with promise of three more poems in the forthcoming weeks. You can read Things You Can Learn How To Be here.

I'm quite pleased about this. You see, a couple months ago, one of the writers for Open Magazine (Michael Barnett) gave me some of the best literary compliments I have ever received, in his review of the London Poetry Festival: Open Magazine | London Poetry Festival. I hadn't met him at the festival as far as I know, so didn't expect this at all! Too kind.

He mentioned in the review that one of the poems he'd heard me read, At the Airshow, wasn't available online - well that's because it hadn't been publish anywhere yet! So I sent it and a couple others along to Open, and they've kindly accepted them into their Poetry Corner. I'm glad At the Airshow will have its chance to shine at a magazine I know enjoys it. I'm looking forward to seeing it up there in a couple weeks!

Until then, please check out Things You Can Learn How To Be, and the other new content online at Open Magazine. I saw an article about the Poetry Society and National Poetry Day in there!

I suppose I should mention, Things You Can Learn How To Be is a list poem, of true things I discovered people have searched for on the internet. I went to the Google main page and typed in 'How to be...' and the auto-complete function started to show me what it thought I was searching for. Things like 'How to be a vampire' and 'How to be anorexic' came up first. Isn't it strange and interesting all the things people want to be?

The Syllabary: FuP 'June, July or August'

2009-10-07T10:06:00.000+01:00

A quick note to tell you about The Syllabary, and to encourage you along to an event this Saturday at the Scottish Poetry Library.

Colin Fraser, editor of Anon, first introduced me to The Syllabary, as Anon 6 has an interesting interview with its creator, Peter McCarey, who talks about his project and a collaborative one with "Provisional Title" he has forthcoming. Peter has very kindly invited us (and others) to write some of the first poems for the collaboration project, a collaboration that will one day have 2,200 poems/poets included (read: this could be you!). I'll let the SPL's event invitation do a bit of the explaining, then I'll post my Syllabary poem below.

Event details (copied from the SPL website):

Saturday 10 October, 7pm
at Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton's Close, Canongate, Edinburgh

Peter McCarey's The Syllabary: Launches x 2
We're delighted to be hosting the liquid launch of not one but two syllabaries:
Syllabary 3.0, which has been test run on www.knot.ch all summer, and "Provisional Title", a syllabary whose 2200-odd cells will be written by as many different people. If you want to contribute, come along for your syllable and instructions, or come to hear the random rant.

In the phonetic context of Peter McCarey's Syllabary, some 2200 people will each be asked to write one poem for a given cell of the structure. The first poems have already been submitted. Should you wish to join in, ask the compiler (mccarey@perso.ch) to send you a random syllable. You should then write a short text – 20 lines max – that contains all the words in the cell you get; some cells contain only one word, others contain dozens. Send a text file and an mp3 recording of your contribution to the compiler.

Free, all welcome

It should be a good event. He's asked some of the people who wrote poems already to read them at the event so you can hear a few samples as well.

In the Anon 6 interview, Peter explained the mechanics of The Syllabary:

The phonetic structure I mentioned above is set out in a 3-dimensional grid that contains a total of 3600 possible combinations of initial consonant, vowel, and terminal consonant. About two-thirds of these cells contain at least one meaningful monosyllabic word; some contain up to fifty. All the noises are read out, and I'm writing a text for each meaningful cell, based on all the relevant words. The program meanders from one to another by alternating initial, vowel or terminal, one step at a time.

With this in mind, he assigned me the cell for 'FuP', which includes the words 'frump' and 'flump'. I wrote the following poem for it:

[FuP] June, July or August

All the fat feral pigeons are pregnant,
stumbling around on the awnings,
drunk with eggs and summer.
One flumps to the pavement
like a slung burlap sack of seed,
foraging for dust, discarded chips or bugs
in the cracks, anything, lust-hungry.
Even an old frump, feathers matte
with crisp white bits, still coaxes
a crude lover who croons to her
on the plinth of a window ledge,
does his spinning dance on splintered legs,
puffs his plump body up before her,
and wins, in time for laying season.

The Syllabary also has audio recordings of each of the cells, so shortly you should be able to hear me reading the poem on the collaboration's site as well! Exciting! I'll be sure to link back when it's up. In the meantime, do send Peter an email to ask for a cell for yourself. It's a great challenge, with what will surely be an amazing result.

---------------
June, July or August, first in The Syllabary, for Peter McCarey 2009

Mesostic: Interleaved project

2009-10-05T16:19:00.000+01:00

Afternoon! Got a parcel in the post today - my contributor's copy of the Mesostic Interleaved book by Alec Finlay!

His assistant has sent along two copies of the book, plus a sample of two of the bookmarks which came tucked in a wee library card-holder! There were 100 mesostics for the project in total, all included in this book. The majority where done by Alec himself and Ken Cockburn, but the other contributors are listed on the front page:

I sent them about a hundred mesostics to go with authors from their list, but they selected this one to use for Francis HUTCHESON: 'thus virtue must associate with pleasure, sin become pain'.

I've highlighted the letters from Hutcheson's name for emphasis. It's like an acrostic, but the letters can be from anywhere in the linking words, not just the first one. These mesostics link to different authors or books in the library. There is a mainly-Scottish or related-to-Edinburgh-University trend running between them, and the mesostics we made are for the surnames of authors.

From Alec's bookshop, the Mesostic Interleaved book is:

100 mesostic poems composed on an eclectic selection of 100 authors. Published to commemorate the redevelopment of Edinburgh University Library (2009), Mesostic Interleaved is a poetic bibliography of eminent thinkers in the fields of Science & Technology, Politics & Economics, Languages & The Arts. Each page has space for writing your own poems and notes.

The project coincided with the re-opening of the University of Edinburgh Main Library. There was a big christening event for it a few weeks back, where Ian Rankin amongst others spoke about their experiences with the library (back when he was an Edinburgh student!) versus what it's become today. I'll not rehash an explanation of what the BBC has already covered. The event was lovely though, and gave me a chance to see what had been done with the mesostics! (A couple of my coursemates and I got involved with the project last November, so its been nearly a year in development for us!)

