2011, year of not as much poetry as I had intended

Sometimes I feel I'm in a time loop. Looking back at a post I wrote in Jan last year, I find I've articulated the very things I'm still feeling: that I keep pushing my own poetry to the bottom of the list. I decided that 2011 was going to be my Year of Poetry. I decided I was going to read a poetry book a week. I decided I was going to finish and polish the manuscript for my next book. I was going to focus more on my own poetry and less on publishing poetry.

So, this year, instead of publishing my average of one Seraph Press book, I published two. They are both wonderful, and I'm glad I published them. But after the middle of the year I did end up feeling that publishing (the two Seraph Press books, plus JAAM) was dominating my time entirely.

I haven't managed to read 52 poetry books this year. I stopped recording them back in May at 16/52. But I've also read these, in no particular order because I can't remember:

• Cookhouse, by Paula Green (17/52)
  
• Spark, by Emma Neale (18/52)
• The City, by Jennifer Compton (19/52)
• Thicket, by Anna Jackson (this is her new one, which sent me back to:) (20/52)
• Catullus for Children, by Anna Jackson (and) (21/52)
• The Long Road to Teatime, by Anna Jackson (22/52)
• Hill of Wool, by Jenny Bornholdt (23/52)
• The Moonmen, by Anna Livesey (24/52)
• Western Line, by Airini Beautrais (25/52)
• Men Briefly Explained, by Tim Jones (26/52)
• Tongues of Ash, by Keith Westwater (27/52)
• The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls, by Kate Camp (28/52)
• Poetry Reading at Kaka Point, by Peter Olds (29/52)
• Pocket Edition, by Geoff Cochrane (30/52)
• The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and other New Zealand Icons: Prose Poems, by Vivienne Plumb (Ok, so I did publish it, but I had to read it multiple times, so I'm going to count it) (31/52)
• The Comforter, by Helen Lehndorf (ditto) (32/52)
• Green Man Running, by Anna Jackson's honours class (I taught them how to hand-bind this little collection one Saturday afternoon) (33/52)
• 2011, by Anna Jackson (this is a little book of 11 poems Anna put together to commemorate the year) (34/52)
• The Same as Yes, by Joan Fleming (a Christmas present) (35/52)
• Nice Pretty Things and others, by Rachel Bush (also a Christmas present, and I haven't actually finished it yet, but I'll make sure I do today). (36/52)

So, 36. Not quite 52, but on the way.

I also haven't quite finished Cinema, the sadly neglected thing that it is, but I have gone so far as to sort it into an order, and hand it over to a trusted friend to read and give me feedback. (Pretty much the first thing she said is that she doesn't think the order is right!) Even though there are still some unfinished poems in there, it has helped make me feel like it isn't too far off being done.

Thinking back on the year, some other cool poetry things have happened. I've been part of Tuesday Poems for its second year (I don't always manage to post or be a good community member, but I try), and we Wellington members had two meet-ups - appropriately at the book-filled Library bar.

I did a couple of readings this year, both of which were really enjoyable - for me at least. In March I read at the Ballroom with Helen Heath and Helen Lehndorf as Helen Cubed. This was a wonderful experience, and one I hope we will reprise. At the end of the year, in early December, I read at Blondini's with Vana Manasiadis, Emma Barnes and Stefanie Lash. Much scarier than the readings was going out to Newlands College, doing talk to a hall-full (well, actually it was half-full) of students (which including reading a few poems, which I found much more comfortable than talking), running a writing workshop (which went really well, to my great relief) and presenting prizes to students who had placed in a poetry competition I had judged.

And I've had a few things published around the place. Most exciting for me was probably Sport publishing a poem sequence 'Nine Movies' (which is from Cinema) in it's entirely - all nine poems. Another big highlight is Paula Green selecting a couple of my poems for a new anthology of love poems that is being published in 2012. Sadly that had to be cut back to one when it got the publisher, who needed it to be a shorter book, but I'm still very excited. And it was also cool when my poem 'If this is the future...', which had been published in issue 2 of Eye to the Telescope, was the Thursday poem in the Dominion Post. (My in-laws still have the clipping stuck to their fridge.)

