With three conversations in progess and more coming online in the next few weeks, it’s been a good yuletide for Likestarlings. Thanks to these poets still at work, and all who slung back and forth with one another in plain view of the e-public last year.
In 2010, we are not planning on any radical (or, indeed, any) changes to the formula. But there are things from 2009 I’d love to see more of…
More transformations
My favourite so far is an exquisite flip along a homonym axis by Jeremey Over, who took Tim Atkins’ Italian father of the sonnet, ‘Petrarch #5’, and made him ‘Petroc Trelawny’, the presenter of the proms on Radio 3 and BBC4. Their conversation continues to probe the Romantic inheritance, parenthood and bees.
More investigation of the anthropocene
The conversation between Jared Stanley & Siddhartha Bose is exciting not only for its use of prose poems, rare on the site, but also the explicit, but by no means straightforward concern with anthropogenic climate change. Bose has taken Stanley’s compelling post-pastoral landscape firmly into an urban context and I’m looking forward to seeing how he responds. In their elegant but turbulent back and forth, Fergus Allen & Stephanie Bolster also worked with a palette of ‘creatures/Eternally eating and being eaten’ (Allen). Bolster’s poems, I think, have a wonderful sound play: ‘A cricket does what crickets do and the air quickens’.
Which reminds me: More transatlantic (and other more distant) connections
Because interesting things seem to happen when languages meet.
More explorations across the screen
Simon Smith & Ryan Murphy are involved in a conversation which breathes in and out with each poem, Smith exploding into clouds, and Murphy contracting. There is a very careful attention to formal echoes between these two, where ‘i/Phone’ becomes ‘i-/Solation’. Still going, it feels like this has the energy to run and run: as Smith’s poem has it, ‘And it doesn’t stop. None of it/stops, ever’.
More pictures
Because so far we’ve had only a tantalizing glimpse of what’s possible.
More contact
We love to hear from people who are visiting the site, as well as our poets. Do let us know what you’re up to. On that note, congratulations to George Ttooulli, whose collection ‘Static Exile’ came out late last year and is a treat.