arts & ego blog
BSD to poetry

I visited the smoke because I wanted to pick up the current version of Open BSD. For complicated reasons, I ended up walking down Charing X Road, where I encountered one of those ubiquitous “closing down tomorrow” temporary bookshops. Usually, such places are full of crap. This one wasn’t. I found shelves full of contemporary poetry collections at 99p each. Rather than selecting individual volumes, I got the hoover out.

Buying a wadge of volumes will show me what contemporary publishers publish and fail to sell, what standards I have to beat should I attempt to get a collection of my work published by a third party. I’m beginning to think my copyleft approach will be a strength; the current music world controversy regarding pirating suggests it could cause a ruckus, so might be of interest to the general media. Mind you, this does rather require me to approach a publisher (at the moment, I’m going for self–publication).

Having bought the volumes, I nipped into a café for a coffee. Charing X Road became surreal; a helicopter landed in Cambridge Circus.