Last fortnight on Anthropocene

Dear friends,

How’s it going on this lonely planet? What have you been up to these past two weeks? I’ve been back in the PhD office working on my Spanish translations. My friend Blossom Hibbert came to stay. She is a poet from Manchester. We worked on her new pamphlet together, it’s called ‘Out of Nowhere’. I think she is really talented.

This week I’ve unfollowed a lot of people on social media - if you were one of them - it wasn’t personal. I’m tired of people I don’t know looking into my life. I have close friends and semi close friends & all the good poeple I’ve met through poetry I will try keep close. As one of Blossom’s favourites writes: “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)”.

Rejection: In my time as an editor I’ve come to realize there are people in poetry who cannot handle recieving a negative response to a bad poem, an okay poem, or a whatever poem. There are people who cannot handle rejection in any form. As Peter McDonald eloquelty put it:

“The exercise of critical judgement (and again, that might be too grand an expression) does not take place on any wide field of engagement, with important things at stake; rather, as has been said before, it is more like a knife-fight in a phone box—intimate, cramped, and unlikely to end well. Everybody gets hurt.

So in poetry, you get hurt, people get hurt. That’s what happens. The way to react to rejection, unlike behaving like a spoilt child, is to be an adult and to take it on the chin. I can look myself in the mirror. I know I am myself. I know I will always be myself. Poets should try to be more stoic. It might also be an idea not to dump your ex lovers by text message. As to anyone else I unfolowed: my every ray of sunshine to you, even if you wish me nothing but rain.

If I sound a little bitter today, it’s just this black coffee I’m drinking,

I love you all (really!)

Charlie

P.S. We’re proud of Hannah Copley - highly commended in the Forward Prizes for her poem. Is that all? First published in these very pages! Wow! Thanks to Tom Branfoot for his keen editorial eye & to Hannah Copley - the genius who wrote it.

Jen Feroze

Nathaniel King (congratulations to him on his Eric Gregory award!)

Julie Sheridan

Gemma Barnett