There is a huge mesostic poem carved into the stones slabs in front of the library, which you should definitely check out if you're ever on campus. Also, Alec has had 50,000 bookmarks made up of the 100 mesostic poems in the set, which are free to take at the library. It's not so easy though! The bookmarks have been tucked into books at random in the library - you'll have to find one if you want it! They're meant to be used for students to take notes on, so have plenty of blank space. And on the back is a library barcode for the book related to the mesostic poem, if a student should be so curious.

Also - the part I am most excited about - the mesostics from the bookmarks have also been printed onto the bright plexiglass bookshelf dividers, so far in the first floor HUB, but presumably next on the bookshelves (currently under renovation) on the 1st and 2nd floors. You can see one of the HUB bookshelves below. I'm so excited that something I've helped with will be around now as a part of the library for generations. I feel like I've left my mark in a way!

Very exciting!

More info on Mesostics and Alec Finlay at: http://www.alecfinlay.com/

To buy the book on Amazon: click here
And head here for the Library Information Services 'Art in the Redevelopment' news article: A great explanation, with pictures! - thanks Denny!

Pomegranate Iss.9: 'Golden Gai'

2009-10-02T10:03:00.000+01:00

Good news! I just found out my poem, Golden Gai, has been accepted for Issue 9 of Pomegranate magazine! [Read the poem here: Golden Gai]

Quoting from their website, Pomegranate is "a free UK-based poetry ezine showing off the freshest poetry we can find." And by "fresh" they mean: "Well, usually it’s an adjective referring to fruit, but here we’re talking about poetry – young poets, new poetry. Pomegranate poets, bloggers and writers are mostly students in secondary school or at uni, and all under 30."

I think it's a really lovely zine & I'm always in favor of journals and magazines that want to give more opportunities to young people. Each issue has a different theme; Issue 9's theme is 'Masque'.

I'm so pleased the editors chose to use Golden Gai. Golden Gai is an area in Shinjuku, Tokyo near Kabuki-cho. Golden Gai these days is a real hub for artists, writers, and 'intellectuals'. It's a bit hard to get to, and doesn't look so nice on the outside, but is such an interesting and important part of Japan's history and culture... & it feels more 'untouched' and nostalgic of another time, than most of the neon-lighted areas surrounding it. This tiny area is a huge hidden mecca of great bars and banter... you do really feel like you've stepped into a secret world in Golden Gai. I found a couple of good articles online about it which sort of capture the ambiance I was going for in my poem, here, here and here. Man I miss Japan...

Anyhow! Apologies for rambling!

The poem is available online to read here: 'Golden Gai' in Pomegranate

Please check it out if you have a chance, and definitely read the rest of the issue as well! I saw a Jen Hadfield article in there!

I'm so pleased to be in such good company at Pomegranate this issue.

Letting Up Despite Great Faults: 'Pause'

2009-09-21T23:36:00.000+01:00

Really cool things afoot! My good friend Mike Lee, lead singer for Letting Up Despite Great Faults, has a new full-length (self-titled) album due out this October 13th. It's been too long since their last brilliant EP ('Movement') & he and his band have been working hard to put this new album together. In fact, it's already garnering excellent reviews from the blogosphere!

Fortunately for me, I've been lucky enough to collaborate with Mike on the lyrics for a song! He's taken lines from two of my poems (Pause and In the Parking Lot) and made them into track 5 on the new album. He's titled the song 'Pause', and the female vocals are by Amy Izushima. It's totally exciting to me to see the way he's taken parts of the two poems and set them to music to create something completely new.

I've included the lyrics here below and a link to some of his other new tracks to sample online. PLEASE go support Mike's band if you like what you hear. The new album is available for pre-order off of Amazon and in the iTunes store & I'm sure Letting Up will be touring Los Angeles & beyond as we speak. I'm so pleased with how this turned out.

Pre-order the full-length at Amazon.com: click here!
And here in the iTunes store: click here!

I'll definitely post again once I've got a copy of the CD here so you can see all the album art, etc. And of course a HUGE thanks to mlee for this collaboration - even the sea can't stop us!

Pause (lyrics)

I blew into it; I dreamed it real
Could it be you?

And I trail you
I think you know this.
My pace increases
The rest of the way

Stock-still in the parking lot,
I snap out of this, catch myself

I stand on the causeway of time,
A suitcase of sentiments trailing behind,
Waiting for you (to carry me)

I'll catch myself
where we first met
holding out your hand

'Masters', a chapbook from Read This Press

2009-09-02T20:17:00.000+01:00

News! 'Masters', the latest chapbook from Read This Press, is now available for pre-order! Head over to One Night Stanzas for more information on how to buy:
http://www.readthismagazine.co.uk/onenightstanzas/?p=1075

My classmate, Claire Askew, editor & founder of Read This Press has put together an anthology of poetry representing the poetry students (me!) on the MSc course at Edinburgh University. The anthology showcases seven other poets & myself, including (copied from Claire's website):

"Niki Andrikopoulou, a passionate political poet from Athens, Greece // Aileen Ballantyne, journalist-turned-poet and winner of the Sloan Prize 2009 // Dave Coates, originally from Belfast in Nothern Ireland, now a librarian at the Scottish Poetry Library, the lucky swine! // Aiko Harman, American poet and recently a London Poetry Festival Poet in Residence // Natalia Herrero, hailing from Mexico and now living in Edinburgh, previously published in Tontine and Read This // Struan Robertson, Read This Magazine editor, metapoet, budding filmmaker // and Hayley Shields, previously published in Textualities and a reader at Blackwells 2008 Best of Scottish Writing Event. (I’m also in there of course, but you all know who I am!)
The anthology is not yet OUT, only available for pre-order. There is a reason for this, however — there will only be TWENTY COPIES available for general sale, so if you want one, I suggest getting a pre-order in as they’ll go quickly. Copies are a bargainous £5 (plus p&p), and if you pre-order one now you can expect it to land on your doormat sometime in mid to late September."

Excited yet? I am!

My poems Authenticity is a Bird and Hart are featured in this chapbook, so if you haven't seen them already at Poets Letter or Poetry Super Highway, respectively, then this is your chance!! Also, I'm positive the contributions by my classmates are more than worth your poetry ££s.

Please do pick up a copy from Read This Press while they last.

