De-Cabbage Lemon Monkey Bins

My De-Cabbage Yourself Salt Cyclone Virtual Book Tour has made its fifth stop at Claire’s One Night Stanzas blog. I post a few lines from the first poem I ever wrote (more than enough!), and consider questions on influence, pamphlet publication, blogging and publishers.

I’m taking a half-time break now from the tour (and from this blog), but I’ll be back on Thursday 16th July at Bernardine Evaristo’s Blog.

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I’m back from London and my reading at the Lemon Monkey last night with Andrew Philip, Katy Evans-Bush and Yang Lian (also Pascale Petit and Brian Holton translating). I am now totally knackered, but I’ll say that it was a cool venue, the audience seemed into the whole thing, all the readings went very well, and I met plenty of great people at the venue and at the bar afterwards. I bought Yang Lian’s Riding Pisces. We didn’t get to bed until very late and I was up early this morning to catch the train to Edinburgh where I had a meeting this afternoon. I managed to read over half of Selima Hill’s new collection, Fruitcake on the way up. It’s something else…

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Got back to find that the bin men have come. The bins along my street have finally been emptied. Cause enough for celebration.