dead end

The nuts and bolts we cracked together
With petty passion, foggy eyes and messy hair
Under the bright light of high efficiency led bulbs
In the opposite of a hurry, in cozy laziness and despair

The bold assumption of a dream-like affair
Sudden tremor, the maniac soulless motion
Of turning gears shy of themselves, all spikes
Oiled and greased with scentless potion

Behold! The engine's roaring beauty
A thousand thunders, a gimmick
Looming in the dark thick air
Of that naked summer night in Brunswick

Deficit means I am not enough
Derelict means I am old and crippled
Do not disturb means I may be taking a nap
Download now means another record has been ripped

It was the end of the road, a dead end
The road not taken better remained that way


gavin thorpe (Whiston, Merseyside, 1978)

the dylan thomas quiz

the centennial of Dylan Thomas's birth is being commemorated with events, readings and exhibitions everywhere. the guardian chose to join the celebrations with a quiz, where you can test your knowledge of his life and work. take it now!

100 years of Dylan Thomas – quiz (The Guardian)

Further reading:

Remembering a Seducer (The New York Times)

Dylan Thomas Festival

Dylan Thomas, the official website

the mind of the mature poet

"[T]he mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of 'personality', not being necessarily more interesting, or having 'more to say', but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations."

t.s. eliot (St. Louis, MO, USA, 1888-London, England, 1965), excerpt from Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), as quoted in Mrs Dalloway and the Feminist Revision of Male Modernism, by Merry M. Pawlowski, published as an introduction to Virgina Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Wordsworth Editions, Hertfordshire, 2003


Further reading:

Tradition and the Individual Talent (Bartleby.com)

final weeks for 2011 poetry submissions

Our reading period is coming to an end. Deadline for 2011 is December 15th. Materials sent after this date will not be considered until the Young British Poets staff resumes poetry reviews on February 1st, 2012.

Want to submit? Please read our guidelines here.


kevin bacon
Editor, YBP

Slightly Foxed Young Writers’ Competition

If you enjoy writing about the books you love, then this is a great opportunity to get your work noticed. Slightly Foxed, "the real reader's quarterly", is calling all young writers to participate in its Young Writers’ Competition. The magazine covers all genres of fiction and non-fiction, including poetry and short story collections, and the books it features aren’t latest publications or big sellers. "We’re interested in books that have somehow slipped from notice but which have meant something to the people who write about them", they say.
Entries should be submitted in Microsoft Word format to youngwriters@foxedquarterly.com until January 15th, 2012. Read the full competition guidelines here.

First prize: winner receives £ 250 and is granted the publication of the winning article in Slightly Foxed, Summer 2012, plus a one-year subscription, a Slightly Foxed book bag and The Chambers Dictionary, 12th edition

Deadline: January 15th, 2012

nikolai

And I will collect your stories, Papa,
like one of your Byzantine hagiographers
And you’ll sing again with your guitar at the kitchen table.
When it’s late and everyone has had too much cognac,
your hair looking so sorry about time and illness–

In an apartment block, snowfall batters windows
Through a darkened corridor, a cat slinks along a wall
A toddler peels back wallpaper to lick at the plaster, eyes half shut
searching for calcium.

A boy runs into a water logged field, his shoes are inverse boats
And he opens his lungs and screams
screams,
for joy,

for love of open space.


varia karipoff (Melbourne, Australia, 1983)

quitting cheese

My discontentment resides in Nottingham
along with some choice pubs
and a favourite day: The Tap, The Stage,
a trip to the park one afternoon
when everything was fresh; the clouds
shrugged out a little rain, the sun
huffed around them, our eyeballs
beamed, an animated white.

Picnicking was rife: foragers
raided the shrubbery, old relics
handed-out hippy wisdom and we
feasted on each other, spinning
the conversational equivalent
of a Roly-Poly; living ubiquitously,
drinking a lot - I wasn’t, even once,
an arsehole, just overused memory.

When we revisited Nottingham
the gaggle had gone and the winds
came and scraped against our bones;
we are a banquet folding
into a cheese cube too many,
bellyache, that fateful feeling
of having peaked too early.


michael pedersen (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1984)

4 am poem, 2 july 2008

It is Wednesday. The taxi is outside,
Humming like a hairdryer, and you are
Yet to leave for Holland. I can still taste
Last night’s chickpeas and cuttlefish,
The Fume Blanc, the flavour of you.
I have barely aged in two days, despite
The details of my birth certificate,
And as I sleepily ponder the necessity
Of poetic license, how writing poems
Is akin to fibbing to others and particularly yourself,
Just as every musical needs a chorus line,
And in Hollywood there's a girl for every geek,
All the birds in the street suddenly burst into song
As you, going, close one door and open another,
Proving me wrong, once again.


alexander williamson (Sandbach, Cheshire, 1979)

darklight

for S.E.






