Well it seems to have been a very long time since I posted anything. I expect you have been visiting the site and expecting more posts, and sadly you turn away, disappointed. I don't blame you.

The truth is I've been busy. Poetry has had to take a back seat. I read at The Troubadour in July - and that was great and in August I received the last of four rejections from four poetry magazines.

Things have been very busy at home too. I'm teaching new courses and the family needs more and more of me. I think I've been using poetry as a hiding place - a wall to keep the world away - to some extent that means my wife and children.

That seems completely unacceptable to me when I look at it that way. So I'm putting writing poetry onto the back burner. I'll only write something if I can do it very quickly. That seems like a good exercise anyway. So don't expect much.

Poetry workshop in Leicester coming up.

Hi I just wanted to tell you about the 50 birthday celebrations at The Poetry Library. We went to the gala poetry evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Wednesday 14 May. it was an entertaining and magical evening. I didn't really want to come home.

The poets were Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, Carol Ann Duffy, Roger Mc Gough and Patience Agbabi. I felt the UK poetry world was there and they all seemed connected in some strange web. We sat near to people we knew and the woman I sat next to knew Peter one of my colleagues. The whole evening was a real buzz. After I walked out onto the new Hungerford Bridge, I didn't want to go home.

I suppose I felt connected in some small way.

This is going to be a very very short blog.

I’ve just spent about 40 minutes writing an entry and then I lost it so I am really pissed off. I really wanted to start my blog like this.

Hi I’m back on line. We lost contact for a while- did you notice? Our computer went down with a very bad virus and I really though we had lost it all. But it is in the process of being resurrected as you can read I can at last make a blog entry.

Its late so this will be short and sweet.

The publicity is out for the reading at The Troubadour. There is also the poetry party later on the 14 July the theme is Paris. I’ve already started on something – but what shall I read?

I’ve been reading and writing a little. At the moment I'm reading Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, and just before Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude. This is his portrait of his father though he could have been writing just about mine. I read Billy Collin’s new poetry collection – the line between stand up comic and poet blurs even further. At college we’ve been studying Frost, and for the first time for me Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. These poets have been refreshing and challenging, Dickinson's intense, dynamic and powerful writing is disturbing but brilliant.

I've been writing about my dad and still playing around with a poem called Sleepless. Since the computer crashed my writing has almost dried up. Clearly I am beginning to rely on the word processor too much. Sleepless has been fun. Recently I've been playing around with the shape and punctuation of the poem. It is an imagist poem but there is also aspects of stream of consciousness, experimental perhaps.

i am still watching DVD's from Blockbusters. I just can't keep on going there. Stephen reckoned Wimbledon Library has a great collection of videos. So perhaps New Malden Library will have a wider collection of films. We'll see. I think I can add two other films to my top ten. The Philadelphia Story and Terrence Malick's Badlands with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The Philadelphia Story is a film I video taped years ago and thought it was amazing. If I could not sleep I used to come down and watch it. I don't really know what attracts me about Badlands. Perhaps it is the narrator, or the escape from a father into a world of your own making - a secret world. Outsiders.

I hope I can maintain this blog and have some real writer's things of interest to put down. I hope someone else is reading this too. This feels a bit like doing an all night radio programme - you just don't know who is listening. Actually when Steve and I were doing late night shows on Campus Radio we always got a response, even if it was 4 am.

Take care and drop me a line if you can.

D

Hi I've got a date to read at The Troubadour. Fantastic. It will be on the 30 June at 8.0, The Troubadour, 265 Old Brompton Road, London. It costs 5.00 to get in. If you can come along that would be great. So I've got a bit of time to put together a reading programme. It will be similar to the Leicester and Canterbury readings but I want to put some new ones in. It should be fun. Don't forget it will only be fifteen minute read, I'll share the event with 5 other "New Voices".

I'm also reading two poems at The Troubadour on Monday 31 March. This will be on the theme of letters. I intend to read Ezra Pound's free translation of Li Po's The River Merchant's Wife - A Letter and my poem The River Merchant - A Reply. What cheek! But I just could not think of anything else.

Last week Katy drafted a letter for me and I sorted out 4 poetry magazines that just might be interested in publishing some of my poems. We've got to keep at it and get the letters out before the big read on the 30 June.

I've slowed down a bit in my writing. Instead I've been reading a few novels. The Reader, The Hours and right now Life of Pi. I don't mind the slow down although I hope the poems don't come to a full stop altogether. At the moment I'm writing a collection of imagist poems entitled Sleepless. It's about sleeplessness suprise suprise. I feel a little like Pi sharing his life boat with a tiger shipwrecked in the Pacific. He seems to be able to just keep going - his day filled with so many little victories. My writing feels a bit like this - very fragile, constantly worrying if it will all dry up and where is the next poem going to come from.

