Birdbook II/Coin Opera II update!

So a brief update is very much in order on our next two books, Birdbook II: Freshwater habitats and Coin Opera II. To accompany this, I've tried to find an image that captures both projects.

Birdbook II is very nearly ready to go printerwards. We've received a foreword from the fantastic Tim Birkhead, proofing has been done and it's just minor tweaks to go. For the uninitiated, this is the second book in a series of four, in which we aim to gather one poem and one illustration for every species of British bird. Each book covers a group of habitats. Volume II is looking great, helped in no small part by the return of Lois Cordelia, who has once again provided her beautiful artwork for the cover.

Coin Opera II, our second anthology of poetic tributes to computer games, is looking good too. With cover art by the very talented Mike Stone and a whole bundle of computer game-themed formal Easter eggs (including what may be the world's first set of 'boss' poems), this is going to be a mighty power-up from our initial micro-anthology, back in 2009. A foreword from Uncanny X Men writer and video games journalist Kieron Gillen, a spot more collaging and rearranging, a good old proof and it'll be off to press before you can say Hadouken.

More updates to come. Stay tuned!

Don't forget you can follow us on Twitter.

The Boar reviews 'Confronting the Danger of Art'

Award-winning university newspaper The Boar has reviewed Ian McLachlan and Phil Cooper's 'Confronting the Danger of Art' thus:

"Imagine a world in which artistic expression is suppressed and condemned by the government. Not too difficult, is it, considering the cuts we have suffered in recent years. Both wonderfully relevant therefore and also intriguing in its portrayal of the thing is Ian McLachlan's 'Confronting The Danger Of Art', a short poetry pamphlet that talks about how to survive an influx of creative types and their work in the style of a 70s nuclear safety information booklet. It is a marriage of ideas that does not sound quite as effective as it actually is; the poetry within providing a hilarious and searing look at the way people do sometimes treat the arts, and how it is a slippery slope potentially towards more totalitarian views ... perfectly crafted and delightfully witty."

Buy 'Confronting the Danger of Art' here, and make an old alchemist marginally wealthier.

Scrooge, Marley et al + We Eat Poets!

This Wednesday sees the fourth and final We Eat Poets event of the year taking place (see the Facebook event or We Eat Poets website for further details) and as part of that event, we've pulled together a set of six poems, each based on a character from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and printed them onto cream greetings cards. They're now available from the Sidekick Books main page.

Any orders we get in the next few days, we'll be sure to send them out first class post as soon as we're able, but since they can also be used post-Christmas (they're blank inside) or saved until next Christmas, we'll keep them available for the next month or so.

November Update!

Here's Dr Fulminare as a pumpkin. It's hard to make out, but he's even got his hat on.

So where are we, two months before the end of the year? On the Fuselit front, we are, as ever, somewhat vexed. My creative solution to our long run of failing home printers was to outsource the pages to a printing company, who would print and cut (but not bind) them and send them back to us for sewing and adding the covers. The company we used have always been reliable before, but for a reason not yet entirely clear to us (although initially it was problems with their printers!) it's now coming up to three weeks since we were supposed to see a proof. I guess I'll phone them up again after I've finished writing this update. Hopefully, the curse of Fuselit hasn't destroyed all their equipment as well.

It's fair to say we have to make some changes to people's expectations with Fuselit. So I'll say this now, and convey it clearly in the new site when it goes live: Fuselit cannot keep to a schedule. It is, as I say, cursed. Your poems may be stuck with us for a year or more while we struggle to get the thing rolling. We will get there eventually, but only though sheer bloody-mindedness.

Things are more positive and exciting on the Sidekick Books front. We're just about to launch our first pamphlet (an artist/poet team-up), scheduled at the moment for mid-November. I'm getting towards the finishing stages of a new site that will incorporate its own blog (albeit it will just be a mirror to this one!), feature a new, simpler layout and hopefully be more welcoming to newcomers. There'll be a link on the front page to whatever we've uploaded lately to our Sidekick Flicks youtube channel, which we aim to populate with readings from our books and interesting audio-visual poetical experiments. Dr F is also getting his own Twitter feed.

Bookswise, we're still aiming to realise Coin Opera 2 before Christmas, although I can make no promises. Birdbook 2 commissions are rolling in at a good rate now, which means it's on target for an April/May release next year. After that, it's all top secret but very exciting.

