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.