So, my year wasn't quite as poetry-filled as I hoped it would be, but it also wasn't quite such as failure as I thought it was before I started reflecting. And I'm going to try to make 2012 an even better year of poetry - one where I write more anyway.

More poetry books I have read (13-16)

I am giving up on writing separate posts for each poetry book I've been reading, at least until I feel like doing it again. I may resort to just listing them. There are many other things to juggle, and while I generally fail, I try to juggle them in a sensible, prioritised fashion. No, that's a lie - if I tried to do that I'd spend much more time writing my own poetry, and less time on twitter or reading news on the internet. Instead, I have good intentions.

Anyway...

Because Paradise, by Charlotte Trevella (13/52)

I was really curious to read this book because the year I judged the junior section of the New Zealand Poetry Society's annual competition (2008) the winning poem was by Charlotte Trevella. (It was 'Other people's gardens' and you can read it on the Poetry Society site) Turned out one of the highly commended poems was also by her. And it turned out that she'd won the year before, and possibly the year before that. So definitely someone to watch.

And yet, when reading Because Paradise, I wished that I could forget I knew that, forget that she was a teenage wunderkind, because it kind of affected how I read the book. I particularly found the poems that were full of nostalgia a bit hard to take - I mean, what does a teenager to be nostalgic for - they've barely lived. Then again, children and teenagers are probably the most nostalgic people of all, and I guess there is something about that teenage nostalgia for childhood, that seemingly carefree time they've just left.

Despite my misgivings, and feeling that Trevella would have been better to have waited until she was older before pubishing her debut collection, there were some lovely poems and lovely lines in there. And I'm still a fan of 'Other people's gardens'.

In Vitro, Laura Solomon (14/52)

Laura Solomon's debut poetry collection. I wrote about this book when I included a poem from it as my Tuesday Poem: http://wingedink.blogspot.com/2011/05/tuesday-poem-conversation-overheard-on.html.

Small Stories of Devotion, by Dinah Hawken (15/52)

This is an amazing book. It's not the first time I've read it - I read it several times many years ago when I was first discovering Dinah Hawken - probably back in 1995 when Mark Pirie and I interviewed Dinah for one of the very first issues of JAAM. I love many things about this book, starting with the shape (it's almost square). It's full of gloriously connected but varied poems. It's mysterious but also grounded in physical reality. I always recall it as a book of female power, but it's much more than that. It's hard to describe. It's beautiful. Reminds me it's time to go and read Hawken's most recent collection, The Leaf-Ride.

Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, by Janis Freegard (16/52)

I went to the launch of this, and was lucky enough to get to see the author reading whilst wearing a rather fantasic long-beaked mask. (You can see Janis in the mask reading a 'The Icon Dies' on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfS_b52SBNE).

I have a particular liking for poetry books that work as books, so enjoyed the arrangement of Kingdom Animalia - there six sections relating to a different order of animals (Linnaeus's taxonomy apparently), with the poems in them referencing in some way an animal (or animals) in that order. Woven between them are poems about Linnaeus, parts I to VII.

The poems I particularly enjoyed in the collection tended, I found, to be the more surreal ones. 'Three Hummingbirds' is a favourite.

Poetry reading: The Book of Blood by Vicki Feaver (12/52)

I first came across a poem by Vicki Feaver several years ago when I was nosing through some poetry anthology that a friend had for her poetry course at university. I was really struck by her poem - it was about Judith, whose story is told in the Apocrypha. I'd written a bit about Judith too in my poem about Artemisia Gentileschi and her paintings: 'Artemisia Gentileschi, 1593–circa 1642' - Gentileschi painted several pictures of Judith, including two of her beheading Holofernes (which is what she was famous and celebrated for).

You can read Vicki Feaver's poem 'Judith' on the English Poetry Archive site. It's a poem written in the voice of her protagonist - something that I've enjoyed doing to. It was a poem that made me want to read more of Feaver's work, and I've looked out for books by her around the place - in bookshops and libraries - but never saw any. So, now with the wonders of the internet, I decided to order a book. The book that Judith is from, The Handless Maiden, is out of print, so I bought the more recent The Book of Blood. It arrived surprisingly quickly.