Besides all this, we have begun, in recent months, a very productive relationship with the chaps at giveapoem.com. If I wasn't up to my eyeballs in ... well, everything, I would have blogged a lot more about this recently. Kirsty and I are now programming the poetry content of their amazing We Eat Poets fine-cuisine-and-entertainment nights, and the recent Hallowe'en special was a huge success, with Mike West and Abigail Parry delivering blistering sets. The next one is a Christmas special on 14th December with Simon Barraclough and Niall O'Sullivan.

And that's just the start. Stay tuned for more news, including a very exciting competition we'll be co-running ...

It's National Poetry Day

We've had our heads buried in so much work that I didn't pick up until three days ago that the theme for National Poetry Day this years is games.

What an oversight! Especially as one of the projects we've been trying to draw together is Coin Opera 2, a whole anthology of poems about computer games, and especially as we're only just past the 40th anniversary of the first coin-operated video game being installed at Stanford University (Galaxy Game, if you're wondering).

So even though we were utterly unprepared, we couldn't let the whole thing just pass us by. Insanely overambitious as it was, I accelerated a little side project that was intended as part of Coin Opera 2 and have spent the last few days staying up late to try to finish 41 short poems, one for every year since the unveiling of Galaxy Game, each based around a game released that year. Oh yes, and they each subscribe (with some room for manoeuvre) to the most pointlessly difficult form I've ever invented.

I crawled across the finish line last night at around 3am, and hence today I am shattered and broken, but able to digitally publish the whole sequence. It's called Treasure Arcade and you can download the full pdf from the Sidekick Books site. In the mean time, here are are a few of my favourites:

1976
Colossal Cave Adventure
You are in a twisted lip.
You are on a lip of ledge, a little twist of ledge, before a deep pool.
You are in a pool of passages, an inverted brain, a cave-cool lap.
You are lip-deep in a loop of cool lip, on the brain’s ledge of sleep.

1982
Dig Dug
Hori Taizo! How dare
you dig up my land again! You plan it as if it were a night-time raid,
arrive with your makeshift harpoon and a tank of oxygen-rich air.
But there are no dragons buried here. Go spade your own hectare.

1985
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
In bed, Carmen smokes
a red cigarette, claws for her red knickers, leaves reedy red marks
across your back. The dawn is meat-red, and there is even beauty
in how she stokes the cabin fire to red sparks, her hair slightly sooty.

1990
The Secret of Monkey Island
We who went a-roving,
lean for the sweet trade, all of us foundered on the garnet-haired governor,
her brazen calico, who left each heart a capsized coracle, each body
run through with loving, every rum cove and ravener drunk for her custody.

1993
Gunstar Heroes
Me and my brother
mixing rare gunpowders – letting the various chemistries breathe.
The shafts they’ve bored are veined with rails and heck-deep,
but we were born to scupper. We seethe with colour and lack of sleep.

2009
Muramasa
I’m thinking of our shared
furious flush in a mountain spring that steamed like boiled radish
the second time we met, me with my memory a shorn stem,
you with your girlish bottom bared and reddish, each wound a diadem.

2010
Angry Birds Seasons
Night and day and night,
they blitzed the weakest joins of the house, leaving it scare-torn
and clotted with powder down, us scrummed, half shaken apart.
Rage made them bright. Greed had drawn us like an applecart.

Free Verse Poetry Book Fair Report

Yesterday Charles Boyle of CB Editions, along with Chrissy Williams and Anna-Mae Selby, hosted a remarkable event, which we were lucky to be part of.

The Free Verse Poetry Book Fair, which was held in the beautiful Exmouth Market area of London, was a fantastic opportunity to see exactly how active the independent poetry publishing scene is. Over 20 presses took their places at tables around a buzzing hall, while, upstairs, readings took place throughout the day. Helena Nelson, head honcho of Happenstance, very kindly invited us to share a table and show our literary ankles with Sidekick Books publications. This is me meddling with the books:



Jon and me, while officially there wearing our Sidekick Books hats, read for Happenstance, who published Jon's debut pamphlet Scarecrows in April 2010 and mine, What To Do, in July 2011. Other readings came from Penned In The Margins (see Tom Chivers' write-up of the event here) and Nine Arches, among others, and Michael Horovitz opened proceedings with poetry, kazoo, a spot of Johnny Tillotson and a call-to-arms in support of fostering independent approaches to poetry.

