Published: Bees & raps

Two more small items to mention and then my backlog of braggadocio will be discharged:

I’ve got a poem in the latest page seventeen – “She Likes Bees” as a matter of fact, which I had previously lamented the rejection of, so that’s a happy ending. Nice to see it in print in the company of other lovely poets such as I. Alvarez, D. Prater and M. Hetherington.

I was stoked when guest poetry editor Ashley Capes wrote to say he wanted to take “She Likes Bees” out of the handful I’d sent him. I think I’d kind of given up on that one ever scoring itself some journal publication love, and had resigned to slipping it between some more succesful-re-journal-publication poems in any eventual poetry collection I might develop. So it was a pleasant surprise to be told my little bee poem was going to get a page of its very own in an honest-to-goodness literary journal.

I also have a poem in the latest Four W, which is a journal that I’ve admired over the years and yet puzzlingly had never submitted work to until now. The poem’s called “Are we There Yet?” for a reason I have never been able to discern, though I’ve tried alternative titles, none of which have worked as well.

It’s a longish piece that’s my take on the self-aggrandising rap monologue, inspired by a summer a few years back spent listening to our The Message: The Story of Sugarhill Records box set, in particular the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and “That’s the Joint” by the Funky Four Plus One. It was a lot of fun being so excessively and unrepentantly self-serving in such an incessant way.

I’ve thought about trying another poem in the same style, but every time I do it feels like this first attempt has said everything that needs to be said, and that any follow-up would be redundant, which leaves this wee poem standing out on its own a little compared to my other stuff, both in subject matter and style, but there you go.

So yeah. Two more poems in the published column for 2010, which has turned out to be a pretty productive year. If you want to track down your own copies of page seventeen and Four W just head to their respective websites or track them down via the ubiquitous all-good-bookstores near you.