Diary
Voices in the Dark: A Memorisation Diary
This blog collects a series of diary fragments taken over a period while I was preparing to recite from memory a poetry set for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. The event – ‘Voices in the Dark’ – sees poets performing to a crowd in a pitch black room, without the usual notebooks and print-outs to…
Janette Ayachi
Re: Drafts – “Start lying about your age”, and other thoughts on biographical notes
As I write this, the latest edition of The Rialto is at the proofing stage and the last of the biographical notes are slipping in by the skin of their teeth. It feels a bit strange, having spent months getting to know poems, to now have a task focused on poets. In most cases the…
Holly Hopkins
Re: Drafts – ‘The Cab Rank Principle’
I’ve been thinking about the law over the last couple of weeks. Not that I’m in any trouble I hasten to add – apart from the usual one that I’m sure some of you have also been quizzed on by other members of the family: “Yes this poeting is all well and good, but when…
Rishi Dastidar
Meeting Kit
Anyone who loves reading knows that there’s only one thing better than words. In certain books it’s hard to even call those things ‘pictures’ because that sort of suggests something flat and two dimensional that you can rest your cup of tea on. In those books, what we are actually talking about is a) windows…
Emma Hammond
Re: Drafts – ‘What really happens on a Rialto editing day’
Holly Hopkins and I, your editorial developees, have been asked to shed some light upon what we actually get up to when attending an editorial meeting of The Rialto. Herewith, a joint diary of a recent trip to Norwich, where selection of some poems took place. NB: Unless otherwise stated, it can be assumed that…
Rishi Dastidar
Ain’t got no style / I’m strictly roots
Recently, I was getting acquainted with May Swenson. I saw her photo and couldn’t resist: Today, she would have a septum piercing and an undercut. A few days before I was reading Women Wearing Clothes – and the question came up: why do some girls have style and others not? On the train, I picked…
Jay Bernard
The Profit and the Loss
This is an interesting moment to be thinking about this topic. Exhibit B, at the Barbican has just been shut down. When I was seven or eight, there was a giant house somewhere in London, where my grandmother used to organise events around black history. One night, there was a display of all the implements…
Jay Bernard
From ‘As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh’, by Susan Sontag –
This book was recommended to me and yielded good results: Artifice + Reality is an interesting description of death, as well as the cemetery. Cemetery as ideal city is fascinating – curated; everybody obedient. Time effacement — as in, making time inconspicuous? Making the memory ever present / timeless? Last words – almost always trite,…
Jay Bernard
Final logbook: ‘I am happy to report however that my husband is still speaking to me’
I’m writing my last post for the residency at 12.30pm on a school night – most of the things I’ve written as part of the residency have happened late at night – after I’ve finished teaching and been for a run, or after I’ve finished conducting my junior band or after I’ve got back from…
Kim Moore
Logbook: ‘Dear Mr Gove today I taught the children not to sit like bags of small potatoes in their chairs’
End of year concert for one of my schools today. There were about 60 children playing trumpets, cornets and baritones, and then about twenty fifes and flutes and about ten violins. This concert is always great fun and there is usually some barely averted disaster – this is the concert where someone was once sick…
Kim Moore
Logbook: ‘I am writing this in my tent with my head torch on’
Despite being officially my day off music teaching, today is the only day I can fit in an hour lesson with an adult who comes for an hour lesson on the tuba. I really enjoy teaching this lesson because this pupil always practices – so I can actually see if the things I’ve set for…
Kim Moore
Logbook: ‘There was the time I woke up in the morning and forgot how to walk’
Conversation overheard at running club: Runner A: “Who do you get to wash your windows?” Runner B: “The rain washes my windows” Runner C: “That’s what ‘usbands are for” Runner A: “Well the rain is my ‘usband” *** After watching a documentary about death row in America.. Who would live in a house on the…
Kim Moore
Logbook: ‘My first day as Digital Poet-in-Residence is almost over’
Monday 28th April My first day as Digital Poet-in-Residence is almost over – in 30 minutes to be exact. I felt very different today – not in a turning-into-a-hologram kind of way, as some of my friends have helpfully suggested as being what will happen when I become ‘in-resident’ but in a ‘I-feel-like-a-writer’ kind of…
Kim Moore