Also great to have Andy Ching, boss of Donut, as a neighbour, though I could feel the special edition of Tim Turnbull's Caligula On Ice tugging at my wallet the entire day - probably the best looking stall in the joint, which is no mean feat.

As an added bonus, Jon got to have a Roger Moore-style eyebrow-raising contest with Donut poet Wayne Holloway-Smith's baby daughter Margot. Either both won or both lost, but either way it was a tenaciously-fought duel.

Oh yes, and check out Jon's spoils (including the copy of the gorgeous Salt Book of Younger Poets, which I snaffled on Friday at the Best British Poetry 2011 launch):



Here's to the next one, eh?

Birdbook at Betsey this Sunday!

For those who couldn't make it down to the Birdbook launch (or who could and who crave yet more birdies!), we have a slot at the magnificent Broadcast All-Dayer at the Betsey in Clerkenwell on Sunday!

Reading will be Roddy Lumsden, Isobel Dixon, Kate Potts, Edward Mackay, Nia Davies and more! We're on about 9pm but come down anytime for fantastic poetry and entertainment, as well as great food and drink.

Early July Update

Half way through the year and not quite knocking down targets in the way we'd hoped, to put it mildly.

On the Sidekick Books front ...

We now have a distributor! Sidekick Books will be handled by Central Books, who're just down the road from us, which means we should be able to get them into more bookshops. The London Review of Books store has already sold out of their copies of Birdbook, and internet orders keep coming through. Also, the launch was a huge success, with a packed room and a jubilant atmosphere, even if I had my mouth set to 'ramble'.

We also have our first team-up pamphlet on the way. Did I mention that before?

On the Fuselit: Contraption front ...

Here are some illustrations that will go in the hard copy only, in special puzzle pages:

Did I tell you about the new printer saga? Here is the new printer saga. The printer we bought with a grant from the Forest Cafe all those years ago has long since decided to lower its quality threshold, meaning that while it's still useful for general printing, it's not up to scratch for printing Fuselit. This is something to do with the drivers. I have spent many hours replacing them with different ones, and once or twice managed to get it to return to printing high quality, sharp text, but then it rebelled and reassigned itself to different drivers. At the moment, it won't even duplex. I sent an email to Lexmark, asking for help, and was advised to go to 'Printer properties' and select 'two-sided printing'. I politely told them that of course I knew how to do this, but it still wasn't duplexing, and they've ignored all my emails since.

So for the last two issues of Fuselit we've taken to printing them at the local repro place. The problem is that the cost of this seems to vary depending on who's manning the tills. Some staff fairly take into account that we bring our own paper and knock a slice off accordingly; other ones want to charge us the full price, which makes Fuselit overly expensive to print. So we've managed to acquire instead our own high quality office printer. The catch is that we had to take one which was 'ghosting' - printing in double-vision. In order to fix this, we needed to pay a lot of money for a repair kit that may or may not fix the problem.

Guess what? The repair kit hasn't arrived yet.

Still we soldier on. Here is a corner of a mock-up we've made, sans cover, demonstrating what the stab-binding plus riveting will look like:

Six months late is our new record. What's more, like Duke Nukem Forever, I worry that progress on future Fuselits will also drag on and on as we try to keep up with newer, sparklier publications put together by more coordinated, better connected, less haggard people! We will do our best to prevent such a perennial slump in productivity ensuring.

Birdbook Launch Tonight!

So we're finally there. The official launch of Birdbook 1: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland is tonight at the Phoenix Artists Club on Charing Cross Road, from 7.30pm. We have a raft of poets reading, free pin badges to give away, some early proofs to display, a slideshow of the artwork to project, and the full range of books to sell. Lots of the artists are coming too, so looking forward to chatting with all the various contributors who came through for us on this truly collaborative project.

In other words, we've printed out a dummy Fuselit: Contraption and found that - yes! - the rivets and ribbon go well together. Slowly we inch our way towards rolling out the new, triple-format Fuselit for all to see...

