About Michael Blackburn

Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing in the School of English and Journalism. Poet and writer.

“Monkey Creates”, a poem by Nick Beaumont.

Monkey Creates

The universe is an omelette.
An omelette, or maybe a quiche…
well anyway, the important thing is
it all started with an egg.

An egg with a bloody great crack
down the middle that fizzles
with dark energy. One day, it splinters
open from one too many bangs

on the celestial frying pan,
spattering globules of sticky blackness
across time and space.
The shell pirouettes away, leaving

a yolk that would have fallen if it wasn’t
for the lack of gravity, but instead
hangs in the gaping silence,
a black, undulating mass of chaos.

The mass is snoring.
But it doesn’t snore for long. Monkey wakes
and scratches his furry arse.
It’s pretty close in here he thinks,

so he lifts up his Monkey paws,
and pushes away the squishy black space yolk.
Above him he creates the great
celestial jungle, and below the waters

of the celestial rapids. He swipes
whole paw-fulls of oozing jelly
and skilfully fashions the
banana tree galaxy, the climbing frame

solar system, even the delicate
patterns of the tree vine constellations.
Exhausted, Monkey rests
on the great primordial rubber tyre,

ideally flicking fleas into the cosmos,
where they explode in soft plumes
of orange and purple, becoming
spiralling galaxies and unexplored nebulas.

By Nick Beaumont (alumnus 2010-2011).

The Black Path – MA students publish their first anthology.

blackpath1
Students on the 2012-2013 year of the MA in Creative Writing have published an impressive paperback anthology of their own work.

The Black Path 1 (a second collection is nearing completion) comprises poems, flash fiction, short stories and novel extracts written by the students during the course of their studies.

What’s special about the book is that the students took the publishing initiative themselves, building on what they had learned during the MA. All the writing, collation, editing, design, typesetting and marketing is student-driven. Overall Editor is Shirley Bell, already a well-published poet.

The Black Path 1 is 132 pages long and can be bought from Amazon at £6.58.

A reading by contributors to the anthology will take place in the University on Wednesday, 23 October, 12.00 – 1.00 in room MC0025. More details to follow.

Contributors: Shirley Bell, Cassandra Cash, Stephen Blessett, Laura Clipson, Tina Daley, Stewart Norvill, Muayyad Elwaheidi, Jennifer Fytelson, Joel Leverton, Ian Turner, Matt Ellis and Rosemary Temple.

Publishing success for Jennifer and Shirley.

Two of our students, Jennifer Fytelson and Shirley Bell, have had poems accepted in magazines.

Jennifer recently had a poem in The Mitre, North America’s oldest literary magaine, published by Bishop’s University in Canada.

Shirley has a poem in a forthcoming issue of The Rialto, one of the UK’s top poetry magazines and publishers.

Congratulations to both of them!

Auden still matters.

auden

He wrote a poem in praise of limestone. He wrote a poem about Sigmund Freud. He wrote poems about cats and opera, about the minute organisms that live on human skin. He wrote an achingly beautiful love poem, a lullaby that stands among the gentlest and most forgiving poetry of the 20th century. Years after his death, when the World Trade Center towers were brought to the ground, traumatised New Yorkers faxed each other copies of a poem he had written for an earlier and greater crisis, “September 1, 1939”.

Source: Alexander McCall Smith in The Spectator.

The Telegraph “Just Back” travel writing competition.

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Your travel writing could earn you £1,000. That’s the prize for our ‘Just Back’ article of the year. The weekly prize is £200 in the currency of your choice from the Post Office.

How to enter the competition

Simply email your entry, of no more than 500 words (no attachments), tojustback@telegraph.co.uk

Montaigne’s revenge: “the essayification of everything”.

montaigne

It seems that, even in the proliferation of new forms of writing and communication before us, the essay has become a talisman of our times. What is behind our attraction to it? Is it the essay’s therapeutic properties? Because it brings miniature joys to its writer and its reader? Because it is small enough to fit in our pocket, portable like our own experiences?

Source: Opinionator.

Fay Weldon speaks up for creative writing.

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I would like to see a new discipline, called simply Literacy, taught in our universities and schools, so that the current outpouring of muddy texts can be replaced by a flow of elegant, informative and crystal-clear information – to the benefit of our national pride and dignity. In the meanwhile employers should note that an employee with a qualification in creative writing can be trusted not just to write simply and well, but to be empathic (the fiction writer spends a lot of time pretending to be other people) so is less likely to write tactless emails and cause a scandal unless intentionally. Creative writing is a degree in the effective management of words and emotion and an understanding of how they relate, and yes, it can be taught. And if I might add, should be.

Source: Fay Weldon in Times Higher Education.

Although she should have struck “crystal-clear” out as soon as she’d written it.