Welcome and contact details

Posted on November 19, 2014 by

Hi.

This site doubles as a commonplace book and a home for updates on my poetry.

I’m on twitter as @harpertext, my email is: harpertext [at] outlook [.] com

Thanks for stopping by.

Advertisements
Posted in Welcome

‘The Cooler’ in The Interpreter’s House

Posted on July 6, 2018 by

Delighted to say that The Interpreter’s House issue 68 is out, the final issue edited by Martin Malone and assistant Charles Lauder Jnr. I’m delighted my poem ‘The Cooler’ is included, my second appearance in TIH after two of my poems appeared in issue 58. Thanks to Martin and Charles.

It’s a great journal, 130 pages of always interesting poetry and reviews, and I look forward to seeing the next issues from editor Georgi Gill and assistant Andrew Wells.

Posted in Published | Tagged ,

‘Ask’ in Eye to the Telescope

Posted on January 17, 2018 by

Eye to the Telescope Issue 27 has gone live today, on the theme of Arthuriana. My Gawain poem ‘Ask’ is included, alongside an interesting and inventive range of Arthurian poems.

Many thanks to editor Adele Gardner!

Posted in Published | Tagged , , , ,

‘Sheer’ in Mirror Dance

Posted on June 20, 2017 by

The Summer 2017 issue of fantasy zine Mirror Dance has gone live, with a theme of masks and disguises.

As well as fiction, it contains poems by Jeana Jorgensen, Mary Soon Lee, Todd Dillard and Robert Beveridge.

Delighted that it also includes my long poem ‘Sheer‘, a fairy tale retelling, or perhaps a fairy tale slice-of-life.

Thanks to Megan Arkenberg!

Posted in Published | Tagged , , , , ,

Oliver Sacks on writing the present

Posted on March 28, 2017 by

The most we can do is to write – intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively – about what it is like living in the world at this time.

— Oliver Sacks, quoted in Bill Hayes, My Life with Oliver Sacks, The Observer, 26 March 2017

Posted in writing | Tagged , ,

‘The Well’ in Liminality

Posted on March 20, 2017 by

The eleventh issue of Liminality has gone live today.

I’m very pleased that my poem ‘The Well‘ is included, my fourth appearance in the journal.

Thanks to Shira Lipkin and Mattie Joiner!

Posted in Published | Tagged , , ,

James Wright on the Olympian syndicate

Posted on February 7, 2017 by

In 1958, in July, [Wright] wrote me a letter (I’m sure similar letters went to others) in which he announced that he was through writing poems. […] The first issue of Robert Bly’s magazine, The Fifties, which he read at this crucial point, arrived like a reproach. (He did not yet know Bly.) He told me: “So I quit. I have been betraying whatever was true and courageous […] in myself and in everyone else for so long, that I am still fairly convinced that I have killed it. So I quit.” In the letter he called himself “a literary operator (and one of the slickest, cleverest, most ‘charming’ concoctors of the do-it-yourself New Yorker verse among all current failures) […]”

A day later he wrote again, admitting that “I can’t quit and go straight. I’m too deep in debt to the Olympian syndicate. They’d rub me out.” (This is Roethke talk, who during mania often alluded to The Mob.)

— from Donald Hall, introduction to James Wright, Above the River (1992), p. 29-30

Posted in Reading | Tagged , , ,

‘The Dig’ in Through the Gate

Posted on January 7, 2017 by

Through the Gate (in its current form) is “a weekly of fantastical poetry”. I’m delighted my poem ‘The Dig‘ is this week’s poem.

Thanks to editor Mitchell Hart!

Posted in Published | Tagged ,