Anniversaries
There are days in the circle of the year that carry an emotional weight. Children’s birthdays, parents’ death-days, anniversaries of weddings and disasters. I didn’t know the reason for my heavy heart last Sunday until I remembered that it was the day my father died 41 years ago, much younger than I am now.
On Monday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti died aged 101. One of the most influential poets of his generation. I saw his spellbinding performance at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in London. June 11th 1965. Keele to London and back the same night by thumb. Does anyone hitch-hike nowadays?
John Keats died 200 years ago on Tuesday, aged 25. His poetry is still resonant and memorable, still popular, still on the GCSE curriculum, still being learnt by heart as I did many years ago.
Imagine – I am sixteen
and suffering my first heartbreak.
English homework this week:
learn a stanza from Keats’s
Ode to a Nightingale. In class
Miss Wilson asks me to recite.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
to cease upon the midnight with no pain …
Someone giggles. Someone guffaws.
To thy high requiem become a sod.
An explosion of mirth.
Miss Wilson tries to hide a smile.
Did I get it wrong?
No, says Miss Wilson,
you said it as if you meant it.
Next Friday will be the fourteenth anniversary of the car-bombing of the booksellers’ quarter in Baghdad. Commemorative readings have been held around the world every year since then.
Here is the title poem from my book “What is a Book?” made for the Al-Mutanabbi Street Project in an edition of 26. One is in the Jaffe Collection at Florida Atlantic University and one is in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.


Posted by Ama Bolton 28 February 2021
Meeting the Muse
This beautiful book has just arrived by airmail. Beausoleil’s latest volume of poetry is published this month by Intermittent Press, San Francisco, in a stylish edition of fifty, hand-stitched in red, with black flyleaves. I am the proud and happy guardian of number 4.
Contact: intermittentpress(at)gmail(dot)com.

Eighteen poems written over the course of half a century document the tumultuous relationship between a timeless elemental and a poet of our time.
The Muse is essentially capricious, erratic in her comings and goings, supremely undependable.
She wears red and black and always makes a dramatic entrance. She is glamorous and shabby, magnificent and pathetic, needy and generous with her random gifts. She has bad habits and an unhealthy lifestyle.
She stays away for months and turns up when least expected. She makes unreasonable demands, and gives unreliable advice. She’s superstitious, manipulative and amoral. She never apologises nor ever explains.
Commitment is not in her vocabulary, though she is fluent in all the languages humans have ever spoken.
She is maiden and crone but she’s nobody’s wife, nobody’s mother. She is Sibyl and Siren. Don’t call her a goddess; she is contemptuous of those who worship her. But she’s happy to sit on a bar-stool or on a river-bank and have a conversation with one who comes close to understanding her and will buy her a whisky or find her a cigarette.
She has come in many different guises, as the Muse of Homer, Sappho, Dante, Shakespeare and countless others. We can’t do the work of poetry without her.
These poems are bruising and uplifting, tender and harsh, down-to-earth and otherworldly; they are full of honesty and subtle wit. I love each one of them and it’s hard to choose one as an illustration. Here is the title poem.

1st January 2021

First poem of the new year:
My new coffee cup
said rise and shine, wake up!
I woke up lazily
and smelled the sovereignty.
Bitter as stewed tea,
it sickened me.
I rose not, neither did I shine
till well past nine.
In other news, I’ve been pursuing the “100 rejections in a year” mirage. In 2020 I sent off 103 individual poems and 11 collections or sequences. Seventy rejections so far, and 33 still waiting for a result, so in my mind I’ve already ticked the box.
Two collections were short-listed. Six poems were published or are forthcoming in print, two appeared online and one was awarded a £50 h/comm prize.
I need a change of direction this year. No goals. Just write for the pleasure of it, and occasionally make beautiful small editions for family and friends. These, after all, are the kind of books I most like to buy.
What I’ve missed most in 2020 has been dancing. I’ve walked much more than usual, and it has certainly lifted my spirits, but not in the way that dancing does. Of the dozen or so folk-dance clubs we used to go to, I wonder how many will survive.
A daily source of joy has been the Shetland Webcams, which I check usually first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Birds, seals, sky, sea, ships, sun, moon, stars, Northern Lights. My cup runneth over. Usually onto the kitchen floor.

