The Sideways Door & Scroll V

Having mush for brains in the middle of this heatwave means that I forget to post things when they're out.

The Sideways Door's May response was up a few days ago. You can find it here.

I have been writing a series on poetry for Scroll and the penultimate column is up today.

How to write new ones is the real question. I'd rather fill a bathtub with ice and hide in it, rather like Tom Cruise (aargh!) in Minority Report.

The Sideways Door: November Response Column

I was travelling and was a bit late with my November's response column but it's now up at The Daily O: 'Letting the geosmin out of the bottle.'

Keeping my fingers crossed that December's prompt will be written in time. It's one heck of a scrunched up time, but when isn't the end of the year, huh?

The Sideways Door at The Daily O

I have failed spectacularly at updating this blog and I don't know that I should apologise for something I am so good at.

Anyway, there is News.

I have been invited by India Today's web-only magazine, The Daily O, to contribute a fortnightly column on poetry. It was meant to be a curatorial column, where I trawl the web and social media and find poems that I curate into a column; but I heard the phrase 'social media' and I shuddered, baulked and felt faint all at the same time, so the editors sat me down, gave me hartshorn and burnt some feathers under my nose and asked me what I wanted to do instead.

I thought I'd do something like the Guardian's Poetry Workshop. I miss it, I miss the poems that the curators found through it.

So that's what I thought I'd do: I'd offer a prompt in one column, and invite contributions which I'd sift through, pick a few and talk about in the next.

I don't know why I am saying all this here, because this is what the first column is more or less about, and you may as well read that, right?

As always, the Naming of Cats and Columns is a Very Important Thing. I think I explained (in the column) how I got to The Sideways Door as a name. Maybe I didn't. If I didn't, tell me in the comments and I'll tell you what other names I considered.

Am I forgetting something? Oh yes - the link to the column: The Sideways Door.