I believe we contributors will receive a few copies as well, so if you miss out from Claire, do give me a shout and I'll try to send one along.

Human Genre Project: FOUR MORE POEMS!

2009-08-22T09:32:00.000+01:00

Stunning news! I've just received a lovely email from Ken MacLeod letting me know he'd be publishing four more of my poems for the Human Genre Project! HOORAY!

The new poems up are:
Stones (on Chromosome 2)
The Illustrated Lady (on Chromosome 6)
Ogbanje (or 'Children who come and go') (on Chromosome 11)
A Cause Célèbre (on Chromosome 21)

As with the first of my poems he published, Ondine's Curse, I've written about a specific disease which relates to a defect/mutation on each of the respective chromosomes.

Of these four new poems, the one I got most engrossed in writing was Illustrated Lady. I wrote this one about Julia Gnuse, who is the most tattooed woman in the world (95% I think, covered in tattoos). She didn't just get all the tattoos for fashion though -- Julia has porphyria, a disease which makes her skin super-sensitive to sunlight and blister/scar if over-exposed. I thought this was a very interesting way to sort of reclaim her body from the disease.

Sorry, rambling! Please do go check out the poems, and the wealth of new writing Ken has already added in the past few days.

I posted here last time about the submission requirements. There is no deadline thus far, so do send some in now if you fancy it!

OH! I ought to mention also, next Thursday, 27 August, 7pm, Ken MacLeod is chairing a panel on 'Genetics and Identity in the Year of Homecoming', at the Edinburgh Book Festival. He'll be with genealogist and biologist Dr Bruce Durie, acclaimed novelist Suhayl Saadi, and writer, producer and former National Poet of Wales Gwyneth Lewis. Should be interesting. Get tickets from the book festival website while they last!

Pigeons book & EIBF reading!

2009-08-20T17:39:00.000+01:00

Guess what I received in the post?! Guess! You'll never guess, I'll just tell you.
Amazing artist & illustrator Lucy Roscoe, of The Book Tree Press fame, has just sent me a hardbound artist's-book copy of our collaboration for the DUO project from last February (May?).

Her book goes along with my poem, Pigeons, and is her interpretation of the poem, in pressed/embossed card paper, hand-set typography, and beautiful renditions of pigeons in various states of... pigeon-life! I wish I could explain better how she made it. She told me once but I can't remember the technique... She uses found objects - lace, different cloth materials, tape - to make the shape of the birds, then does some sort of hard pressing to get it to stick out/in like that. I seriously, seriously, love this kind of stuff.

I've already posted here about the DUO collaboration book available for sale at blurb.com.
And here with the poem and her original prints, ages ago.

But this is different. This is ridiculous. Lucy is an artist like I've never seen! The book is small, fits in one hand. She was right about needing to feel it, hold it up to the light, to really appreciate it. I see it's got a '1/6' on the back, so perhaps there are only a few others in existence, but definitely head over to Lucy's site to see if you can't find something for sale or if you have a project in mind. She's great!

ALSO!
I'll use this as a very clever excuse to tell you about the next DUO reading, which will be this coming Wednesday, 26 August, at none other than the Edinburgh International Book Festival, at 2.30pm, Peppers Theatre. My coursemates and I will be reading our collaboration pieces, along with what will surely be a brilliant digital slideshow of the artists' work. Come see us if you're in town!

West Port Book Festival Readings

2009-08-15T21:20:00.001+01:00

A big day tomorrow! As part of the West Port Book Festival, I'm reading twice in the same day!

First at 2pm at Main Point bookstore for the textualities.net 'Concise Ceilidh'. I'll be reading alongside Valerie Gillies, Robert Alan Jamieson, and a big handful of other excellent writers. More information here at the WPBF website: http://westportbookfestival.org/news/2009/08/13/the-concise-ceilidh-explained/

Then at 6pm at Peter Bell bookstore for the Anon reading. About this event, from the website: 'Showcasing poets who feature in the latest issue of Anon, the anonymous submissions poetry magazine, as well as those who have appeared over past issues, this event will also introduce the winner of the ﬁrst Anon Poetry Competition. A sparkling mix of poetry old and new – with special guests.'

About the (second annual!) Festival: The aim of the West Port Book Festival has been to offer free events to a diverse audience who share our passion for books, bookshops and fun. We have also been creative, dipping into the dressing up box, casting our eye around for new talent and transforming local shops into intimate, innovative venues.

The pavements of the West Port have always been imprinted with the memory of conflicting footsteps. Specialist shops sell clothes and painted canvasses; strip joints show unlikely silhouettes in black and pink; secondhand bookshops entice bibliomaniacs. These shops set the stage for poetry readings, bookbinding workshop, and talks from famous interesting writers and flaneurs! Everything is free (but ticketed)!

London Poetry Festival

2009-08-14T18:18:00.000+01:00

Got home from the London Poetry Festival on Tuesday afternoon. It was a great gig! Being one of the five Poets in Residence, I read four nights in a row at the massive Waterloo St John's Church, just a short 10 minute set, but it was still quite exciting and stressful being 'on' for four nights. Buckets of excellent up&coming and established poets came through for the event from Dover and Glasgow, all the way to New Jersey! I'm still seriously exhausted from all the weekend shenanigans though.

As a celebration of the London Poetry Festival reaching its 5th year, the festival director Munayem Mayenin put together a special edition book, which is available from the London Poetry Festival website.

The book features all the Poets in Residence, as well as past PiRs and readers at the Festival. 64 writers in total, I believe. And I've got a whopping five poems in! [Tower of Silence, Sugar Sculpting Little Tokyo, The Pit, Jackfish, and Castle Rabbits, Edinburgh.]
So do grab a copy if you can. I think the Poets in Residence will receive half the profit from each book sold. I wait with bated breath for my poetry winnings.

Also, some lovely news! Poet JoAnne McKay bought one of my new handmade Poetry Pets (working title) - a Robot (to go with my poem 'For Your Love of Robots'). My first sale! She's also commissioned me to make a second one as she's got two twin boys who will love them very much.

More about this as I get our proper website sorted. Watch this space.

