Kathy Pimlott

April 2024

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I’m very pleased to share the news that The Emma Press will be publishing my latest pamphlet, After the Rites and Sandwiches, in November – in fact, in the week I turn 72. This will be my third pamphlet with the press and it is a real joy to work with them again. I’ve been very lucky with my publishers. As well as The Emma Press, I had the pleasure of working with Verve Poetry Press to bring out my collection, the small manoeuvres, in 2022. There are many fine small presses who publish beautiful books, but so many of them just don’t have the capacity to lead on distribution and publicity. Both The Emma Press and Verve are able to support their poets to get their work out there – a daunting task to do alone.

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 (or so I assume). 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.

As a taster, two of the poems from the new pamphlet will be published in the next edition of The North. In the meantime, I’m fiddling endlessly with the mss and fishing around for the next preoccupation which will, hopefully, lead to new poems.

I'm reading
Paul Stephenson's Hard Drive (Carcanet) and Charlie Baylis's a fondness for the colour green (Broken Sleep Books)