PUBLISHING

This summer I've been chained to the computer most days, not to the easel.  I've discovered the pleasures of publishing, not only my own writing and Dónall Dempsey's poems, but also the work of the friends we've made through hosting Pop up Poetry, our spoken-word group in Guildford. 

Last year I decided to edit and publish an anthology of the poems of people who had read there and this year we've produced a second anthology, bigger and better than the last.

Producing the book has also made me look again at my other website, and update it. dempseyandwindle.co.uk is where all the books we've published so far are displayed for sale.

Our poetry group has been known since November 2011 as Pop Up Poetry, a name we inherited by default from another promoter, but we've been feeling for a while now that we'd like to change it to a more imaginative name. Our 2014 Anthology's subtitle is "A Thousand Monkeys with a Thousand Typewriters..." and we're considering changing our name to "Thousand Monkeys". Here's an extract from the foreword to the latest Pop Up Anthology, which will probably be the last we publish under that name: 

“If a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters typed for an infinite length of time, then eventually they would write the complete works of William Shakespeare ...”

Nobody seems quite sure who first made this remark. In any case, we haven’t had to go to the animal kingdom or use a thousand laptops to collect the text of this anthology. It seems to us that most people have a poem or two in them, and Pop Up Poets is the group that aims to find and enjoy as many people’s poems as we can encourage on to the stage and the page. These poems are far from being the random products of mathematical probability. Personal, honest, crafted with care, or poured joyfully on to the page without inhibition, but never random.


Whatever the name, we'll go on writing, hosting and publishing poems as long as anyone wants to come to our events or contribute to our collections.