The Golden Hour Book Volume II: Lunch & Dragon Sculpting

2009-08-13T19:31:00.000+01:00

Just got my contributor copy of The Golden Hour Book Volume II. It's lovely!! It's thick and short and fits in the hand just perfectly. Cover and interior art is by Magda Boreysza, who also did all the new art on the walls at the Forest Cafe!
The Golden Hour book V.2 is the second in its series, following volume one, available here:
http://www.theforest.org.uk/golden-hour-book

They've not yet got a dedicated page up for the second volume, but Forest Publications is launching it's own website soon, here:
http://forpub.com/
It's looking pretty swanky already -- I'm looking forward to new content!

Anyhow, sorry. The Golden Hour books showcase musicians and writers who have performed at the monthy Golden Hour cabaret show at the Forest Cafe. I performed at the Golden Hour last December (Christmas special!), and they've decided to take on two of my poems, Lunch, and Dragon Sculpting, for this volume. It's very exciting!

Also, this volume, as with the first, is loaded with an accompanying CD of music in the back, featuring musicians who've played The Golden Hour since the last volume. Tunes = rad.

I believe the official launch will be in September at Blackwell's, but you might be lucky enough to snag an early copy at the 'Festival special' Golden Hour this Wednesday, August 19, at 8pm. FREE!

Fuselit, Mars: Martial Arts

2009-08-04T09:08:00.000+01:00

This just in! I've got my contributors copy of Fuselit: Mars, and it looks AMAZING!

I love magazines like this -- that take the extra effort to create a unique and interesting product. They've played with different papers, burnt artistic holes, hand-sewed the book bindings, glued on shiny stars, and that's not even started on the content!

Each issue of the magazine has a different theme. Fuselit very kindly accepted my poem, Martial Arts, for their Mars themed issue:

Every issue of Fuselit is handmade and comes with a tiny cd of music, and usually some sort of other creative project. For example, this issue came with a booklet called Telemorphics, which seems to be translations of writing made by doing computer translations (an alien language?) on an original text, then translating them back into English poetry/creative writing. Interesting concept!

Also, the magazine itself, albeit A6 tiny, is full of games and even has a fold-out comic book in the middle! The rest of the pages are chock full of poetry, short stories and art. How did they pack so much awesome into something so small???!

Definitely go check out Fuselit's website, and see if you can't pick up a copy of Mars or other back issues while they last.
Their next issue is themed TILT. The next after that is themed JACK and they are accepting submissions for it as we speak!

Westwind: Only Child

2009-08-03T20:38:00.000+01:00

My poem, Only Child, is published online on the Westwind Journal website.
I'll copy it below, but do go have a look at the new Winter 2009 issue, as well as the quality back issues available online at their site.

Only Child

The cars on Gilbert Boulevard
start and stop at the crosswalk—
a muffled honk and the peel of tires.
Inside, hamsters spin in their cages
on squeaky wheels.

I sit on an orange swatch of carpet—
the one in the patchwork design
that I call ‘Mars’.
Not the brown bit, ‘California’,
or the avocado ‘swamp’.

With the door shut, clutching
a Barbie doll in each hand,
I make believe the blonde doll
is the big sister of the one
which looks more like me.

She chaperons her plastic sibling
to the blue patch, ‘ocean’,
and they spend hours swimming
together in silence. _ _

About Westwind:
Westwind is the Undergraduate Literary Journal for the University of California, Los Angeles. When I was an undergrad at UCLA, I did the layout and design for Westwind for three years. It was my first time watching how a magazine operated from the inside, and my first time teaching myself how to use design programs (InDesign, Pagemaker, & old school Quark, among other things!) to produce a quality book.
Anyhow, I never submitted to Westwind as a student, feeling it'd be a bit nepotistic for me to contribute to a magazine I was a member of, but now that all my mates have graduated from UCLA, I thought I'd give it a shot & see if I had a winning chance of being published by my alma mater. What exciting news!

---------------
Only Child, first in Westwind, Winter 2009, 08/01/2009.

Human Genre Project: Ondine's Curse

2009-07-31T19:17:00.001+01:00

Cool news! My poem, Ondine's Curse, has been accepted for the Human Genre Project.

You can read my poem here, on Chromosome 4, the green one!:
http://www.humangenreproject.com/page.php?id=59

My poem is about Ondine's Curse, which is comes from an old German myth, iirc, about a water nymph (Ondine) who cursed her husband (Palemon) to suffocate when he fell asleep -- his curse for cheating on her with a mortal woman. The disease by the same name is very real & exists today; it is a sleep apnea that causes even babies to die when they fall asleep, because their autonomic controls sort of shut off, and they forget to keep breathing. Sad. Interesting, but sad.

Anyhow! There are tons of really interesting unique poems on the Human Genre Project site as well, and the editor, award-winning Scottish sci-fi writer, Ken MacLeod, will keep adding more as the project continues, so definitely bookmark the site and check back later as it develops!

More about the project & how to submit!, (from their website):
The Human Genre Project is a collection of new writing in very short forms — short stories, flash fictions, reflections, poems — inspired by genes and genomics.
Starting with just a few pieces at its launch in July 2009, the collection will grow and develop over time. Please check back regularly to see what has been added.
The project was conceived by Ken MacLeod, writer in residence at the Genomics Forum, who also edits the collection, and was inspired by Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction.
The Human Genre Project is an initiative of the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, part of the ESRC Genomics Network, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and based at The University of Edinburgh.

How to submit:
We welcome new contributions of short works inspired by genes and genomics. Ideally your contribution would be related to a specific gene, but if not, don't worry.
Your contribution will, unless you ask otherwise, be shown with a link to your own website or blog, so this is a good way to spread the word.
Pieces may later be displayed in a variety of formats and media, besides this website: an exhibition, a book or booklet, a set of postcards, etc.
The only right we're asking is for is the right to reproduce the work for the life of the project and in any medium (online, print, public exhibition, interactive display etc) — but only as part of this project. All work will be fully attributed. You are, of course, free to publish your work anywhere else and in any way you like.
Please email your contribution to me as an attachment in Word, txt or RTF format. I will reply with an acceptance, rejection, or editorial suggestion as soon as possible.
Ken MacLeod

2009-07-20T19:36:00.000+01:00

Claire at One Night Stanzas has given me a shout-out and posted my poem, Ravine, to ONS:
http://www.readthismagazine.co.uk/onenightstanzas/?p=969

This all in preparation for the London Poetry Festival coming up August 7th-10th, 2009.

