It’s a very solid, well-presented journal with lots of good things in it.
So the year has started well, poems in the The SHOp and The Stinging Fly. Small victories, but it’s always so much better when the poems appear in journals I know I’m going to read from cover to cover.
Which does raise the question: why are Irish journals so good compared to Australian ones. I don’t mean, why do they occasionally publish what I write,which could be sued against them, when Australian ones never do, but why are Irish ones so full of good things.
Since I am a guest here, I should probably not follow that idea.
Instead, let us consider the fifty word Bio. I always read “notes on contributors”. Often to find if poet x does have a colelction I can track down. Sometimes, I find my name there and wonder who he is. The guy who sent the poem to The SHOp still believed Heaventree were going to publish Lady G, which we know didn’t happen and the nice people with great taste at Nine Arches did.
Does anybody ever feel comfortable with the request for the brief Bio? The subtext is: describe yourself in fifty words and make sure you remember to plug the latest collection.
I used to go for windswept and interesting:
Liam Guilar is the only poetry writing lute playing white water kayaking medievalist to have been smuggled over the Kazak border and then arrested and given twenty four hours to leave Samarkand.
But most people don’t know what a Samarkand is…
These days I wonder if I should go for blunt:
Liam Guilar lives in Australia. Or tries to. Some days he doesn’t do it very well. His last collection of poems was Lady Godiva and Me. Please go to this web site and order your copy, now.
Or honest.
Liam Guilar is an anagram. A three toed Nergle from the planet Zipthith. Exiled for incompetence, he does a very bad job as an undercover agent, studying the ritual behaviors of humanoids. His latest collection of poems, Lady Godiva and Me, (go to this website now and buy several copies) contains coded revelations about the mystery of the universe. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn how to teleport.
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2 comments:
I like the last one, can I borrow it?
Of course. And then peope will think Nergles are taking over the word. Or the world. (It's hard to type with only three toes.) Your Bio in the SHOp is much more interesting. And the poem itself is a fine antedote to Hardy's "The Ruined maid".
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