In praise of...anti-praise

Hey all,

My poem, Seven months: the navel-gaze, has been selected for The Guardian Review's Poetry Workshop's April Shortlist.

The way the Poetry Workshop works is this: "Every month, our poetry workshop is hosted by a different poet who sets an exercise, chooses the most interesting responses and offers an appraisal of them. That's the hard part taken care of - all you need to do is start writing ..."

For April, the poet was Scottish writer Jen Hadfield and the exercize anti-praise poems.

Hadfield had this to say about my poem:

"This is the most visceral set of images, and yes, it really works. I almost can't believe someone could pull off the image of 'My belly button is a muddy worm run/ just before it rains and the whole thing sinks in on itself,' but you sure did. I wondered whether you might be able to organise these individual images in a way that would give the reader sort of gastric departments to get the whole lot digested. I'm getting tangled sometimes in your syntax; the lines in the second verse from 'my belly button intact is the last gasp ... ' are all a bit of a blur for me! I wouldn't want you to lose any of the momentum you've got rolling here, so I'd say, if you edit this, do it delicately?"

Interestingly, in her treatise on how to write anti-praise, Hadfield cites Canadian poet Wendy Morton...

Anyways, if you haven't seen this website/exercize yet, it's well worth checking out...I also quite enjoy Posy Simmonds' Tamara Drewe comic and, of course, The Guardian Review itself.

(Yay!)