I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed with this book. I wanted there to be more in there that I loved, but a lot of the poems just left me kinda cold. They didn't feel rich, they didn't feel necessary. But, looking back on it, I have fond feelings about the book, remembering how it very quietly seemed to tell a cumulative story of a life. Of sadness, of being left, and then finding love again, but that not solving everything.

In any case, there was one poem I really love, which makes the whole collection worthwhile: 'Hemmingway's hat'. It's a sort of genderbending poem about new love. No, it's more than that - it's about how we are the sum of various parts, of our histories. It ends with joy.

Poetry reading: Lost Relatives by Siobhan Harvey (11/52)

I haven't been keeping up with recording the poetry books that I've been reading, but I have been reading. I'm in danger of losing track, so it's probably time to start recording them again.

First up is Lost Relatives by Siobhan Harvey, which I've mentioned previously when I included a poem from it, 'Tooth', as my Tuesday poem. I said then that it was lovely meeting old friends in here - poems I'd come across in other places, including some I'd published in JAAM many years ago. The book tells a story of loss, and of gain. Of leaving an old home and family and country behind, and coming to a new country, building a new life, with a new family, and new connections.

February poetry reading (6-10)

My reading has been rather haphazard, but I seem to have managed to read some poetry books. I got a whole bunch out of the library, and now they are all overdue, sigh, and I'd better take them back. This is why I'm generally not a library user - due dates mean nothing to me, and then it ends up being cheaper buying books...

Vita Nova by Louise Glück (6/52)

I have conflicted feelings about this book. Louise Glück is a celebrated contemporary US poet, she's won lots of prizes, including for this book, but most of it didn't seem very good to me. That isn't to say that it isn't good, but more that it sent me in a bit of a spin because I couldn't see why it was good. Is it a problem with me? I guess this happens a lot - people raving about something that doesn't speak to me at all, which seems clumsy or lacking a point - and I guess we all just have different taste. But still...

There was some lovely stuff in Vita Nova though, even for me. The collection is telling a subtle story of the narrator's rebirth into life after something happened. There are snatches of a failed love affair and it's all mixed in with mythology. Should have been right up my alley. And some of it was. Here's my favourite quote:

I lived in a tree. The dream specified
pine, as though it thought I needed
prompting to keep mourning. I hate
when your own dreams treat you as stupid.
(Condo)

Vita Nova is, apparently 'written in the elected shadow of Dante', and so I thought now might be a good time to pick up that copy of Vita Nova/The New Life by Dante, which has been sitting on my shelf for some time. I'm still clawing my way through it, and perhaps it is just the translation, but it reads to me like the stalky obsessions of a very socially maladjusted young man, who could do with a bit of a slapping (except of course I abhor violence). It tells the story of how he saw Beatrice, fell in love with her, and then obsessed over her for years and years. He writes some poems. In between the poems he tells us what the poems mean and how they work (and how clever he is), and how he pretended he loved someone else, for some reason, and how he got so thin because of his love, and goodness me you really should have found some medieval Florentine psychotherapist, Dante, then perhaps you could have just asked her out and got it all over and done with.

I probably didn't come into it with the most receptive attitude - when working on My Iron Spine I wrote a poem called 'Poetry with Beatrice and Laura', where I have a poetry-writing group with Beatrice and Laura (the beloved of Petrarch). I wrote it after I was really annoyed by this epigram by Anna Akhmatova:

Could Beatrice have written like Dante
Or Laura glorified love’s pain?
I set the style for women’s speech
God help me shut them up again!

I normally like Anna Akhmatova's poetry, but this infuriated me, and I wanted to give some kind of voice to those women, who haven't gotten to have one in history.

Anyway...

Music Therapy by Peter Olds (7/52)

In contrast, I really enjoyed this book. It's quite simple, accessible and balanced. I reminded me of nothing as much as James K Baxter's Jerusalem poems, and I imagine it may be written in that tradition - Olds spent some time at Jerusalem in the 1970s. Similarly, many of these poems are about a time spent living differently, in solitude. In the 1980s Olds lived for a while in a hut at Seacliff, near the old psychiatric hospital. Like Baxter's poems, he will often describe things he sees around him, which will very subtly be metaphorical of what's going on for him. The rest of the book focuses on Dunedin in the 1990s, after a breakdown. I would include a quote, but that book has gone back to the library, to avoid further fines.