I will be Poet in Residence at the festival, along with 4 others: Bryan Oliver, Christian Ward, Rebecca Atherton, Tony Fernandez.

Anon: Mary Celeste (with audio!)

2009-07-16T18:24:00.000+01:00

I posted a few days ago prior to the Anon launch, that my poem, Mary Celeste, was accepted for Anon issue 6. Well, I now have the issue in my hot little hands, as mentioned, & it looks AMAZING!

They've made available a free downloadable sample of the magazine here (.pdf):
http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk/Anon6Preview.pdf

Also, they've been linking some audio recordings of the contributors reading via Anon's Twitter, and mine is there! So you can hear me reading Mary Celeste!:
http://chirb.it/svfACg

Please go help out Anon by buying an issue or subscription from their fancy website!: http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk/subscriptions.html

They're selling a bulk of 4 back issues for £13, and the new Issue 6 for £5.99. Well worth it!

Bolts of Silk: July

2009-07-14T23:16:00.000+01:00

My poem, July, is published at Bolts of Silk!
Please go check it out, along with the rest of the lovely stuff on Bolts of Silk!

July

Out on the back porch
watching the dogs catch June bugs
praying for peace.

Red Solo cups clutter the lawn,
saran wrap hugs the leftover
hamburgers until tomorrow.

After dusk, mosquitoes make
blue sparks in the hanging zapper.
Crickets tune on the lawn.

Grandfathers sleep in Lazyboys
in the living room, holding cups
of melting ice on their bellies.

Girls in sundresses catch lightning
bugs along the still lake in mason jars
— nature’s night-lights.

My mother, her sister, sit in the kitchen,
remembering, their staccato voices echo
from the window like two canaries.

I am home. I sleep to the hum
of the fan left on overnight, dry heat,
and summer.

---------------
July, first in Bolts of Silk, 07/14/2009.

Anon 6: Mary Celeste

2009-07-01T18:26:00.000+01:00

I’m VERY excited to say Anon has accepted my poem Mary Celeste for its upcoming issue 6!

I’d usually mention it after the fact once the issue is out and I have a copy in my hot little hands, but thought I’d say so early in order to publicize the Anon re-launch event next Thursday, July 9, 7pm, at the Scottish Poetry Library.

Colin Fraser, co-editor of Anon (with Peggy Hughes), emailed contributors to let us know what was in store for the launch:
‘Part of what we have planned is to let people have the chance to hear poets reading their own work in a rather innovative and, we hope, exciting way that involves "discovering" poems positioned throughout the building.’

Sounds intriguing! The info again:
Anon Issue 6 launch event
Thursday, July 9, 2009,
7pm, at the Scottish Poetry Library.

It’s free! Come by!

More about Anon (from their website):
Anon is a print-based poetry magazine where poems are assessed anonymously. We publish the names of all our poets if they are accepted. Poems that are rejected remain ‘anonymous’ – the editors do not discover the names of poets they reject.

Issue 6 includes interviews with Peter McCarey and Roddy Lumsden an essay on Jen Hadfield and Jen Tynes by Timothy C. Baker and a television insider's view of the recent BBC Poetry Season.

Poetry Super Highway: Poet of the Week

2009-06-13T09:55:00.000+01:00

I'm about to head off to Killin (Loch Tay) for a short holiday, so won't be able to link to Poetry Super Highway on the first day of my tenure!

I have been selected to be Poet of the Week at Poetry Super Highway for the week of June 15 - June 21, 2009. VERY EXCITING!

The editor has selected At Thanksgiving, Packing, Hart, and Elephants.

My poems will be initially posted on the Poet of the Week page, and after this week, they'll be moved to the Past Poets Archive.

Please check them out!

Also, a note: I first discovered Poetry Super Highway, doing a search for Gabrielle Mittelbach, my old boss! I didn't know she was a poet, and was very pleasantly surprised to see she was the 2007 winner of the PSH Poetry Contest, and has a few amazing poems up on the website as well. I got to reading some of the other poets in the archives and found tons of great and up-and-coming poets listed there. I'm pleased to be in their ranks.

In Favor of Weeds

2009-06-05T11:25:00.000+01:00

My poem, In Favor of Weeds, is published in The Glasgow Review!
Definitely go check out the rest of the writing available at TGR if you have a chance.

In Favor of Weeds

Great nations rally behind the goldenrod, the thistle.
Let us never disregard the dandelion clock,
spraying spumes of white seed into the wind
like a hapless ruffian atop a thin stalk.

You say buttercups grow on their own.
No one plants them. They just come.
You love the wild life. Careless invasion, chaos.

Cushag, Cankerwort, Mare's Fart,
Dog Standard, Stammerwort, Stinking Ninny-
How can anyone hate the helpless ragweed?
Your sheep sick, and make a fairy's field
of mini golden tansies come spring.

I tell you about the widow's weed: not a weed at all,
but a cloth worn in times of mourning.
A symbol, a memorial, a warning.

In the backyard, she lets her weeds
grow for years. She wants him to pull them,
her favorite son. She tends the weeds 'til his return;
meanwhile they choke the plumeria.

Yellow starthistle, America hates you,
the way your golden body taints her soil.
But your kin are the icon of Scotland.
And prickly burdock, your slender root
is a delicacy in Japan, pickled or stewed.

Let me remind you of daisy chains - girls
sat in circles in the school yard, gossiping,
making bracelets and necklaces
from linked weeds. The first jewelry.

One man's trash is another man's treasure.
Every place has its own weeds.

---------------
In Favor of Weeds, first in The Glasgow Review, Spring 2009, 06/05/2009.

Dash: When You Are Gone

2009-06-04T13:09:00.000+01:00

Just got my contributor copy of DASH vol. 2 in the mail today! It looks TERRIFIC!

DASH is the literary journal produced by Cal State Fullerton's creative writing club and English department. They've really put together a lovely book -- it even has full-color pictures in the middle, and lots of cool art interspersed throughout. I'm very proud. Go grab yourself a copy if you're around Fullerton!