Birdbook Poets Win Major Award

Nice headline-style heading for you there. Our newest and mightiest anthology, Birdbook: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland, is already full of award-winning poets, but just to demonstrate that we aren't just picking up our leads after the trophies have been handed out, three more poets from the book - Tom Chivers, Holly Hopkins and Niall Campbell - have this week won much-coveted Eric Gregory awards. The Gregories, given annually by the Society of Authors, are awarded to the best five (give or take) British poets under 30.

Naturally, the search is under way to find poets for our upcoming projects who will win the award next year. Let's see if we can beat our record and get five out of five.

Birdbook Launch! Plus Lifelines!

Tomorrow night, Kirsty and I are joining a multifarious array of performers for a Japan fundraiser event. It's at the Rugby Tavern near Holborn from 7.30 and since it's a charity event, there's an entry fee of £7. We'll also bring our latest books and pamphlets and put a decent fraction of everything we sell towards the appeal.

As I have a particular interest in the intermingling of Japanese and western cultures, I'll be reading poems entirely around that subject, including translations/versions of poems by contemporary Japanese poets. I'll also be bringing some illustrative props to aid in the education element, including some genuine x-rated doujinshi.

Here's more details from the event organiser:

At 7.30pm tomorrow night a group of performers and poets will be gathering at The Rugby Tavern, 19 Great James Street, London, WC1N 3ES. This gathering, which goes by the name of Lifelines, will showcase a fabulous concoction of poetry, spoken, word, music and comedy.

Your lineup for the evening includes the founders of Sidekick Books and crafters of the written word, Jon Stone and Kirsty Irving. Richard Evans is the author of two beautiful collections of poetry, The Zoo Keeper and Orbiting. Nick Hunt is a journalist and fiction writer whose work has been published by The Guardian, The Economist and the BBC. Chris Rusbridge is an electro folk musician and Major Horatio Hebblethwaite is a decorated Knight Commander in The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

I will be introducing this eclectic lineup and giving each performer 15 minutes to dazzle, delight and tickle you (no hands allowed!).

You will be asked for £7 (£5 concessions) on the door and this money will be donated to Oxfam's Japan appeal to help reconstruction efforts after the devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Here is a picture, map and more details of the venue http://www.shepherdneame.co.uk/pub/wc1/rugby-tavern.aspx

As Churchill once said, on the fearful eve of the battle of Normandy, "See some of you there."

Also on the horizon is the official launch of Birdbook: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland, the mightiest, most sumptuous book yet from Sidekick Books. It will be on Thursday 23rd of June from 7.30pm at the Phoenix Arts Club, just off Charing Cross Road. Full details on Facebook here. We're still putting the readers in place but there will certainly be projections to accompany them, and some of the artists involved will be bringing their original artwork for us to put on display. Stay tuned for further details and in the mean time, scribble the date in your diaries!

New Irregular Features, Interview, Birdbook stockists!

We're excited to announce that, with help from Chrissy Williams, Kate Parkinson and Chris Larkin, Birdbook I: Towns, Parks and Gardens is now stocked in Foyles Royal Festival Hall (see Ms Amy Key's lovely photo above) and the London Review Bookshop, with more shops pending.

Well, it's only taken us till May to get Irregular Features' 2011 edition up and running! Here it is in all its glory at http://drfulminare.com/features.html. What have you got to look forward to?

• an article by Andrea T Judge on the 'Poetics of the Movie Trailer'
• an interview with Sabotage Reviews boss Claire Trévien
• reviews of poetry collections by Wayne Holloway-Smith, Ruth Larbey, Andrew Pidoux and Ross Sutherland

With lots more to come!

In other news, me and Jon were interviewed recently by the lovely Caroline Crew for Flotsam! She quizzed us about Sidekick, Fuselit and the dynamics of two poets in a relationship, among many other topics.

Birdbook: Here at last!

I wanted to put up a photo of the 23 boxes of Birdbooks currently stacked in our flat's front room the Sidekick Books warehouse, but we've run out of batteries for the camera! You'll have the front cover image and this link to the appropriate page on the Sidekick Books website, from which a copy can be securely purchased.

Early April General Update!

The next Sidekick Books release, Birdbook, should be arriving at our HQ in boxes tomorrow or Monday. Sorry it's taken so long but only two weeks ago, we were *still* discovering errors that had crept in between proofs (including, unfathomably, the replacement of a whole poem with another one - who is sabotaging us, and why?)