Finding time to write is still hard and now we have the TV space has become a problem. I'm still not watching it but just having it in the house is a pressure and a strain.

However I do watch DVD's. We rent some from Blockbusters and I want to buy my top 10 films. I don't know what they all are but I have bought Bergman's The Seventh Seal, Francis Ford Copola's, Apocalypse Now and Wim Wender's Wings of Desire. They are not perfect films but they all seem to address issues or themes that disturb, intrigue, haunt and facsinate me.

Last time I wrote I told you about all the poets I'm teaching with my students. Well it has not been as easy as I first thought. The AS year is very short and it is a race to get through the poems. The Penguin American Anthology Of Verse is a great anthology but just no time to dwell on the poems in too much detail.

Finally I seem to be developing a Blog routine. Just one a month one every 4 or 5 weeks. But you never know. Keep watching this space.

It seems to have been a while since I last wrote an entry. Which does seem rather pathetic. However there has been a lot of personal difficulties at home over the last few weeks and this has made writing rather difficult. These still seem to be going on but we are at at last trying to put them in in a reasonable perspective. So then...poetry.

I read Alice Oswald's TSEliot prize winning poem and loved it. I read it in two sittings. lots of different voices all submerging into one voice - the river - a great idea. A poem that seemed not really to have a beginning but just wandered and flowed eventually out into the sea. There was a real sense of her capturing individual characters, her own voice minor, self efacing letting others speak.

I won't be submitting anything to Magma this time. I wrote the poem - finished it off over half term. It is a good poem but does not address the theme of alienation or separation from home strongly enough.

Now I'm busy - desperate to be honest - to get a poem out for The Troubadour. The theme is letters. I have an idea but it is so outrageous I hardly dare use it. I just can't think of anything else at the moment.

Nothing on the 15 minute slot at The Troubadour yet. I'll let you know in good time, don't worry. I've completed 4 poems since the beginning of the year. I think that is a good record, so far. I enclose one of those poems here. Enjoy.

Seven Twenty-Five

Midwinter morning,
still dark, except my head lights
boring into the blackness
and an upstairs bedroom, flood lit
curtains drawn full back, no nets,
and a woman,
her bare arms
bent over her head
brushing long blond hair
staring into her mirror,
pale naked shoulders,
her flat belly
and small breasts,
caught in her bedroom light.

She stands oblivious
of my fleeting gaze
in the cold, frost coated, street below.


© David Loffman 14 January 2003

Hi there. Getting to the computer has been difficult these past couple of weeks. Katy's work has been very much tied up with the screen, even today my time the computer is very limited. But I am writing. Since the new year I have written two poems and am in the final draft stages of a third. This one I hope to send to Magma for publication in March. The theme is alienation or exile and I'm trying to write about my Jewish experience. I do have another idea for a poem on the same theme and might start on that after this one. They have to be submitted in February so there is much to do.
I am teaching a lot of poetry at the moment. Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath with the second years and later with one second year group Blake and Betjeman. With a first year group I'm teaching an anthology of American poetry. All of this will influence my writing in a direct way. Plath's imagery is so dynamic and powerful - I love her play with language and symbols, with Heaney I'm attracted to the emotional restraint - the carefully crafted image, and the rich, full sounds of his of his work. But we will see what eventually materialises, perhaps nothing.
Anne-Marie has offered me a slot in the next Epiphany at The Troubadour which could be in the summer. That will mean a 15 minute reading. I am very excited about that.
I want to make a response to the TS Eliot prize winner but have not had a chance to read it yet.

Hi this is blog take 2. Poetry is the main purpose of this Blog. Poetry exists in the cracks left over from family life and work. This does not amount to very much time at all. Poetry is one of the subjects of my dream life. One that I hope to make a reality. As presures on my time increases so the time for poetry is squeezed into a smaller and smaller space. As a result my expectations and hopes for my poetry grow and grow. Typical. So this is a journal of my dream life. One of my resolutions for 2003 is to become a published poet. And another one is to add to this Blog on a regular basis. Just watch this space!

Today we've spent some time updating the Conjuring Sunlight web site. I've added a new poem to the Landscapes page and I've begun a new page called workshops. I'm hoping soon to be able to add some photographs and a selecion of the poems produced from the first workshop in Leicester.

I am overwhelmed by my level of paralysis. So much needs to be done. Today though was a day of hibernation - we kept warm, fed ourselves, let the children watch TV, read. I have not been out once. Katy said it was freezing outside when she ventured out for ten minutes.