2012 Roundup Year-in-Review

Mayan Stone CarvingsOnce again, I take a look over the past year and select one post from each month that seems significant.

January: Numerology of Grief (The Sixth Year)

This brief meditation on six years since the death of our son found its way to a friend-of-a-friend who also lost his son in infancy. To hear how much it meant to him made all the long silences between writing seem bearable.

February: Long-Listed, National Poetry Competition

So close. Still, having my poem be one of the 130 long-listed poems out of over 11,000 entries was a nice little boost.

March: Magma Poetry Launch Reading at The Troubadour

I was delighted to have a poem appear in Magma, and fell in love with the history and rich atmosphere of The Troubadour that night.

April: First Year in London: Lessons in Negative Capability

Reflecting on lessons learned after one year living in England, I found the advice of John Keats as pertinent to poetry as it was a balm for culture shock.

May: Jonah (Film-Poem by Alastair Cook)

Lens-based artist Alastair Cook did a remarkable job incorporating a poem I wrote in memory of our neighbour-friends’ son into a film-poem in his characteristic visual style.

June: At Home in the English Countryside

Settling in to a different pace of life.

July: In Praise of Small Spaces

Learning to take pleasure in the little cultivations of a simple life.

August: Sabotaged! (A Review)

Martha Sprackland made some deeply insightful observations, the likes of which could only have come from reading closely and thinking carefully about my debut collection Human Shade

September: Ira Lightman: Experiments in Poetry

I came to embrace the high-risk, high-reward art form of experimental poetry.

November: Silk Road British Poetry Feature

After months of poem-wrangling and poem-wrestling, I completed my special feature on British poetry for Silk Road Review, due out in print next summer.

December: The Power and Peril of Written Words

Raw from the Newtown shootings, I typed out some thoughts on America’s reverence for the Second Amendment. It was re-syndicated by Huffington Post and ended up making the front page. Thousands of reads and hundreds of comments later, I only hope we might come a little closer to preventing such tragedies in the future.