I wish you, my dear reader, all you wish for in 2021, and may your targets be achievable. I’m starting with a sensible resolution to wash the kitchen floor. And maybe clean a few windows. Let some light in.
On collaborations

I’ve been to two physical launches of issues of Magma poetry magazine. Both involved exhausting, expensive and time-consuming journeys from Somerset to London and back. Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending a virtual Magma launch without travelling or expense. It was warm and intimate, with magnificent readings and the usual Zoomy glitches. Not by any means to be confused with gloomy Zitches. (Which, since you asked, is Urdu for “stalemates”.)
Magma 78 is mostly about collaborations. It is a rewarding and exciting read.

It got me thinking about other collaborations. I’ve been involved in a few, one of which was “Waterwoven”, a half-hour performance of poems about water. A sound-collage for six voices and rain-stick. Forty-two poems by six poets were cut up and rearranged to form a sequence for performance, beginning with the first drops of rain and ending with the vastness of the Atlantic. Solid blocks of blank verse were whittled down to slender elliptical stanzas. Sonnets and villanelles were ruthlessly dismembered. Many opening lines and first stanzas were discarded. Choruses emerged. We had the first draft of a script. Through four weeks of rehearsal it was refined bit by bit by all of us. Another week of rehearsal might have yielded further changes. We performed it in Bath Poetry Cafe and at Bristol Poetry Festival … and in the Literature tent at Priddy Folk Festival. The neighbouring tent was the venue for a programme of rousing sea shanties. I do love a rousing sea shanty, but …

Other collaborations I’ve enjoyed in recent years include LZRD, from Indigo Dreams. It’s a captivating, playful and mysterious sequence of poems from the Lizard peninsula by Alyson Hallett and Penelope Shuttle. One can only guess who wrote what!

Aloneness is a Many-Headed Bird was published by the Hedgehog Press last Monday and arrived through my letterbox the next day. A sequence of touchingly honest responses to ageing and the state we and the world are in, by Rosie Jackson and Dawn Gorman. Their poems, presented alternately, complement each other perfectly. Swell Amazon’s bulging coffers if you really must, but you can get a signed copy here.

Two Girls and a Beehive is a beautiful collection from Two Rivers Press by Rosie Jackson and Graham Burchell: a meditation on the art and the complicated life and loves of Stanley Spencer.

And today, thanks to an email from StAnza, I discovered this. THIS! Another glorious collaboration. A choose-your-own adventure. Do have a look.
Written by Ama Bolton on 23rd November 2020
Murmuration

I do love a collaboration!
About the time of the Summer Solstice, Linda France invited poets to contribute a few lines to a collaborative work called Murmuration. There were 500 responses. Linda skilfully edited them into a long poem in two parts, which formed the basis of a beautiful film that was premiered last night at the Durham Book Festival. You can watch it, read about the making of it, and read the complete text here. I have a line in part one and a line in part two.
My life seems to be all about birds just now. Partly because I’m taking an online poetry course, The Avian Eye, with Anne-Marie Fyfe, and partly because I have a Significant Hen. Anne-Marie is a great workshop leader, generous with ideas and well-chosen course materials.
I missed last night’s premiere because it clashed with a Zoom workshop with six other members of Bath Writers and Artists, facilitated by Graeme Ryan. Birds featured in all seven pieces of writing: in some they played fly-on bit-parts, and in others they held centre stage. Even an otherwise bird-free mixed-genre memoir included a poem called “Ducks in Space”!

August Postcards

Here is the latest small edition from Barley Books: a new chapbook of marvellous poems from San Francisco poet and activist Beau Beausoleil. Fourteen very recent (August 2020) poems, plus a specially designed postcard.
Subject matter includes a reading by Sylvia Plath, the catastrophc August 4th explosion in Beirut, the murder of George Floyd, corrupt bureaucracy, the role of poets in a burning world, love, exile, rage, loss and, always and everywhere, beauty and hope.
Beau’s poems are pared back to their essence, slender and strong as steel cable, personal expressions of emotions all can share.
As always, it has been a privilege to collaborate with this remarkable writer.
This is an A5 (148x210mm) pamphlet, 20 pages with an insert inspired by Australian Piano-hinge Binding.
Text pages, flyleaf, postcard and cover are different weights of recycled paper from the Frogmore paper mill.
Edition of fifty numbered copies.
The first consignment has arrived in San Francisco! Signed copies can be ordered from Beau and shipped to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada for 20 U.S. dollars. Please write to Beau at overlandbooks(at)earthlink(dot)net.
In UK and Europe it is available, unsigned, from me, Ama: barleybooks(at)hotmail(dot)co(dot)uk for £13 plus postage (UK £1.40, Europe £4.50.) Please pay by Paypal if you can. You don’t need a Paypal account.