Waking and rising in the January darklight,
I recall the morning when we didn’t watch the dawn.
That was when I realised it was winter; now we’re past
the solstice and night’s pendulum no longer swings as
far as it did. Soon the both of us will have to grow
accustomed to light pressing on our eyelids, to light
rousing us from dreams. By the time I’ve scrubbed and lathered
the sleep from my skin, the sky’s already indigo.
(When I leave the house the world’s already there, ready
and waiting for me, but the sky is muffled up in
thick grey clouds. I wear a scarf. It’s cold).


anthony adler (St Albans, Hertfordshire, 1990)

francis

Funny that you are an artist because you think like one touch like one as you describe my
Chiaroscuro cheeks in awe of the light the shade around us the sheets swirl unmade a
Van Gogh night sky but we are still to better see the speed the beams bounce it all goes
Back to the body everything is for us to consume we make it that way it is all for eyes ears
Nose mouth hands guts brain heart spirit soars as you caress my contours I sense the
Sculptor in you stroking away at the stone shedding the stubbornness finding human form
Beneath suspended Woodman delicate disgusting transcendental trickery can you feel
Your blood quickening dribbling drying rich russet paint that makes sense of this blank
Canvas the way you arrange and divide my sight my attention with your skill your hands
How have you sown planted nourished these thoughts Pollock surprise heartlight shines
Brighter now I know how you see me a beauty similar to art itself not always attractive but
Always challenging the grotesque is sacred why else decorate churches with gargoyles


emily s. morgan (Cambridge, 1990)

a reflective poem

What's that? The sunglasses?
Well I have to wear them,
I’m reading poetry outside
And I’m sure you know
That of all the literary forms
Poetry is the most reflective.

Why? Well that’s obvious isn’t it?
Those verses, stanzas, haikus
They take up barely any room at all.
Even epic masterpieces
Tend to be confined
To the left hand side of the page.

This slim volume of poems contains
Considerably more brilliant white surface
Than it does absorbent inky scribbles.
Hence the sunglasses.

And what about the cowboy hat?
The leather jacket? The boots? And all that
Rouge and mascara? My delicately painted nails?
What about them?
Oh well I guess that I’m just a poser.


james price (Preston, Lancashire, 1987)

with divine ovation

As a resident of Brinsworth,
she enjoyed the acreage and courtesies
of the artistes’ benevolent fund;
a sixty-four-fold companionship; reciting
nightly, verbatim, alongside coupons
from occupants and the jaunted
pastiche of their loyal visitants.

Colin, a fan first and nurse after,
makes an impromptu stop
ensuing her missed appointment
with Earl Grey and buttered
crumpets - there lies Eloise,
decubitus and stone cold dead.

A more courtly passing
you couldn’t have ask for, not
tethered by wires nor sprawled
across iron, like pets on vets’ tables,
but serene, elegant, at ease.

Colin shuts the door,
lifts the rejected analgesia
– morphine, a syringe-pump –
and self-administers the full 10 mls;
on closing her eyes, mouths
Bravo Eloise – now taking his seat
for the encore.


michael pedersen (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1984)

when the track divides

When the track divides,
Shall we take it upon ourselves to divide also?
Or shall we hold on,
til our arms are outstretched
And our fingers reach out,
Like hopeless tendrils for hopeless love?


martha rowsell (Camberwell, London, 1987)

transition

Silent stillness a heartbeat in the air your only
Pulse in the world at this moment in time mesmerised
By the tiny mechanical Clack clack of clockwork days
Recent surf going out and in a delicate Shh
Over thick heavy empty sand Starry
Slush in its eyes like the skies it stares at all night –
We remember driving like lunatics
Half-drunk freedom soldiers out to seduce the world
With our radioactive blood – A distant orange summer
Slick hot and golden and full of eerie practise
Of life and practising death by bottle screaming and screaming
Butterflies every now and then in some bold wonderland
With sharp enemy fronts held by our explosive eyesight
That never stopped seeing
Everything wide-eyed and in a daze no doubt
Some unwelcome Vega to come and ruin it
And you said something along the lines of:
“What’s the point?” I don’t know.
Why don’t you know? But you calmed down
We took turns going crazy sometimes
I climbed a fence and fell off, then a tree
At 2 am in the South of England: I grew up you grew up
We all grew up
Eyebrows raised and set forward
On the horizon where “stuff” was happening –
Separate ways – there and then meeting again –
If only we took serious new times: happening now.
We pass the time around like a bottle of mixed cocktails
And where are you going with that
Gun in your hand, born victims with robotic eyes:
Purple skies of vitamin appear in morning
Before work at 6:15 am, it’s a slow change you got there
Transition onto next raining slowly grinning.