My poem When You Are Gone was accepted for this issue. It's an older poem, but has a bit more of a Los Angeles vibe to it, which I thought would appeal to Dash. Hooray!

DUO collaboration project, THE BOOK!

2009-06-03T15:55:00.000+01:00

In all my haste these past few days, I forgot to mention the publication of the DUO Collaboration Book!
It is on sale here: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/653665

...a bit outside my price range, but I've seen a copy and it looks fantastic! Full-color glossy, comes in hard or paperback. Totally want... *starts counting her pennies*

I should explain this better. DUO was/is the collaboration this year between University of Edinburgh's Creative Writing masters students (that's me!) and the Edinburgh College of Art's Illustration students. One artist was paired to one writer, and we exchanged work, and each produced new pieces based on the other's original work. The best of these have been assembled by Robert Alan Jamieson, Dilys Rose and Harvey Dingwall into this lovely final product!

I've posted my poem, Pigeons here already -- it was the one selected to appear in the final book.
I also exchanged and produced Umi-Uma (Seahorse) and In The Reference Library via this collaboration with my partner Lucy Roscoe. [Lucy is brilliant by the way, check her website!] All of these poems (and Lucy's accompanying art) are posted on this site, but they're only a taster of what is printed in the book, honestly!

Anyhow, just wanted to post a link to the book sale website -- hopefully there will be a few takers out there!

Links to my collaboration poems, on this site:
Pigeons
Umi-Uma (Seahorse)
In the Reference Library

Kichijouji

2009-05-31T01:16:00.000+01:00

Long absence on my part. I've got some things in the works, and I've been swamped with my internship at Luath Press for the past few weeks. Back now though, and just picked up copies of Nomad Magazine! Nomad is a travel-related magazine put out annually by students from Edinburgh Uni. It's a lovely product -- full-color & magazine format. *proud*

They published my poem, Kichijouji, in their Spring/Summer 2009 issue, along with a photo I took at Kichijouji park in Tokyo when I was over last March.

I've since revised the poem a bit -working the kinks out- and will post the newest version in the near future. Until then, go check out Nomad's website!

Kingyou-sukui WITH AUDIO!

2009-05-11T09:02:00.000+01:00

Excellent news! I've just been published at textualities.net. My poem 'Kingyou-sukui (Goldfish scooping)' has been published in the most recent issue, along with the poetry of a few of my classmates. 'Kingyou-sukui' exists in a previous version on my Poets' Letter page, but I'm now pleased to say this version comes with AUDIO!

Do check it out!:
http://textualities.net/aiko-harman/kingyou-sukui/

Poets' Letter, Poet in Residence: Final thoughts & Reading list

2009-04-09T09:58:00.000+01:00

I have just finished my March residency at Poets' Letter. It was really lovely & Munayem has been a great inspiration. Over the course of the residency, I wrote 6 new poems after the reading assigned to me, 5 of which are posted to my Poets' Letter page, here: http://www.poetsletter.com/AikoHarman.htm
As promised, I'll post my reading list below.

'The Paper-knife' was written in Week 1 after the following reading assignment:

Week 1: Emmanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason and Jean Paul Sartre: On Existentialism and Humanism.

Go for a walk for at least an hour. Walk on a long road pavement, preferrably on an afternoon when there are not many people about. I would like you to walk without any destination in mind and simply pass through the space not giving much attention to it and be inside your head and think about the way Kant's mind works, how the ideas flow and how beautifully his language runs with him like a dog and sings the beauty, the art of wonderful, intricate, subtle and sublime thoughts in a rational succession of waves. And when you are coming back I would now like you to look and notice the space through which you would be walking back home.

Write a poem: not about Kant, not about Satre or their philosophies but about your walks and how they have deliberately drowned themselves in your lake and become sky-like-blue splashes of colours and everything that you saw and looked at and touched and reacted to felt so differently.

In Week 2, I wrote 'Authenticity' and 'Authenticity is a Bird' after the following reading assignment:

Week 2: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard and Regine Schlegel née Olsen

Write a poem about Søren Aabye Kierkegaard and Regine Schlegel née Olsen. But I would like you first to get into Kierkegaard’s mind and then do the same with Olsen. This is not a historic poem you are writing but an areal poem the way you recraft their life and how they came alive in your viewscape and how you got into their lives.

Try reading and reading about: Federico Garcia Lorca, Rabindranath Tagore, Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, Derek Walcott and Fernando Pessoa, (And Ernest Hemmingway’s For whom the Bell Tolls).

Poets’ Letter Archive: Kona Macphee, Briony Dennis and Malgorzata Kitowski

In Week 3, I wrote 'Ravine' after the following reading assignment:

Week 3: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo

Write a poem about these two and again, I would not want you to write history. I would like you to bring them alive the way they came alive in your sensedia and understanding.

Try reading and reading about: Rane Maria Rilke, Robert Frost, Vladimir Mayakovosky, Elizabeth Browning, Seamus Heaney, Chinua Achebe, Sharon Olds, Mimi Khalvati, (That Does not Die: Maitreyi Devi and The Bengal Night: Mircea Eleade).

Poets’ Letter Archive: Cheryl Follon, Claire Askew and Philip Ruthen

In my final week, I wrote 'Ono' after the following reading assignment:

Week 4: John Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon

This one, particular attention must be paid to avoid the massive cliché that exists in the public domain. I would like you to ignore all that paraphernalia and dive into where they came from. And I would not want you to write history but areality as to how you found them to be talking to you.

Try Reading and reading about: Pablo Neruda, Thomas Dylan, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Nelson Mandela’s Autobiography: A Long Walk to Freedom, Coleridge and Boris Pasternak (A Game of Hide and Seek: Elizabeth Taylor and Dr Zhivago: Boris Pasternak)

Poets’ Letter Archive: Leanne O’Sullivan, Alan Buckley and Sharon Harriott

*

It's been a great month! It was really nice to be constantly reading and reading about all these great poets and writers and thinkers and people. Inspirational. I'm looking forward to attending the London Poetry Festival in August where I might just meet a few of them!

Weathering & Buried Bones

2009-04-05T16:46:00.000+01:00

Weathering and Buried Bones are published in Issue 3 of Bottom of the World magazine.

