Reading at the MAC, Birmingham

I'll be reading at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham later today. I think there are still tickets available if anyone wants to come along. It's a popular monthly open mic night with a guest poet - me, this month. I'll be reading from Boudicca & Co. along with a few newer poems, some published in magazines, some completely virgin.

The event kicks off at about 7.30pm, but I believe you may need to sign up before 7pm if you want to read your own work. Anyway, if you're in the right area and fancy some live poetry tonight, tickets and venue location details are available from the MAC website, here.

I'm knee-deep in revision for my Ancient Greek exam in early October but have still managed to look at a few poems this week. Just scraping at them, pretending to edit and fiddle with the bald little things when really I'm considering deeper issues such as 'Do I really want this poem in my next collection?' and 'Is this next book going to be a vague mish-mash or is it still possible to draw these threads together into some sort of coherent pattern?'

I think it could be a very important collection for me. Either that or it will be a failure in the worst sense, the sort where nobody notices it, not even the toughest critics, where I might as well not have put it out there at all. But although that sounds like I should be under serious pressure to get it right, I don't feel any. I have a fatalistic view of such things. Pushing hard for a particular outcome has never worked for me in the past, and in fact has often been counterproductive.

So I'm trying not to consider the potentially high stakes riding on this next book of poems. Instead, I'm concentrating on writing the book that I want to read, the book that I approve of. There doesn't seem to be any other way to do it. Just taking it slow and steady, one poem at a time ...