Butcher's Dog newsletter

Here is the latest Butcher's Dog newsletter, featuring details of the Northern Poet Library and mini workshop, for my followers to peruse:

Butcher’s Dog is thrilled to welcome award-winning poet Pippa Little as co-editor of issue seven.  Pippa Little, no stranger to Butcher’s Dog having appeared in issue 2, was a natural choice to guest edit the forthcoming issue. She is “very excited about being part of the Butcher's Dog 7 team, looking forward to working with Andrew Sclater, Jake Campbell and discovering some amazing new poems.”  Pippa Little is a poet who reviews and translates a bit, too. Overwintering came out from OxfordPoets/Carcanet 2012 and she's working on her next collection. Her work appears in print and online and in anthologies, the most recent being Emergency Poetry edited by Deborah Alma, which has reached number one spot in the Amazon best selling poetry anthology charts. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newcastle University.   http://www.rlf.org.uk/fellowships/pippa-little/         BD poets in the Northern Poetry Library There are not one but four BD poets involved in the Northern Poetry Library poet-in-residence project. The NPL, based in Northumberland, is the second largest poetry collection in England but not everyone knows about it so Active Northumberland along with lead poet Lisa Matthews are spreading the word. The project, funded by the Arts Council of England, aims to: Develop new and wider audiences for contemporary poetry raise the profile of the NPL provide the library staff with opportunities for skills development encourage a culture of creative engagement You can find out more about the Northern Poet Library on their spanking new website and hear from the poets in residence including BD4 poets Lisa Matthews & John Challis, BD5 guest editor Carolyn Jess-Cooke and me.       photo credit: David Williams   (MINI) WORKSHOP: WINTER   It's getting a bit nippy, isn't it? The snow didn't descend on my bit of Gateshead as predicted but we're definitely shifting from Autumn to Winter. So let's go with it. Have a read of Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden. I love the line "I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking."  What were winter mornings like when you were small? Did you live in a house without central heating, the inside of the windows painted with frost each morning? Or did you always wake to a warm house where double glazed windows kept the outside out? Or listen to Muddy Waters' Cold Weather Blues with its reference to going 'where the weather suits my clothes'. Or take one of the following lines as a starting point:  The Man who was Marked by Winter (Paula Meehan) bridled with ice / the beck is down: / it has been snowing / it will snow (Paul Bachelor) after the long wintering / of false starts (Jackie Kay) Later, Suddenly, Snow Will Stop Falling (Pippa Little) Free-write for ten minutes. Keep in mind the theme of Winter, think about how the senses respond to the cold. The sounds of winter, the smell, the taste etc.  Don't censor yourself, don't stop writing, keep the pen/cil moving until the time is up. Now underline three things that startle you, a phrase or a word. Use those three things to start your poem and go from there.     Support Us! Butcher's Dog just keeps getting better and better and you can be part of keeping us going. The simplest way of doing that is to buy a copy of the magazine. And if you're thinking of sending work for our next issue (submissions open until 31 January 2016) we do recommend taking a look at the sort of work we publish. If you like what you read, chances are we'll like your poems too. Click here to buy a copy.         Other stuff you might like... On Wednesday 25 November for one night only, via Montreal, Boston and New York a little bit of Prague Fringe Festival comes to Newcastle! John Arthur Sweet performs “Erect but Unstable”, his award winning Monologue… Check out the personal invite to Newcastle audiences here: https://vimeo.com/145426642 If you were living in a poetry free bubble last year you probably didn't hear about Jo Bell's amazing project, 52. Well never fear, you can catch up with the brilliant poetry challenge with the latest publication from Nine Arches Press 52: Write a poem a week. Start Now. Keep Going

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