You can buy a copy from: Lulu, a print-on-demand publisher.
VERY LOVELY COPIES! I am so impressed.... glossy perfect-bind, nice pages *swoon*. (Excellent content as well. My colleague Dave Coates is also featured!)

For Your Love of Robots & Lilith

2009-04-04T16:36:00.000+01:00

For Your Love of Robots and Lilith are published in Gloom Cupboard Print Edition!

You can buy a copy from erbacce press!

note: Lilith has been severely revised, (even renamed!) such that this is probably the only place you will be able to find the original. A collector's item! =)

---------------
For Your Love of Robots also published at Poets' Letter on my Poet in Residence page.

Mimicry

2009-04-03T16:15:00.000+01:00

Mimicry

It’s called a mimic in nature when a species wears
the colors of its kin. There’s something in it: the hair
the skin, the sound, even the way a thing breathes
can be deceiving. The language of the body
can so easily be copied – a close call,
if you will, a rose by any other name.

Like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, going by the wolf’s name,
a weaker creature conceals itself in what the stronger wears.
Some dazzle for distraction: the octopus’ calling
card is a cloud of black ink. An ermine turns white its hair.
Call it camouflage or crypsis – to hide one’s body
in a similar scape, to trick a killer, to keep breathing.

Lappet Moths lie dead like leaves, barely taking breaths.
Danaid Eggflies copy Monarch butterflies whose name
strikes flight and fear into the feathered bodies
of foes who know to avoid the poison orange they wear.
Photuris fireflies are nicknamed ‘femme fatales’; their hairy
hoax to catch a prey is to fake its mating call.

The cuckoo bird fools other birds into calling
its egg their own. They’ll feed it, raise it, breathe
life into it, never questioning its different air
or size, or why it does not come to its own name.
Milksnakes know coral snakes are poisonous, so wear
their stripes, black-red-yellow, like caution tape on the body.

Uroplatus geckos are masters of disguise; their bodies
are practically invisible to passersby. At a hunter’s call,
the chameleon chromatically changes what it wears.
Evolution. A cunning adaptation. To freely breathe
under the dubious spoof of a species by another name.
The clever care to modify their face or shape or hair.

In summertime the once-white snowshoe hare
turns its fur a rusty brown. An anglerfish’s funny body
baits prey with a hook-like lure, analogous to its name.
There’s something in it: the way one knows how to call
to another, knows the language of movement, breath,
and scent. Knows it is home by what its mate wears.

In our bedroom, I wear my hair the way she has
in photos. I breathe your body in as she would
and I do not shudder when you call her name.

---------------
Mimicry is a sestina, and was the winning poem for the 2009 Grierson Verse Prize.
Mimicry, first in Tontine, STUDENT Newspaper's creative writing supplement, 03/17/09

Caledonian

2009-04-02T08:34:00.000+01:00

My poem 'Caledonian' in Snakeskin 153. They've done another 'short verse' month:

Caledonian

We began like trees: our wooded heights, our glory
in number and pride. A proper home for lynx or wolf,
for lichen, moss, and moose alike.
Where once our bellies swelled with bloom and root,
the geriatric few of us that still stand tall
are but a "wet desert", pushed north, cornered west
to make way for sheep feed, for timber shipped to England.
Our leaves mute to make way for new life: an empty silhouette.

---------------
Caledonian, first in Snakeskin, 153, 04/02/09

Heat

2009-04-01T08:28:00.000+01:00

My 'small stone' at a handful of stones!!:

Heat

You say a voice is just air and vibrations.
I pull my ear close to the radiator
and hear heat.

---------------
Heat, first in a handful of stones, 04/01/09.

Poet in Residence: Poets' Letter

2009-03-31T08:45:00.000+01:00

I am currently Poet in Residence at Poets' Letter for the month of March.

Visit my Poet's page here:
http://www.poetsletter.com/AikoHarman.htm

Thus far, the following poems are printed on my page:
Fireflies
After Annie's Box
Kingyou-sukui (Goldfish Scooping)
In the Court of King Neptune
For Your Love of Robots

*new* March 6:
The Paper-knife

*new* March 17:
Authenticity
Authenticity is a Bird

*new* March 26:
Ravine

It's been a great month so far! Still have a couple poems for my last week. I'll post Munayem's reading list afterwards as well.

this collection: 2 poems

2009-03-15T17:00:00.000Z

Two of my poems have been chosen for inclusion in 'this collection', a really cool project that will pair 100 poems (of 100 words or less) about Edinburgh with 100 films (of 100 beats or less) about the poems. The poems are all in, and now independent filmmakers from Edinburgh will choose which poems appeal to them and make shortfilms for them.

My poems Going Home:
http://thiscollection.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/going-home-by-aiko-harman-no-16-of-this-collections-top-100/

and Between Lauriston Gardens and Lauriston Park:
http://thiscollection.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/between-lauriston-gardens-and-lauriston-park-by-aiko-harman-no-17-of-this-collections-top-100/

are posted on the 'this collection' website. Go check them out! A really great idea, and still time for filmmakers to get involved!

Red Planet & Night Out

2009-03-12T14:15:00.000Z

Two of my poems have recently been published on the textualities.net website!:

Night Out:
http://textualities.net/aiko-harman/night-out/

and Red Planet:
http://textualities.net/aiko-harman/red-planet/

Go look!

Skin Deep: Onsen

2009-03-05T18:11:00.001Z

This just in!

My poem Onsen is featured in the first publication by Read This Magazine's new imprint, Read This Press.

It's an excellent anthology on tattoos & tattooing, with a nice mix of up-and-coming & established poets as well.

You can buy it now on etsy, if you hurry! There are only 5 copies left:
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=21583305

In the Reference Library

2009-02-23T10:45:00.000Z

In the Reference Library

Hushed
we pass notes between one another,
touching.

Each time,
our hands meet like the beginning,
a genesis of electricity.

I ask you in ballpoint,
“Coffee?”
You score through my hand,
scribble something,
slide the scrap
back to me.

Smiling shyly,
I wait for your eyes to catch mine.
You nod,

I unravel
the paper in my fingertips.
“Secret balcony,” it says.