(EDIT - Birdbook now due next Friday (April 15th) as corrections need to be made to the spine)

This weekend's project: press releases!

The next issue of Fuselit, Contraption, is still badly delayed by a minor breakage of one of our computers. It's been to two repair shops already - one said they couldn't fix it while the other said it would cost £100 but they couldn't repair it *completely*. The manufacturers want proof of purchase if they're to repair it, which we've been unable to locate.

Why not just use the PC I'm typing on at the moment? Because it's new and doesn't like our old version of Quark. We're switching to InDesign but all the work we've done on the hard copy of Contraption is in Quark, which still runs off the broken laptop (when it's not broken).

Upshot: still hoping to finish it and have it out this month. Digital versions are more-or-less finished, but want to launch all three together. Fingers crossed! We will still aim to get two issues of Fuselit out this year so that we don't slip beyond the roughly biannual schedule.

Thanks, everyone, for your patience!

Mimesis Digital Chapbooks Relaunched

That renowned trinket collector Dr Fulminare has come across the winning entries from the 2009 Mimesis Digital Chapbook Competition and added them to his library of available texts at Sidekick Books. Since the Mimesis site has sadly disappeared for the time being, this is now the only means of accessing these fine mini-volumes by Ian McLachlan, Adham Smart, Jeff Calhoun, Alistair Noon and Carolyn Srygley-Moore. They're entirely free, and can be downloaded to Kindle or any other e-reader for reading whilst in transit.

End of February General Update!

Those of you who read January's 2011 plotorama entry might be getting a little concerned. January was supposed to see the release of Birdbook and February the release of Fuselit: Contraption. The former has been delayed by a manic hunt for the right printer - the large number of images meant that our usual printers, reliable and efficient though they are, didn't have the right kind of paper, so we've had to do think carefully about where to head next, bearing in mind our limited budget. The good news is that we think we've settled on one and will be taking them the files this week.

Fuselit: Contraption, as well as being pushed back by the extra work needed on Birdbook, is in equal need of care and attention, since this time we're attempting to properly coordinate and balance an online edition with the printer version. We're at the advanced stages of both, but still wrestling with such things as embedding audio tracks, sourcing containers (the print edition will come in either a box or some kind of wallet) and Kirsty's vitally useful laptop suffering cosmetic damage.

In short, we hope to have both out in the next month. The plans for everything afterwards have been somewhat tossed about by recent revelations about how to save costs on printing, but I'll save posting on that for when we have these two beasts ready to go.

But why does it take you guys so long?

That's the question I'd be asking if I was on the outside looking in, and in many respects it's the question I ask myself anyway, watching the days fly past while I fight the limitations of technology and my own competence. Two simple answers, which I'm sure I've hinted at before:

1) Both Kirsty and I have full-time jobs. We're both working on plans that will allow us to devote more time to literary projects while still paying for bread, board and internet connection, but these plans are long-term and difficult to orchestrate. If anyone were to invest a couple of thousand pounds a month in us and our mission, why, that would undoubtedly speed up matters.

2) Producing a lit journal and books is effectively doing the work of a much larger team of people, each with specialist skills. I started off very gung-ho about the whole affair, but the more I go on, the more respect I gain for disciplines such as copy-editing, copy-writing, illustration, graphic design, web management and web design. These are all areas I could merrily spend all day attending to and still fall short of the general standard. The best I can hope for in each area is to fool non-experts. Undoubtedly the pro graphic designer would find my graphic design sloppy, the pro web designer would stare in bafflement at my rickety html, and so on. But that's what you get for following your dreams. Just ask Justin Bieber.

Sidekick Books Artist Profile: Lois Cordelia

Continuing our artist profile series, today I'm talking to the fantastic Lois Cordelia, whose magical scalpel-cut silhouettes dance across the cover, and between the pages, of the forthcoming Birdbook I.

Born 1982 in Ipswich, Lois is a self-taught artist. Since graduating from Edinburgh University in 2006 with an honours degree in Arabic, she has renewed her focus on the visual arts through exhibiting in a series of solo and joint shows in the UK and Germany. Her work spans a diverse range of media and styles: silhouette paper-cuts, portraits in acrylics and pastels, wildlife art, still-lifes, Arabic calligraphic compositions, and sculpture. Her latest exhibition, Black Gold, has been extended till 10 March 2011 at the Open The Gate Cafe, Dalston.

