It seems Joanna Lumley has been making an ass of herself. The full story can be found here. The fuss is over comments she wrote in the introduction of Liz Cowley's forthcoming book, A Red Dress. Essentially it's the same old thing – "Oh, modern poetry is too difficult" with a side order of "the rest of it …
The difference between judging and editing
I've just about finished making the selections for the anthology. Everything has been read, re-read, and re-reread. Longlists have been compiled, and shortlists are emerging. Fingers crossed, I should be able to get notifications out by the end of next week. The mechanics of selection are pretty much the same for judging a competition and …
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NZPS anthology – the process
When your entries arrive at the NZPS (comfortably before the cut-off date, naturally), the competition secretary enters the details (your name and address, plus the titles, first lines etc of your entries) in a database, and assigns a unique code number to each individual entry. The two copies are separated (of course, you followed all …
Things to avoid when entering a poetry competition
I thought it might be interesting to post a couple of times through the process of editing this year's NZPS anthology. There's no official secrecy about it, but an awful lot of people don't seem to know how the process works. So lets start with some real duh moments. The first time I edited the …
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Poetry and Music
I use music a lot when I write. A lot of my poems have been written to what amounts to a a "theme song" – a piece (or pieces) of music that fits the emotional texture of the poem. That takes me back into the emotions that the poem is coming from. Writing being the …
A Dark Feathered Art 