michael holloway (Liverpool, 1985)

keats

keats, by emily s. morgan (Cambridge, 1990)
directed by guy smith (Blantyre, 1990)

yet another ranking: poetry's most poignant lines

Stylist, the free weekly magazine aimed at "affluent career women", has just posted on its website a ranking of "the 50 most poignant lines of poetry ever written", under the embarrasing subtitle "Unforgettable quotes from the world's greatest wordsmiths".

Read it here:
http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/50-of-poetrys-most-poignant-lines

submissions wanted

The Young British Poets blog accepts submissions from poets born on or after july 20, 1969, from all countries in The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth of Nations.

Please send two to six unpublished poems written in English to this e-mail address: youngpoetsblog@gmail.com. Contributions are accepted in an ad honorem basis.

Read our full submission guidelines for further details.


The Young British Poets Team

to earn a living from selling your poetry:extremely unlikely

"Poetry is a broad church, and more people write it than read it. Even more people read it than buy it. The market for selling poetry is, in relation to the total book trade, an extremely small one, and it is complex, fragmented, well-managed and highly competitive. Because of this, it is notoriously difficult to coordinate a sustainable economic model for contemporary writing. You will be extremely unlikely to earn a living from selling your poetry. However, you may earn money from a range of cultural projects related to ‘acting’ as a poet, and some writers seek to earn their incomes from running workshops or courses, teaching English or Creative Writing, making festival appearances, giving paid readings, taking on residencies, and becoming cultural commentators and critics."

Chris Hamilton-Emery (Manchester, 1963), excerpted from 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell: The Salt Guide to Getting and Staying Published (Salt Publishing, 2006)

Further reading:

101 Ways to Make Poems Sell (Salt Publishing)

101 Ways to Make Poems Sell (Google Books)

Chris Hamilton-Emery Offers Advice on How to Make Poetry Submissions (Salt Publishing)

Chris Hamilton-Emery's MySpace profile

The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize 2009

The Waywiser Press is now accepting submissions of poetry manuscripts for the fifth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, named after Anthony Hecht (New York City, NY, 1923–Washington, DC, 2004), American poet and essayist, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and inventor of the double dactyl, a humorous poetic form which begins with two three-syllable nonsense words such as "Higgledy, piggledy."

Entrants must be at least 18 years of age and may not have published more than one previous collection of poems. Manuscripts must be written in English. There is an entry fee of $25 for residents of the USA and £15 for entrants in the rest of the world. Read the full guidelines here.

Prizes:

The winner receives $ 3,000 or £ 1,750 and publication of the winning manuscript by Waywiser Press, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

Postmark deadline: December 1st, 2009.


Further reading:

Times Topics: Anthony Hecht (The New York Times)

Anthony Hecht at poets.org, The Poetry Foundation and the English Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

the last of the commune dwellers

"Gunn, who died in 2004, began his career as a hot young poet in England (he published his first book, “Fighting Terms,” when he was only 25) and was generally associated with the taut, plainspoken aesthetic favored by writers like Philip Larkin and Donald Davie. In 1954, he left England for San Francisco, where he eventually settled after studying with Yvor Winters at Stanford. Gunn embraced the city’s bohemian lifestyle — Edmund White called him “the last of the commune dwellers ... serious and intellectual by day and druggy and sexual by night” — and he grew increasingly interested in syllabics and free verse even as he continued to hone the metrical forms that distinguished his early career."

David Orr on Thom Gunn (Gravesend, Kent, 1929-San Francisco, CA, 2004), excerpt from Too Close to Touch, published in the Sunday Book Review, The New York Times, July 10, 2009


Further reading:

Poems by Thom Gunn on The Poetry Archive

Profile: Moving voice (The Guardian)

A Poet's life, part one, part two (San Francisco Chronicle)