Sidekick Books: Who or what would you say influences your work?

Lois Cordelia: Ideally, artwork is an endlessly dynamic process of flow, in which everything influences and is influenced by everything else. I welcome positive influences from every source, whether visual, musical, poetical or mystical. Beauty inspires and speaks to me wherever I find it.

The creative process is a birthing process: a process of conception, gestation and bringing to birth. I am influenced and inspired by things I see or hear around me. These are the seeds that are sown in my imagination. The embryo grows, develops and evolves organically and takes on a life of its own, nourished by daily experience of sights, sounds and ideas. Only at the final stage (the 'birth') does the artwork manifest in physical form, though even during birth it continues to evolve.

As the poet Kahlil Gibran wrote: “Work is love made visible.” I avoid creating anything at all if I am not in a loving, positive, open frame of mind, because the resulting artwork will inevitably be affected by my emotional state. The flow of creativity often gives me a feeling of a natural 'high', and so my emotional response gathers its own momentum towards something approaching ecstasy that carries me through the tremendous struggle of 'birth'.

A couple of quotations by other artists that I particularly relate to are the following:

“I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle. ... In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing – not perfect.”
(Henry Moore)

“My goal in life is to give to the world what I was lucky to receive: the ecstasy of divine union through my music and my dance.” (Michael Jackson)

SKB: Does the subject matter you use vary wildly, or do you find yourself returning to certain motifs and ideas?

LC: I strive constantly to reach beyond the mundane surface of things. Seeing a person, an animal, or a tree, for example, I try to capture something of the soul or consciousness that animates it. My inspiration comes from anything that evokes dance, movement and metamorphosis: nature, human figures, animals, trees, running water, the seasons, dance, music, rhythm, poetry, light and dark, and so my subject matter varies widely.

From intricate paper silhouettes, painstakingly cut by hand using a surgical scalpel, to fast and furiously painted portraits and landscapes in brilliant, dramatic colours, my artwork also spans a vast spectrum between precision and free-flowing energy, which has often caused visitors to my exhibitions to remark that the works they see could have been created by several different artists.

I tend always towards fluidity, allowing forms to evolve and metamorphose, one into another. Spirit is eternally changing and shape-shifting, and requires form to be flexible; if form is too rigid, it fossilizes and breaks. I particularly like to explore the expressive potential of Arabic and other cursive scripts to evoke this same principle, allowing the words to evoke further layers of poetic symbolism.

SKB: What convinced you to take part in the Sidekick Books projects?

LC: I've worked at intervals over the last decade with the Polish artist and illustrator of children's books Jan Pienkowski (co-author of the 'Meg and Mog' series, pioneer of the pop-up book genre, via Haunted House and other titles, and creator of many beautiful volumes of silhouette illustrations). Beyond this natural affinity and link with book illustration, I freely confess that I was persuaded to take part in the Sidekick Books project by the personal charisma and charm of our good friend the eminent alchemist Dr Fulminare...

SKB: Do you prefer to work alone or collaborate, and why? If the latter, what would your dream collaboration involve?

LC: The artistic profession can be an intensely lonely one. Being fiercely independent by nature, I generally prefer to work alone in the privacy of my room, immersing myself in my favourite music or poetry recordings, chosen to fit with whatever theme I am currently exploring.

Conversely, I would be the first to acknowledge my eternal debt to Jan Pienkowski (as mentioned above), from whom I have learned most about the organic process and philosophy of creativity and whom I will always consider my 'guru'. Whenever possible, I also love to perform live art demonstrations, painting portraits and landscapes or creating paper-cut works in public, as the dynamics of a live audience add an invaluable layer of zest and spontaneity.

SKB: What would you say is the most common misconception about art that you've encountered?

LC: The most clichéd misconception I've encountered is that professional artists (whether painters, poets or musicians) are naive and blissful "thinkers of beautiful thoughts", untroubled by reality. Frequently I am asked by people: So when are you going to get a real job? It is not a path for the faint-hearted. Yet it is consoling and humbling to find oneself in the company of some of the greatest artists in history, who have all too often worked themselves to pieces and burned themselves out at a relatively young age, in passionate pursuit of their vision, only to be “discovered”, recognised and appreciated a century after they died!