Soft Sift, by Mark Ford (8/52)

I picked this one up from the library cos it's published by Faber and sounded interesting. I'd never heard of Mark Ford before this, but then I have an appalling lack of knowledge of contemporary poets who don't live in NZ, which is what I'm trying to rectify this year.

I started reading this one afternoon, while I was in a grumpy-pants mood, and had wandered down to sit in the park in the sun to have some alone time. When I read some more, I was sitting on a concrete thing at Oriental Bay, with my feet being lapped by occasional waves - until I retreated because the tide was coming in and a particularly huge wave soaked my skirt, my bag, and dampened the book (don't tell the library). I finished it off sitting at my dining room table. This is basically irrelevant, except that now it's intimately connected with those locations in my head.

I found the poetry itself really dense. I described it to friends as kind of like eating dessert while drinking something also very sweet. I can totally enjoy dense, rich, even sticky poetry, and I did enjoy quite a bit of this, but I found I had to keep rereading lines - there seemed to be a lot of words without a clear meaning - not in a metaphorical sense so much, but as in a sense sense (if that makes any sense). For example, the first two lines of 'Penumbra': Beneath an angular web of scratchings-out/Vagrant motives glow like phosphorus: low, creeping' (though actually, that seems to make more sense now than it did before...).

I confess, I read a lot of the poems without really getting them - and now have forgotten them entirely. But one that has really stuck with me is 'The Long Man', about the Long Man of Wilmington, well, at least partly - you know poems, tricksy things – they're generally about stuff other than what they're about. Anyway, it begins 'The Long Man/of Wilmington winces with the dawn; he has just/endured yet another mythical, pointless, starry/vigil'. A favourite bit: 'I had/ the 'look', as some called it, meaning I floated/in an envelope of air that ducked and sheered/between invisible obstacles.' And the end:

... I kept picturing someone tracing
a figure on the turf, and wearing this outline
into a path by walking and walking around
the hollow head, immobile limbs, and cavernous torso.

Piki Ake! and Voice Carried My Family by Robert Sullivan (9–10/52)

I read these in preparation for Robert Sullivan's reading at the Poetry Society in March. Piki Ake!, his second collection, is from 1993, while Voice Carried My Family is from 2005. There's a bit of a gap in between (though, there are other books in this gap), and there does seem to me to be a development of style, as well as some similarities and similar interests and concerns. Both draw on Maori culture, stories and heritage, and both show the influence of waiata. Pike Ake! seemed more ... informal - I'm not even sure that's the right word. Perhaps looser is more what I mean. It has quite a few personal stories, including several poems telling the story of a family reunion up in Northland. There's still personal stories in Voice Carried My Family, though they seem tighter, perhaps more sophisticated.

He tells others' stories too - such as the stories of Te Weherua and Koa, young Maori boys who hopped on board the Resolution in 1777. Sullivan also knows that telling others' stories is problematic: 'But I can't. I just can't take the middle of your throat./Who would I pay for the privilege?' ('3 Mai') I felt a similar issue when working on the 'biographical' poems in My Iron Spine - I wanted these women to be remembered and celebrated, I wanted to give them voice, but I knew that it was my voice I was giving them, not their own. I couldn't really know what their voices would say. It is a slightly uncomfortable appropriation.

I think my favourite poem from either collection is the mysterious and haunting '13 ways of looking at a blackbirder'. I can't possibly tell you exactly what it's about, but I kind of feel it. You know, like a David Lynch movie.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing/hearing Sullivan read - I've never heard him before, and hearing how a poet read, their rhythms, can give you a whole new way of understanding their poetry.

January poetry reading (2–5)

The Time of Giants by Anne Kennedy (2/52)

I was fortunate enough to meet Anne Kennedy at the launch for Crumple in Auckland in November. We've been corresponding and she very kindly sent me a copy of The Time of Giants. This is a re-read for me. I read and enjoyed it back in 2005 when it came out. I've enjoyed it even more this time through though - as I often do when I reread things I liked the first time. You often get more of the nuance and layers and so forth.

One thing I hadn't picked up on the first time, possibly because I hadn't read it yet, was its parallels with Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson. Both are collections of linked narrative poems, aka verse novels, which modernise a character from myth. In Carson's case, a monster from Greek myth, and in Kennedy's case, a giant from Irish myth (though Moss, the protagonist, is not herself from a myth, she is a descendant of Irish giants, such as Finn MaCoul, whose story is told in the second section).

