Martin Mooney

Since my poem 'No News' was accepted by the exciting US magazine Superpresent, I've been brooding and worrying at a couple of … well, thoughts, for want of a better word. First, I've been thinking about how much has changed since I was last submitting regularly to magazines (probably pre-2010). Submission fees, for instance: when did that start? But while it's a culture shock, to someone old enough to remember having to include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for the return of the rejected...

For a couple of weeks now I've been correcting proofs of the New and Selected. It's a strange experience - especially given that for so many years I couldn't bring myself to think about poems new or old. It takes a bit of an effort, like forcing yourself to look at photographs of yourself in profile, or listening to recordings of your own voice. That's not me. But oh, it very much is... Of course some of what we're talking about are typos, misprints, literals. Mistakes I've made in the...

At yesterday's Music and Mind Festival in Whitehead, the young Belfast poet Zara Meadows read a cento, a poem constructed of lines and phrases from poems by other poets. I’m a massive fan of the found poem in general, usually based on non-literary texts, but the cento isn’t a form I’ve explored. It prompted me to share this, though. A year or so before he died, my friend the artist, musician and designer David Hunter (known online as Speciman Yak) recorded a piece of music with lyrics taken...