Do you still need a reason to read Whatever You Do, Just Don't?! Well, Andy Hopkins has generously (and with great insight) written at length on his blog about five good reasons for doing so. You can find out what they are by following this link!
Stephen's Payne's not only an excellent poet but also an excellent critic. And by extension, his new poetry blog promises to be excellent too.
Given his scientific background, a lazy reader might be tempted to describe Payne's approach as forensic and thorough, but that would ignore his honed sensitivity. For instance, the first post on his blog is packed with both emotional and technical insight into Billy Collin's poetry. You can read it by following this link.
Victoria Moul has a terrific poetry blog, titled Horace & friends, over at Substack (see here).
Her blog's terrific for two main reasons, the first being a deft combination of rigour and accessibility when dealing with complex issues of literary theory and practice. It's refreshing to encounter an academic who's willing and able to engage with readers from beyond the realms of university life.
And then the second reason is its additional linguistic and sociocultural perspectives, thanks to her classical background and the time she's spent in France. This means that she's often able to cast fresh light on U.K. poetry.
All in all, Horace & friends is thoroughly recommended. It's already among my favourite poetry blogs...!
Jonathan Totman has recently started a new poetry blog and it looks like becoming an top-notch addition to the scene. Using his expertise in clinical psychology as a point of departure, his posts provide a focus on poetry and mental health, offering selected poems by the likes of Ramona Herdman alongside reflections that are informed by his counselling work.
There are already five excellent posts awaiting you, though I'd especially recommend the latest one on loss and fearing joy, which also features a terrific poem by Sue Rose. You can read it here.
Certain regular readers of Rogue Strands have complimented me on the number of poetry blogs I manage to follow (or insinuated that I've got far too much time on my hands!), but I continue to make new discoveries of excellent, long-running poetry blogs that have previously slipped under my radar.
This is at once annoying and terrific. Annoying because it makes me feel useless. Terrific because each discovery provides me with the chance to devour a whole back catalogue of interesting posts.
One such case is Edmund Prestwich's poetry blog (follow this link to read it), which is packed with in-depth reviews that get down to the nitty-gritty of books such as Hannah Lowe's The Kids, Maurice Riordan's Shoulder Tap and Gerard Woodward's The Vulture, alongside nuanced analysis of poetry from the past, especially from the 20th Century. All in all, it's a treasure trove of points of departure for poetic discussion and debate. Thoroughly recommended and it's going straight on my Poetry Blogs List. I can only apologise for not having found it earlier...!
I’ve long admired Jonathan Davidson’s
poetry and have featured his collections on Rogue Strands, while his most
recent book, Commonplace, is a uniquely generous engagement with other poets’
work.
And this same generosity runs through
his poetry blog. I uselessly forgot to include it in my annual round-up back in
December, though it deserves a post to itself in any case.
Jonathan Davidson’s blog might be
irregular, but it’s packed with posts that force us to pause, think and
re-evaluate our assumptions of poetry’s place in the contemporary world,
analysing the seismic shifts that are taking place in traditional roles of
poets, publishers and readers. Moreover, all this is grounded in sensible
discussion without unnecessary linguistic fireworks. Instead, we encounter
solid arguments and debates that speak to us directly. I cannot recommend it
enough, and you can see what I mean by reading it via this link!
The last few years have undoubtedly
seen a significant drop in the number of poetry bloggers on the U.K. and in the
regularity of their posts, almost as if there were a tacit recognition of the
format’s growing irrelevance in the context of social media.
However, I’d argue that this shift is
also tied in to two important points. Firstly, it’s far quicker for a user to tweet
than to write a blog post. And secondly, even if the blogger gets their finger
out and writes a post, it seems to fall into a vacuum and garner little
reaction (how many people leave comments on blogs these days?!), whereas a
tweet might receive several replies in minutes.
Well, I can do little to address the
first question apart from suggesting we all need to fight the growing loss in
our attention spans. Nevertheless, the second issue does have several potential
solutions that can not only help poetry blogs survive but enrich our
interaction with them.
Over the past year, I’ve been
experimenting with how I use this blog in conjunction with social media. My
point of departure was a quick analysis of the differing temporal nature of blogs,
Facebook and Twitter as a poet’s main means of communication with their readers. If a blog post often gathers
pace over the course of days and weeks (and sometimes even months and years if
Google takes a fancy to it), Facebook posts accumulate likes over a period of hours
and days, while Tweets find audiences mainly in minutes and hours.
This is why blogs are losing impetus.
But it’s also their possible saving grace. Rather than viewing my blog as a
separate entity from my social media use and lamenting its decline as a fading
anachronism, I’ve begun to realise that my blog posts could acquire a crucial
function on Twitter and Facebook. And as a consequence, the viewing stats for Rogue
Strands have increased once more.
For instance, on some occasions, I now
initiate a debate on Twitter via a quick, questioning Tweet, let the replies
fly back and forth, then collate the differing opinions in a blog post that can
consequently be posted on Twitter to bring the discussion together more
coherently, thus enabling it to take a step forward instead of being lost on a
morass of other threads.
Meanwhile, another option is to use a
blog post as an anchor for debate. If a quick Tweet feels insubstantial, too open
to misinterpretation or not long enough for a position to be coherently
explained, the afore-mentioned blog post can work as starting point for
exchanges of views. What’s more, if posted as the start of a thread, a decent
blog post is a place where Twitter users can check back to recall a discussion’s
initial frame of reference.
Oh, and one final reflection-cum
provocation. I’ve found that certain blog posts fly on Twitter and others on
Facebook. Facebook tends to work best with posts that reward lengthier engagement,
while Twitter homes in on catchier stuff that’s more immediately attractive. Once
again, the question of our ever-reducing attention-spans.
Do you agree? Does your experience
tally with mine? Am I right in feeling that there is a strong future for poetry
blogs if they learn to interact with social media in innovative ways…? Do you
have alternative suggestions?
It's always a joy to discover high-quality poetry blogs, so I was delighted to find Jeremy Wikeley's The Left Margin last week. Moreover, it might be new to me, but there's an extensive archive of posts, which means prolonged reading pleasure while I catch up. My personal favourites are probably his pieces on Philip Larkin and Louis MacNeice. Why don't you have a look for yourself by following this link...?
Over here at Rogue Strands Towers, we're always looking out for a decent excuse to sideline all our commitments and dive into poetry blogs. Of course, this feeling only grows as the pandemic rumbles on, so I was delighted to discover Bob Mee's terrific poetry blog (see what I mean here) a few weeks ago.
I might be late to the party, as his blog's been going for a fair while now, but the excellent news is that I've thus had loads of top-notch reading matter to get through. Bob Mee's been involved in poetry for decades, and I've realised he even published one of my poems back in 2004 when he was running iota magazine (via Ragged Raven Press) with Janet Murch. His experience, knowledge and astute vision of the genre shine through in every post, whether reviewing, commenting on news, posting original work, etc, etc. All in all, his poetry blog's a gem and I thoroughly recommend it.