Moss and her brother Forest are giants, though their parents are normal height. This is really the story of Moss and her efforts to keep her normal-sized boyfriend Paul from realising she is so tall. I took this also as metaphorical for that feeling that I'm sure most people have - that they are some kind of freak, and are going to be found out at some point.

It's a really playful collection, with a playful story and playful and surprising use of language. I'm going to publish a piece as my Tuesday Poem soon, so you can see what I mean, if you haven't already read it.


Friend's poetry manuscript 3/52

I won't say much about this, with it being unpublished and all and still in progress (though basically ready to be unleashed on the world in my opinion). But I will say that it's great, and I'm excited about it. I'm going to be giving feedback and praise, so will read it a few more times, but I won't cheat by recording each read-through though.


100 Traditional Smiles, by Anne Kennedy 4/52

Because I'd just read The Time of Giants, and because I had recently acquired this book as part of a big bag of poetry books that a friend donated to me, I thought it was a good time to read it.

I'm not sure I should be counting this one, as it claims to be a novella, and is clearly written in prose, but it's very poetic prose, with only the loosest narrative (much looser than The Time of Giants), so I am claiming it as prose-poetry verse novel(la).

Like The Time of Giants, it's wonderfully inventive and surprising. In the more than 100 sections (I would count them, but I put the book down somewhere and now can't find it) of varying lengths, from short to really short, it jumps between a series of characters, including 'the woman' (actually I think several of them are referred to as 'the woman' and I wasn't always sure which one was meant, which I'm sure was deliberate), the Italian couple, Eileen, Irene, Leslie, the Hoboken couple (former New Zealanders living in New Jersey), the graphic designer and even, in a few places, an 'I'. They are in various parts of the world - New Jersey, as I mentioned, Auckland, Gore, New York, Nottingham. Some know each other, some don't, but there are threads, or rather wools, connecting many of them.


Northland, by Michele Leggott (5/52)

Northland is a gorgeous hand-made book from Pania Press (Jack Ross and Bronwyn Lloyd). I was keen to get my paws on a copy because it's about, or perhaps rather set in, the same areas as my book Heading North. Northland is a gorgeously produced book, and it was lovely revisiting some of these places in poetry. I think my favourite of the poems was 'listening', with the repeated line at the end of the three stanzas 'unwinding the bird in my throat'.

Nox, by Anne Carson (no. 1)

To be honest, I'm not even sure if this book really qualifies as poetry. It isn't immediately recognisable as a poetry book - it's much thicker for a start, is in a box, and is concertina folded. And when you look at the pages, you don't find what you'd immediately recognise as poetry. There are fragments, photos, scribbles, things that appear to pieces of peeled paint, and lots and lots of definitions of Latin words.

But, when you read them, they feel like poetry, and it's by a poet, so I'm counting it.

I'm a big fan of Anne Carson. She's a Canadian poet and the author of what, if asked, I say is my favourite poem: 'The Glass Essay' (I've written about it a couple of times on this blog). She's better known, I think, as the author of Autobiography of Red - a kind of verse-novel retelling/revisioning of a Greek myth about the monster Geryon and his relationship with Herakles - which I also love, but not as much.

I asked for Nox for Christmas, and it duly arrived via the internet - I haven't seen it in Unity Welly, though I did paw it in Unity Auckland but didn't have enough room in my bag to bring it home. As I said, it's a big book. As a physical object, it's gorgeous. (Oh hey, here's a video showing it on Youtube.) It's a facsimile of a scrapbook Carson made as an epitaph for her brother after he died. It tells his story, sort of, in little fragments, snatches, glimpses, riddles almost. She only had little snatches of him, really, because he 'ran away' at some unspecified age (sometime in early adulthood) to avoid prison - I don't think we are told what for, but intimations are drug dealing or possibly something to do with the death of a girl he loved - though that might have been later. And after he skipped the country the only direct contact Carson had with him was about five phonecalls over twenty-two years. So, anyway, these story snippets are mostly on the right-hand pages.

The book begins with a reproduction of a typed, slightly water damaged, poem in Latin.