We pack up our belongings,
a muffle of notebooks and nerves,
and I follow you.

---------------
In the Reference Library, first in DUO collaboration project with Lucy Roscoe, of Edinburgh College of Art, 2009. (art by Lucy Roscoe)

Frog Dream

2009-02-22T13:44:00.000Z

Frog Dream

In my dream, as you promised,
We are hunting frogspawn

I am surreptitious in a lake,
With one lip above,
And one below,
The horizon of the water

It's very still,
And I know nothing about frogspawn
But imagine they do not breed in water
Deep enough for me to be half-lip in.

I imagine it is a swarm of eggs,
Murky like your sky
(Not orange like Japanese ikura
Which I think are delicious.)

In my dream, lip-deep,
I brave my face into the puddle of eggs,
Stare so closely into some of them
That we are eye to eye

I can see tails,
Little pod-bodies, all head.
My lips unveil,
Capturing one slick egg—

Mouthing over it
-No, it is not ikura at all-
Holding the thing on the tip of my tongue
Up to the sunlight

In my dream I watch it, and I shine through
Because in dreams you can be in two places at once.
I can see your puddock, on my tongue,
A real live frog.

---------------
Frog Dream, first in Gloom Cupboard, #75, 01/15/09

Sleep

2009-02-21T12:59:00.000Z

Sleep

In the mellow argot of our pillow talk,
my sloe eyes destory you. You feed me
a pabulum of day-stuffs, recount our walk—
the bit of blue ribbon we saw, matte in the gutter
near our flat, and the magpies, enough for a secret
never told, telling it to the passersby
who do not speak magpie, unfortunately.

I remind you of the cloy of hops and malt
which fills our part of the city, especially at midday—
a smell you can no longer smell,
as one cannot smell the aroma of his own home
but knows it.

Our report dissolves into echolalia:
"You were a poet hemming pantlegs," you say,
a spume of snore, I say, "hemming pantlegs."

---------------
Sleep, first in Tontine, STUDENT Newspaper's creative writing supplement,Week 9, 11/19/08

Pigeons

2009-02-20T12:46:00.000Z

Pigeons

There are pigeons everywhere.

Pigeons on the stoop, doing the Egyptian.
Pigeons in groups, in rain troughs, bathing.
Pigeons who own the place & know it.
Know that this is the ledge of the window
On which the previous tenant has written "Do not Open, Broken".
Pigeons who sit there, and stare, as I write pigeon poems:

      City Doves, punk Rock Pigeons,
     Shit on the heads of great dead men
     Immortalized in stone.

Pigeons in the courtyard, pigeons in the square,
Pigeons in swarms, taking aim in mid-air.
Pigeons who could not care less whether
I am trying to get somewhere
In a hurry,
And go on bobbing and weaving,
Puffing their neck feathers and cooing,
And making romantic advances
At inviting lady pigeons,
Taking up the whole damn sidewalk.

---------------
Pigeons, first in Tontine, STUDENT Newspaper's creative writing supplement,Week 7, 11/04/08
Also for DUO collaboration project with Lucy Roscoe, of Edinburgh College of Art, 2009. (art by Lucy Roscoe)

Aiko, Do You Love Me?

2009-02-19T12:41:00.000Z

Aiko, Do You Love Me?

After 30 years of grooming
She still cannot say "strawberry"
(Strawvelly)

She is like an orchid in bloom
In how they do not blossom,
But grow slowly into themselves
Quiet -then sudden- and stay.

On our walks:
"Aiko, do you love me?"
She does not wait for answer—
"Look at that one! Good pink color. Magnolia tree:
It is in my garden at home.”

With plants, she sings English.
She grows the things, a careful scientist.
All prune and feed. Guess and test.

I water the orchid I bought.
“It will grow best outside, Aiko.
Orchid likes the wind."
The pot moss is moldy, white with fuzz.
I water it anyhow. My hands are not her hands.

I murdered the shame plant.
Mimosa. She calls it in Japanese, "Ojigiso".
I touched it and prodded it
To watch it bow its head and rise again,
My tiny minion.
Until one day it simply did not move.

So I have only this orchid, here,
And my memory of her science—
Naming them, my Adam of botany.

---------------
Aiko, Do You Love Me?, first in Read This Magazine, #12, 11/2008

Attack

2009-02-18T12:38:00.000Z

Attack

Focus center:
You, knelt, sitting on your feet,
Winning all the single-player time-trials
To unlock karts and question marks.

Pan left:
Me, seated at the laptop,
Clattering.

You head for the kitchen.
Pan right, pan further right
You start the kettle for two teas.
It is our second night here.

Pull back.
Tilt and follow spotlight to target.
Launch egg through 6-inch opening in kitchen window.

You shout from the kitchen, “Someone has thrown an egg through our window!”
You apologize for Scotland.
We grab towels and console one another.
We love our house. It is ruined.

Camera has long-since stopped tape.

It does not follow us, mopping goop off our ceiling
Before it sets or stains. Before it reeks of sulfur.
It does not see underneath the fridge where I reach precariously
To swab up puddles of smell
All Saturday evening.

---------------
Attack, first in Read This Magazine, online 10/2008

Umi-Uma

2009-02-17T12:26:00.000Z

海馬 (Seahorse)

your feathered head
is a brilliant mane
[despite what you say.]

fragile elegance
intricate skin
i eye-trace the curlicued
chest of you.

no teeth.
no stomach either.
you suck prey in.
you cock your head,
and suck.

i watch your colors change,
as you bow— 色々な色

to hold you
is to shatter glass,
to loose self (bleed)(ablate)
for tampering with
untouchables.

i am behind a pane.

your lover lays her perfect eggs down before you
and you take them, tuck them inside of you.
you bear the birth—

you, bucking bronco of it—
fight through the water,
with a hummingbird fin.

and when you have finished,
i will enjoy you,
laughing with shoulders
hunched over, above the stones.

at last, you wrap your tail around me.
& i eat you for your sex.

---------------
Umi-Uma (Seahorse), first in The Drum Magazine, Miyagi, Japan 2007
Also for DUO collaboration project with Lucy Roscoe, of Edinburgh College of Art, 2009. (art by Lucy Roscoe)