For a change, I'm not blogging my poetry in this post. Instead, I wanted to share two things I've written about it recently. One was something I said early last year on Eratosphere:

I thought I'd write here about my long flirtation with poetry.

My parents, who both worked in London when I was a toddler, would leave me in the care of my grandfather, who would attempt to teach me reams of Scott to pass the time: meet nurse for a poetic child. When I grew a little older, perhaps five or so, I found a red school exercise book and entitled it "POEMS BY T. T." It contains entries such as:

What a flutter!
What a butter!
The jam is spreading on.
And Marmite too, and Marmite too.
We will eat it up. Yum yum.

When I was sixteen, I cycled past a dead bird on my road to school. I don't know why, but I decided to write a sonnet about it. So when I came home, I looked up the rules, sat down, and came up with this:

I saw upon the road to school today
Blood, bones and feathers on the tar. [sic]
Some little bird had flown down on the way...
And been squashed flat by some enormous car.
Charles Darwin tells us in his famous Theory
How birds and beasts adapt to suit their need,
A Camel in the desert is not weary,
Giraffes from trees as tall as houses feed.
So blackbirds, fearing danger from the sky,
From falcons, hawks and other birds of prey
Fly low in terror. That's the reason why
The car had hit the one I saw today.
So, soon will frightened country ones fly down,
And those that rise, be birds-about-the-town?

I have been practicing ever since; I hope I have improved a little. They do say you have to get a hundred thousand words out before you reach anything good.

The other is an excerpt from a letter I wrote this week to a reader in answer to her question about what I usually do with the poems I write. (For reference, I left the US in June of last year, and "the Dandelion book" is a self-published collection of about a hundred of my poems from the last ten years.)

[...]To be honest, I'm rarely sure what to do with poems after I write them. For many years I simply posted everything I wrote online; this is true of most of the poems in the Dandelion book. Of course, once you've done that, you can't sell them to a magazine, but this never occurred to me.

About two years ago, I decided to try publication, and kept back about a dozen poems over the last two years or so. I sent them off to several magazines and had, I think, four of them published, all of them in web-based magazines. Each of those was reprinted in "Dandelion", except for "Examination".

I still have about ten of these unpublished works in a folder, but I haven't seriously tried publishing anything since I left the US. It does take a lot of effort compared to putting them on a website, and the rewards aren't particularly great in comparison. But perhaps I'll try again later, when I have a little more spare energy.

I have a recurring feeling that far more people would enjoy my poetry than currently have access to it, but I'm not sure how to bring it to them. I suppose I should do more readings, but then what? I need to think a good deal further about this.