On many of the left-hand pages are definitions of Latin words, much as one might find in a Latin-to-English dictionary. The definitions (it took me a little bit to realise, I'm afraid, but I was a bit ill at the time, so forgive my slowness) are of the words in the poem, defining each word's various meanings, subtleties, layers, and gives the word in the context of a few phrases. While these definitions are not always easy to read, they are each like little poems. For example, the definition for aequora begins:

a smooth or level surface, expanse, surface; a level stretch of ground, plain; inmensumne noctis aequor confecimus? have we made it across the vast plain of the night?

Later, she tells us about the poem that begins the collection. It is by Catullus (poem 101), and he wrote it as an elegy for his brother, who had recently died. Carson, who teaches Classics at university, says how it had moved her, and how she tried several times to translate it, but:

Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101.

She does, further in to the book, include an English translation of the poem, but the real translation of the poem is the accumulation of these definitions, which show the weight and power that sits behind each word.

As well as highlighting one of the difficulties of translation, it also for me emphasised the power of poetry - in a good poem, each word has all those layers of meaning sitting behind it. It may mean one thing on the surface, but another thing below that, text and subtext, punning and play.

It's getting late, and I'm ranting a little now, but this is a rich book - not easy, perhaps, but rich in language and rich in ideas and meaning - and a book I suspect I will return to over and over.

2011, Year of Poetry*

*I should note first off that 2011 is not the year of poetry in any kind of official sense, and is in fact, according to Wikipedia, the International Year of Forestry, International Year of Chemistry, International Year for People of African Descent, and World Veterinary Year.

There's nothing like being on holiday to make me stop and think.

As soon as I did, I realised something was wrong.

I realised that poetry, something I consider one of the most important things in my life, has been consistently pushed (by me, I confess) to the bottom of my priority list. I have been neglecting it. The writing and revising of my own poetry, and the reading of other people's poetry, and generally being a poet (so, sitting around, especially in cafes, looking kinda melancholy and deep, thinking profound thoughts) doesn't have strict deadlines, and so is generally trumped by things that do.

Some of the things that get prioritised above my own poetry are also poetry-related - publishing other people's poetry through Seraph Press and JAAM - but I realised that while those things are very important to me, for my self personally my own poetry is more important, and I should stop putting it at the bottom of my list.

OK, so easier said than done.

I'm not planning to give up Seraph Press or JAAM, I have a full-time day job, I have a partner I quite like to hang out with often, and friends I like to see from time to time. I also really like sleeping. So how am I going to make this the year of poetry?

Well, I do have some ideas. One is to spend less time on the net, especially Twitter and Facebook, not so much because of the time, but more because I find it makes me attention-deficient - anxiously checking and clicking, finding that I'm looking for some kind of 'hit'. It puts me in a space that is kind of opposite to the space I need to be in to write poetry.

Something that puts me in a good head space to write poetry is reading poetry. Usually I find it very mind calming; slowing, but often sparking - a word, phrase or image often sends me off in a parallel or perpendicular direction. Also, you know, I like poetry, and I think it's important to have an idea of what the local and international poetry community is up to.

So, I have arbitrarily decided I'll try to read at least one poetry book a week. And while I'm unlikely to write detailed reviews and analyses of them, I do want to record them in some way - so expect blog posts.

I'm also looking for recommendations, so let me know collections or poets you think I'll like, or think I should read. I'm particularly interested in broadening my familiarity with contemporary overseas poets - though they are sometimes hard to get hold of around here.

Another thing I'm going to do is make sure I spend a lot of time hanging around in cafes - I tend to write better there, where - despite the busyness - there are fewer distractions that at home.

That said, my major poetry plan for the year is to finish 'Cinema' - what I hope will be my next book. I've been working on the poems for it for a while, and think I have most of what I need for the book - though I still have a few in mind. After Christmas I spent a few hours going through what I had and pulling out all the poems I didn't like so much, or which I don't think fit. Now I want to work on the structure/order/flow/narrative of the collection as a whole, and polishing the individual poems. Probably then I'll find spaces where new poems should be, which will want to be written too.

Secondary to that, is my next epic poetry project, which I started on in the middle of last year, and which I expect to take a while.

It's going to be a busy year.