A bit of a catch-up… I just want to make a record of where things are with this Spaces in Between blog today. It has had over 250,000 hits since it was first published 2012, and the figures have increased massively in the last couple of years, even though I post infrequently. That is about the change!
Readers are from all over the world, in the last fourteen years most hits have come from the USA, then Singapore, Hong Kong, UK, Brazil, Germany, Vietnam, Russia, France, Sweden, China, Israel and Ukraine. I’m please there are readers in all these places and many more.
Nearly all the posts on here are poems of mine, either published here because I didn’t think I’d get them published in any mainstream poetry magazines or anywhere else, or because I was fortunate enough to get them published in those places and I wanted to record that. And there are many that were time sensitive because they related to current affairs, and the blog allows for immediate postings.
The most popular post on this site is still ‘The Power of You’, which was first published here in 2013 and went around the world in great numbers straight away. It is shown here in a new form, with a study I did in art class (oil on canvas). This will be part of a public exhibition of poetry as art, that I am staging in collaboration with other poets and artists this summer.
Until about three years ago I was still submitting my work and aiming to get published in poetry magazines and anthologies, and in online journals too, with some success. Also, I have three books of my own poetry published, and another on the way, probably next year. But as well as publishing in print and on here, I have gradually come to the view that I want to get poetry more ‘out there’ in the world, maybe even to more people who say they ‘don’t read poetry’. Developing and sharing this blog is part of that, and so is my continued passion for the spoken word, for taking part in live events in all kinds of venues. (That’s for another post sometime).
It’s not only my own poetry I want to get ‘out there’, it’s all poetry really. In collaboration with five other poets locally we put together a Poetry as Protest exhibition, titled Resistance is Fertile, which was staged at venues in south west Wales over last summer and earlier this year. I’ll blog more about this in another (yet another!) post later, as a new exhibition is upcoming in May. And we have further plans take our work very much into our local communities, and to engage local people more too, but enough said on that for now.
Look out for new posts about new adventures – and how you might be able to get involved – over the next months. And if you are one of the regular readers of The Spaces in Between, thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy what you find here.
Here's the text of that poem:
The power of you
In the still quiet centre of you
are all the mountains and valleys
all the streams, rivers,
peaceful lakes and raging oceans,
all the forests and plains of this Earth.
In the still quiet centre of you
are the sun and moon
and all the planets and stars
of the universe forever.
In the still quiet centre of you
is all the love there ever was
in all the world through all time.
In the still quiet centre of you.