***

See more of Lois and her splendid scalpel at www.LoisCordelia.com.

Dr Fulminare's Dark Science Seance

Ever the humble innovator, Dr Fulminare, former leading light of the foolhardy Guild of Alchemists and current raconteur, freelance necromancer and head of Sidekick Books, invites you to join his minions for a Dark Science Séance, to launch the experimental poetry anthologies Pocket Spellbook and Korsakoff's Paper Chain.

What be these? Well see here:
http://www.drfulminare.com/publications.html

Hosted by Dr F's indentured servants Jon Stone and Kirsty Irving, with readings from contributors Cliff Hammett, Amy Key, Edward Mackay, Dec Ryan, James Wilkes, Chrissy Williams and Adham Smart. There will also be the only-thus-far planned full read through of the text reresurrection adventure story that is Korsakoff's Paper Chain.

Prepare to see science and superstition, those unlikely bedfellows, thrown together with nary a care! Hell, we're going to splash out and get snacks for you folk too!

FREE ENTRY

2010 Retrospectacular / 2011 Plotorama

Happy new year to everyone, particularly those to whom I have not yet wished it.

I don't think I've had good reason to write a retrospective of a year before because nothing very much seems to have happened. But some time in mid-December, I started miserably trying to account for all the months that had drifted by, and realised that actually, it's been quite a good year for Kirsty and myself, as poets and poetry activists if not so much in our professional capacities. So I'm going to do a quick run through 2010, and then talk a little about our plans for 2011.

In January and February, we were still working on getting Cut Out & Keep off the ground as a regular online journal, as well as promoting the first two Sidekick Books micro-anthologies and putting together Fuselit: Tilt, in much the same way as we begin this year putting together Fuselit: Contraption. I found out a poem of mine had placed highly in the National Poetry Competition (although the ceremony wasn't until March), and after a lightning-quick weekend editing session involving (possibly) dozens of emails exchanged between me and Helena Nelson, my debut pamphlet, Scarecrows, was ready to go. The reception it received, coupled with the prize, doubled my confidence in a very short space of time and created some much-needed momentum. I was offered more readings in the next few months than I had been in my full and awful 27 years up to that point, and I still feel genuinely thrilled to have been able to do sets at events like The Shuffle, Days of Roses and the Torriano Reading Series. It all feels rather jammy, in fact.

National Poetry Awards ceremony. I'm the smuggest one.

In March, we were finally able to make Tilt available to buy, and reams of positive feedback followed, with initial demand far outstripping our ability to make a paltry ten or so copies a week. Kirsty appeared for a reading and interview on Sydenham Radio, while articles we published on Dr Fulminare's Irregular Features included ruminations by K on the endings of poems, and Chrissy Williams on her new job at the South Bank Poetry Library. We also dusted off our guitars to play a one-off gig called Suffering Jukebox, alongside other bands, including Dec Ryan's The Shingles, and it was there that a plan was hatched to put on a Leonard Cohen tribute night.

In April, said tribute night came to fruition, with poets and songwriters a-plenty, as well as NME/Guardian journalist Gavin Martin giving a short talk. But we spent most of April writing a poem a day in the much-maligned tradition of NaPoWriMo.

In May, Kirsty read at The Golden Hour in London, as part of its nationwide tour and we both took part in Roddy Lumsden's Lardermania event, writing and reading poems about food (I chose um ... 'tongue' and K went for ... 'ants').

In June, we went to Edinburgh for Happenstance's 5th birthday party and to be special guests at Rob Mackenzie's Poetry at the .... Happenstance, who published Scarecrows, went on to win the Michael Marks Publishers' Award, the only prize in this country for a pamphlet publisher. K had a poem published in the first issue of George Ttoouli and James Brookes' sumptuously produced Polarity and something of mine turned up in Dwang 2. I was also the Friday Feature poet one week in Todd Swift's well known Eyewear blog, and he said some flattering stuff about me.

So far, so good, eh? In July we went on holiday. Not for the whole of July, but that was the main achievement.

In Conwy with chums. Cheap hols ahoy!

August was something else. In August, we joined up with Days of Roses (Dec Ryan and Chris Horton) to celebrate Fuselit's 5th birthday (apparently a lot of stuff was being birthed in 2005 - Eyewear was also 5 this year) and to launch the 16th issue of Fuselit, Jack. It was a free event with cake, and we sold out of almost everything we'd brought to sell. Silkworms Ink published my e-pamphlet Thra-koom and Mercy's Twelve Angry Zines project included extracts from past issues of Fuselit, as well as new poems by Kirsty and me.

In September, Kirsty read versions of her poems in English and German to an audience of ninjas in at the first Kunoichi Taikai in Hannover. Then she went on to sell copies of Coin Opera and Obakarama to them at a little stall. She also read at Roddy Lumsden's Broadcast Old, New, Borrowed, Blue event, while I did my first of three talks about the more cerebral side of 1980s cartoons at Camden School of Enlightenment. After a lot of tinkering, we uploaded up a brand new site for Fuselit in anticipation of the coming change of format.

Technically, it's 'bujinkan', not 'ninja training' or 'ninjing'

October saw the release of the third Sidekick Books micro-anthology, Pocket Spellbook (which was originally supposed to be out in April/May). Scarecrows was reviewed favourably in Poetry London and Kirsty and I both contributed to the Liverpool Biennial Audio Guide released by Mercy. I made my third appearance in under-30s poetry e-journal Pomegranate, and both of us read at the insanely popular Clinic Presents.

November was almost too much for us. It was back up to Edinburgh for an experimental night of poetry, art installations, computer gaming and ... some sort of music (dubstep?) under the banner of Golden Hour vs Plastic Forks, while a weekend of intensive writing produced our collaborative, pseudonymous pamphlet No, Robot, No! There was also the second Camden School of Enlightenment, and we managed two in two months with the release of a fourth micro-anthology, Korsakoff's Paper Chain. Best forget we also nearly lost our luggage at Gatwick.

Finally, in December, About a Minute, the inaugural exhibition at The Gopher Hole opened, featuring six new poems by me as part of a piece called Staring Into Space. It's running until early February, so there's still a chance to catch it! Kirsty and I also turn up in the much anticipated Stop Sharpening Your Knives 4, edited by Jack Underwood, Sam Riviere, Nathan Hamilton and Emily Berry.

Retrospectacular over. Plotorama begins.

NOW, what of 2011? First of all, we'll be booking a venue for the official launch of the two micro-anthologies. That's priority 1. Priority 2 is getting our first full-size anthology, Birdbook I, to the printers. It's huge and scary, and no doubt still needs the last few errors knocking out of it by a thorough proofing. We want it out this month, since many artists and poets have been waiting nearly a year to see their work on the page.

At the same time, we're working towards a February release of Fuselit: Contraption, which will be brought out simultaneously as an e-broadsheet, and in a limited edition of 100 print copies. There's a whole truckload of extra stuff going into this issue, fingers crossed, that should see us increasing its cross-medium appeal and readership, while keeping the old spirit going. What's more, there'll be badges. Or stickers. One of the two.

In February, we're also appearing at this event, which means we're going to have to scrabble around for anything that might be considered 'love' poems. Some time around, before or after then, there'll also be the rescheduled Orbiting event, which sees poet Richard Evans coming up to London to headline a fundraising literary auction event. Kirsty and I will both be reading at that too.

After that, we'll be pushing to finish and print Coin Opera II, the full-size sequel to our first micro-anthology. Some amazing poems lined up for this one, some of which (as with those in Birdbook I) are already finding their way into collections and other scheduled publications.

Rather than continue with micro-anthologies, the next set of books we want to aim towards will involve full collaborations between poets and illustrators. Not a case of illustrations based on or inspired by the poems, but something more even-handed. I'm envisioning intense talks - editor, poet, artist - about the structual integrity of each pamphlet, deep into the night.

There are a couple more projects, as well as personal missions, that I'm going to keep quiet about for now, at least until they're set in motion. We've certainly got plenty to keep us busy, but I'm hoping there'll be a few more surprises along the way as well. Cheers!

Christmas Press Release

Since we've got Korsakoff out just in time for Christmas, I've whipped this up. Please spread far and wide if you are willing and able!