Poem of the week newsletter: twenty poems in!

If it seems like an age ago that I posted the first installment of my poem-of-the-week odyssey, that’s because it was. Despite my best intentions of posting one poem a week to my newfangled newsletter service, I’ve unintentionally skipped a week here and there. Only now can I state, with utter conviction, that I am twenty poems in!

As you’ll see from the track listing below, the ten most recent poems have careered between subjects, including snow (‘snö’), the moon (‘Hey, Moon!’), David Bowie (‘A New Career In A New Town’), Sun Ra (‘another kind of sun ra’), Valentine’s Day (‘Voor mijn Valentijn’), mystery trains (‘Silverpilen’), birds (‘a little bird tells me’), starsigns (‘starsigns’), Ethiopian superstars (‘(On the tomb of) Ephrem Tamiru’ – pictured above) and plain old heartache (‘Coaxing the heart to heal itself’).

Admittedly, it’s been kind of hard to come up with a new idea, much harder than I thought it would be. It’s clear, looking back, that in some weeks I was very, very on, while in others … meh. What’s even more clear to me is that you can’t please everyone all of the time. Some poems I thought might electrify my (now 57) subscribers passed by without even a whimper, whilst others attracted surprisingly generous responses. My thanks again to everyone who has signed up.

My plan now is to write four to six more poems and then make a little half-way-through-the-year chapbook to send to all of my lovely subscribers. I guess that’s my cue to whack in a little link to the page where you can sign up if you dare!

That track listing again: