Simon Zonenblick - Writing and more

Following a blazing spring, summer began with downpours, and is only now brightening. But even on this sunny afternoon, the clouds are sky-wide, like sodden blotting paper.  Its rained pretty much constantly through June, the Calder Valley landscape is drenched in vivid green. I don't think I've ever seen so many leaves on the trees.  These cumulous skies have put me in mind of cloud-themed poetry, of which I have written an abundance through the years.  Two of my unpublished collections contain homages to clouds, and my still-being-written pamphlet of purposely verbose poems Slitheroe Bridge includes a special sequence of short poems about them:  Clouds, like bones of undiscovered animals dotting desert sands or the silty silences of caves, stud night's mirage of starlit dark, skeletons dredged from a broken arc. My poem Cloud depicts a spring sky, a bubble of clotted cream, spilt into a pool of splashed shiraz , in which one individual cloud, fat, ...

Random Journeys , a gathering of twenty one poems written between 2001 and 2014, was published in April 2014 by The Unpretentious Arts, Ripponden. The pamphlet contains poems previously published in Poetry Now, Tears in the Fence, The Black Rose, and also online via both InPossee Review and The Maynard. All for sale copies are now out of stock pending a reprint, but some are still available through libraries. These poems , begins the blurb, offer reflections on the natural world, rooted in the poet's native Yorkshire.   Indeed, most of the poems concern wildlife sightings in and around the edges of West Yorkshire, drawn from childhood memory and contemporary observation, even though they are fairly general in terms of their descriptions - the song thrush summer-plumped and freckle-flecked , might just as easily occupy a tree in London, Lancashire or Llandudno, though set together the poems conjure for me now a tangible memory of the decade or so that I lived in the almost-ru...

A few copies of my 2013 pamphlet Freezings - containing edited versions of stories written between 2004-06 - are available from myself, and through Calderdale Libraries. In the fullness of time I will make them available elsewhere. Described by Ian Brinton in international literary journal Tears in the Fence as dystopian landscapes bleakly transposed , the five stories all take concern solitary introspection, nocturnal encounters, or surreal imaginings, as when a man's tears bring forth the growth of fruit in a dream-like desert land, with violent consequences. The opening piece, which takes its title from a line in a Shakespeare sonnet quoted forlornly by one of its care-worn characters (the pamphlet's title, in turn, taken from this line), begins: A desolate expanse of disused warehouses and factories dribbled into the distance beyond the platform, the night air pinpricked by a few dim lights in the windows of peripheral blocks of flats. This melancholy commencem...

In the autumn of 2013, I put together a suite of six poems, mostly composed in the spring of 2004 under the influence of Keats, various translations of Ancient Chinese poetry, and my pedestrian readings of dream interpretations. The resulting sequence was never intended to be a serious exploration of dreams or the psychology or popular pseudo-science attached to them, but more a somewhat fun dip into those waters with some fancy imagery and open-ended fragments. The heart's hidden theme, the buried beam, the conscious mind's illogical extreme, the spectral stream, the brain's coal seam, the splintered scream, the hushed-up scheme, the mutilated meme, the dream. Dreams are variously imagined as starlit carnivals of drowsy delights , and submerged motifs of the subconscious , and there is even a nod to those unremembered dreams now absorbing dust on cutting room floors.   The poems are mainly light hearted - in one I ponder the question Is a drea...

Apropos of my previous post about my collection Little Creatures, the following is a list of online items containing quotes from the book or other items about it: YouTube promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aUI-mxKHBw Three Collections of Poetry video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cU35i5eh_g Excerpts from my Nov 2017 Little Creatures reading at Pencilvania, Fox and Goose, Hebden Bridge: Damselfly Octolune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0dro_JxHuk Snail's Lament, by Albert Kalimbikatha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hraeu6T9eIk Slug Sex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTplLs5u6U8 Slug Octolune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebqzz59jXLo From Season of the Rains, by Simon Mpondo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H10eSlsqA4U From my Millipede sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj2GrhwvKYI Adam Zagajewski's Moths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i...

My debut  poetry collection, Little Creatures - Poems of Insects, Small Mammals and Micro-organisms , was published in 2013, though many of the poems were written long before that time.  The earliest pieces began life in the autumn of 2001. I had been walking home along rained-on streets, finding myself dodging snail shells on the pavement, which placed those animals squarely in my mind when I sat down to write that evening (though I seem to recall this writing took place not behind my desk, but sitting in front of the television eating tea - the urge to pour out my pontifications being far too strong to wait until a later hour.)  I had been reading translations of Kafka's short stories, and the opening line of one - It is of a little woman that I now speak of - seemed to insist its way onto my page in zoomorphic form:  I am thinking of the little creatures.  And thus my Little Creatures poems were born. LITTLE CREATURES I am thinking of the little cre...