Kathy Pimlott

July 2024

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Hey, hey - I'm very happy and not at all humble, to say that my poem won the Welshpool Festival Competition. And as is often the case, it was the one added for luck - particularly flukey as it was my latest poem and a prose one to boot. Who ever knows? You can read my poem plus the other placed and commended poems and the judges' report here.  I couldn't go to the festival as I was on a long writing weekend with my much-loved Saturday zoom poet friends but in real, blustery, bracing life in Cromer. It was bliss. 

I have had a first glimpse of the cover for my next pamphlet with The Emma Press,  After the Rites and Sandwiches, due out in November – in fact, in the week I turn 72. As a taster, one of the poems from the new pamphlet will be published in the next edition of The North. 

How important is getting it out there? There are poets who are content to write for themselves, though I have never met one. While, for me, the true value of the whole endeavour is the doing of it, the making of the poems, I do want to see those poems out in the world, being read, responded to, becoming something separate from me. A careful review is a blessing, the congratulations from friends and peers at a convivial launch is a great boost and winning a prize is very exciting. One of the most gratifying things that has happened in my poetry life was being contacted by a wedding planner telling me that one of my poems was going to be read at a wedding and would I sign a copy to be framed for the couple. Non-poets, people I don’t know, wanting my work to be part of their important day. It was a blast.

I'm reading
Paul Daniel's Old Men (Salt); Rainer Maria Rilke's Change Your Life, Essential Poems, translated by Martyn Crucefix (Pushkin Press) and Paul Stephenson's Hard Drive (Carcanet)