Happy Monday ✨ I am pleased to announce the publication of my article 'London Blakeans' in vol. 89 of 'Publishing History'! Thank you to all who contributed ❤️❤️ www.proquest.com/scholarly-jo...

Many thanks to the poets who took part in the #EcoSonnetChain: #LindaFrance, #EmmaMust, @calebparkinpoet.bsky.social, #AnnSophieBalzer, @janeburn.bsky.social, #TishaniDoshi, #JemmaBorg, @jsaphra.bsky.social, #JacobPolley, @sophieherx.bsky.social, @helenmort.bsky.social, #SteveEly, & #GlynMaxwell.

“…Our Wandsworth teacher told us how to tell ‘the black bib male sparrer’ from ‘the laidee one’, in her once common, now rare south London chant... She’d yell from out her Clapham grave to hear of sparrers in decline. ‘Parrakeets! You what?’” @sophieherx.bsky.social #EcoSonnetChain (4/4)

Sophie’s sonnet, #10 in the sequence, brings together the toll of species loss and the parallel threat to social cohesion posed by gentrification by posing the interesting question: what do we mean by ‘common’? #EcoSonnetChain #NewBootsAndPantisocracies @sophieherx.bsky.social (3/4)

Except this week, it’s the final poem of Phase 1 of our Thursday posts (by Claudia Court), and the sonnet happens to be by GFC co-editor and New Boots protest calligrapher, @sophieherx.bsky.social. So it feels like everything is pivoting at once. (No, we didn’t plan this. Are you kidding?) (2/4)

Our tenth eco sonnet just alighted on a nearby branch and it’s by @sophieherx.bsky.social. What’s common and what’s no longer so? Birds and language and identity - each under seemingly equal threat: newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/2025/06/19/e... #EcoSonnetChain #NewBootsAndPantisocracies

Persons of London! I'll be in town soon to launch my memoir Boater - first at the Poetry Pharmacy inside LUSH on Oxford Street (Weds 20 June) and then in Word on the Water near King's X (Weds 2 July, 3-7pm) Both free - and for the Poetry Pharmacy you need to book via the link below. Please come!

Thanks to @sophieherx.bsky.social for a great workshop @royalacademyarts.bsky.social this evening. Erasure poetry FTW.

Where do the essential human tasks of caring for each other and making art meet? Dan Schifrin & I discuss how these processes do & don’t dovetail in our new podcast series #artandotherpeople podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a...

I got round to writing a substack post - looking at paint as a way in & out of the news, and a visit to the Noah Davis exhibition at the Barbican Centre yesterday. substack.com/@sophieherxh...

The Polish poet Krystyna Miłobędska (1932-2025) died last week. She was an important poet, her work experimental, scrupulous, spare, but also deeply enjoyable. Here’s part of her script for a rare public reading, tr. by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese & published by me in @mptmagazine.bsky.social in 2013

This gave me thrill this afternoon #colour

It’s Monday, and that means there’s an empty space in the #GhostFurnitureCatalogue that needs filling with - another empty space. Thanks to Joan Hewitt for this melancholy exploration of the Italian root for ‘stanza’: ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2025/03/24/j...

#ExecutiveDisobediences #3 is by Beth McDonough and is in the form of a recipe written in opposition to Executive Order 14160: ‘PROTECTING THE MEANING AND VALUE OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP’: newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/2025/03/20/e... #NewBootsAndPantisocracies

My poem, to be whispered widdershins, is featured today in the marvellous #Ghostfurniturecatalugue

Defy AI with observational painting & other diversionary tactics poetryteapot.wordpress.com/2025/01/30/p...

If you see this post, quote with a bridge from your gallery

Every furniture catalogue (even a ghost one) needs a bed. #Rilke knew a thing or two about beds & ghosts. He certainly spent time in richly furnished property. Thanks to @billherbert.bsky.social & @sophieherx.bsky.social for posting one of my translations of New Poems, out this autumn from #Baylor

A beautiful piece of writing by Rosa about Conrad. They are both such fantastic people, I am a v proud mother. open.substack.com/pub/rosaherx...

