Kathy Pimlott

January 2025

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Here we are, a new year. For me it’s an unusually spacious prospect as I’ve finally retired from my day job, which, even though latterly, was only theoretically one day a week, took up a large amount of my thinking and gave me an all-pervasive feeling of guilt – that I wasn’t doing enough, wasn’t doing it well enough – that I’d stopped caring. I feel lighter already (and poorer), but I’ve also lost one of the main ways I defined myself. So now I’m looking to the always itchy definition of ‘poet’ to fill that gap.

Which does that mean? Reading more, writing more, getting my act together. Being serious about it. Post-publication is typically a fallow time for many poets and certainly so for me. Now I’m looking to push myself back into writing with all the strategies I know – it doesn’t mean I’m writing well, but I am writing and, being a Pollyanna, I believe I will write better. Post-Christmas I’m determined to make proper headway on the pile of books that’s been sitting there since the middle of last year. No more afternoon tv for me – no sir.

I’m still ploughing my way through the many submissions to the Magma summer issue I’m co-editing with Paul Stephenson and Danne Jobin. It’s so interesting to be on the other side of the submission process (and of Submittable), to see the differences in approach to submitting from different countries. My main takeaway for my own submission practice is what you would think would be obvious but clearly isn’t – read the instructions, the call, especially if there’s a theme. Don’t rely on a long cover letter explaining how your poems fit the theme – this won’t be available to readers of the magazine – let your poems speak for themselves. Oh, and a short biog is up to 50 words – and yes, you can’t convey your complex, fascinating life in that or ten times that but you can in your poems. Leave out your manifesto.

Onwards and upwards. Wishing good health, happiness and crisp notebooks to you all.

 I’m reading (well, clearly not all at once, but on my sofa-adjacent pile):
Dai George’s How to Think Like a Poet (Bloomsbury); Clare Pollard’s The Untameables (The Emma Press); The Hawthorn Bride (Victoria Gatehouse (Indigo Dreams); and The Apocalyptic Landscape ed. Steve Ely (Valley Press).