Fabulous invigorating poetry tonight @southbankcentre.bsky.social for #tseliot prize we laughed we cried Congrats all shortlisted #katrinaporteous #rachelmann #carlphillips #gustavparkerhibbett #karenmccarthywoolf #helenfarish #petergizzi #hannahcopley #gboyegaodubanjo #raymondantrobus

A reflective gem to conduct us from the old year to the new through a mirror - @fionalarkin.bsky.social has joined the stacks of intoxicating goods at the emporium I co run with @billherbert.bsky.social ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/f...

Here’s a link to the #NewBootsAndPantisocracies website: newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com And here’s a lovely pic of the pamphlet, with a cover by @sophieherx.bsky.social (2/2)

You did it! Thanks to your incredibly generous support we have raised enough money to restore Betchcott Hill! Thanks to you we can: 🌱 restore acid #grassland and upland #heath 🐣 create habitat for #moorland birds 🥾 ensure #accessibility for all while protecting vital habitat from disruption

Ways to walk into a new year perhaps

winter trees invite light from murky to incandescent & today I saw the soft plumage of a gigantic buzzard in close up it was waiting in a bough for something to move

A Winter Christmas

As November draws to a close, people in our street are called upon to find a date in December they’ll feature in a window decoration. This year I got 13th & I cut out a pet quartet- our cat & dog with guest mouse & goose vocalist. Happy Holidays!

Thanks Anne - & we welcome submissions at the rolling-on-castors Ghost Furniture Catalogue. Please make sure your poem contains household items & email it to [email protected]

One of favourite street pics from 10 years ago. I lined up and waited for someone to complete my frame...

I got stuck on a Sunday night with a broken down car in Cirencester & treated myself to dinner in a pub. Here’s my accompanying watercolour #bleakmidwinter

This is the wonderful blog by the awesome poet @billherbert.bsky.social — very chuffed to he featured on it today.

If the darkness of December is creeping ypu out - there’s a lamp for that, and a poem for the lamp, it’s by Seth Crook & it’s todays addition to The Ghost Furniture Catalogue ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2024/12/02/s...

Thanks so much to followers -& wishing us all the luck walking about in these new platform shoes with butterflies on our toes.

Ahoy there! Do come aboard & take a look at my #CharlesDarwin poem out today in Bill Herbert & @sophieherx.bsky.social ‘s #GhostFurnitureCatalogue already full of curious wonders! #hybridwriting #naturewriting #poetry #art #PoetsOfBluesky ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2024/11/28/s...

This weekend I’ll be taking ink & poems to Exmouth Market and drawing who knows what - as a guest artist to two I admire: Kathy Prendergast & Anne Ryan. Details below. www.eyetopencil.art/pages/taking...

I'd like to find like-minded #HybridWriting folk here: writers, lit mags and publishers who leap over genre boundaries & out of boxes, ignoring labels & definitions - in their own writing and in what they publish! Can you point me in the right direction, lovely people of BlueSky? #UnboxYourWords

I’ve started a substack called CLARE’S POETRY CIRCLE. It’s free to read and subscribe. Today we’ve begun a readalong of Keats’ LAMIA 🐍🐍🐍 Do read part one and join the conversation! clarespoetrycircle.substack.com/p/reading-la...

3 of my listened to live & drawn on the spot stories - these are collected from wonderful writers to mark their becoming fellows of #RoyalSocietyofLiterature earlier this year @jacquelinecrooks.bsky.social #richardscott #clarepollard

A decade ago on ‘another platform’ poet Bill Herbert & I began a chat via the creaking doors of our ancestral sideboards. Now the Ghost Furniture Catalogue is a real project. Welcome to todays poem which flaps with foxed sheet music #poetry ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2024/11/14/k...

Had a great last teaching day yesterday at #RoyalDrawingSchool on #WorldPoetryDay. We recited #VelimirKhlebnikov Incantation to Laughter & read #CharlotteMew too.