Ten Years of Ictus and Call for Submissions

 In a post from earlier this year I mentioned that its been ten years this summer since I began this blog; sporadically enough at times and with a couple of hiatuses along the way but I've just about kept it going through what seems an unbelievable time-span, a decade of dramatic ebbs and flows during which my life has transformed itself in almost every way. Writing has been the one constant in a sense and this irregular blog has trickled along with it like a meandering tributary, never my main focus when I've found time to write but more like something running in the background, a testing-ground for thoughts and opinions, a fairly unpremeditated repository for poems, reviews, interviews, bits of music and miscellaneous other jottings.

  It amounts to a rather incoherent record of a decade it would be hard for me to summarise in any other way. Who knows how many readers came along for the circumlocutory journey, if any at all. I'm only pleased to have got this far. It seems a good enough point, however, to change things up a bit, alter the format and open the blog up to other voices a lot more, as I have often talked about doing in the past. I've included several contributions from guest authors in the past (both poems and reviews) and enjoyed the experience of sharing what I regarded as engaging work.

  I'm inspired by the likes of The High Window, The Interpreter's House, Eyewear and Gists and Piths to move Ictus away from being a common-or-garden writer's blog and more in the direction of an online literary review, with less of myself and more of other people's writings. So if you'd like to submit some poems, a review, an essay or piece of creative non-fiction, or even a short story, please send them to: ictuspublishing@gmail.com. 

 There isn't a particular style or genre or approach I'm more inclined to publish, although there are certainly qualities I value in both poetry or prose: a care for and awareness of form and crafted language; an ungeneric freshness of perception that's liable to give the reader a jolt of surprise and recognition; an engagement with ideas and concepts not as abstract add-ons but as dynamic forces energising the text. Overall the sense that this creative act was a psychological or even physiological necessity on the part of the writer: it wasn't just a classroom exercise, it urgently had to get out there into the world and communicate something to me as a reader, if only its own presence.

 If this sounds prescriptive, it isn't meant to be and I welcome contributions from both experienced, published writers and complete beginners. I'm also very open to works from potentially marginalised or less often represented voices, especially BAME, LBGTQ and disabled poets and authors. I know that many people have turned to poetry during lockdown as a source of consolation or a repository of thoughts and ideas which have been beneficial to reflect upon in this anxious crisis; the simple fact of having more time or working from home has allowed a great creative outpouring to occur in many households, home-offices and garden sheds. I would welcome lockdown poems or poem-sequences: its become the key issue of our time and we are still processing its impact.

 

  

Inbetween Days

 The striped caterpillar my daughter found in the garden and kept in a jam-jar has now entered the pupa stage and formed a cocoon among the ragwort leaves. Despite her impatience, I have told her it may take two weeks before a beautiful, black-and-red cinnabar moth emerges. "So what's inside there now? A caterpillar or a butterfly?" she asks, "Do we still need to feed it?" As so often, I'm stuck for an answer and resort to word-games: "Well, you see now it's turned into a caterfly; no, a butterpillar." 

  Of course, science tells us it's neither one creature nor the other at the moment, a liminal, metamorphic between-state where the cells of the larva are gradually reconfiguring and repurposing themselves into the new form of the moth. This incredible feat of nature, taking place within a small dark casing hidden among leaves in a jam-jar on a shelf, is hard enough for this adult to comprehend as a commonplace occurrence, let alone a three year old. But then again her ability to accept the world at face value, full of discoveries and marvels which often don't seem strange or implausible because she has so little to compare them with, almost certainly exceeds mine, continually jolted out of acceptance of a world that seems more bizarre by the day, I suppose in comparison to a more settled, more "normal" existence that got established in my consciousness some time in the past 51 years (although when and what those old norms were I also find increasingly difficult to formulate or remember).

   I may well be labouring this metaphor now, but we also seem to be living through a transitional state this summer, struggling to emerge from the cocoon of lockdown while still surrounded by a climate of apprehension, caution and frequent setback which at times makes us want to climb back inside again. Neither in lockdown nor quite out of it yet, you could say, and the prevailing air of uncertainty hasn't lifted, hardly helped by the government's tendency towards sudden U-turns and about-faces. Are our children all going back to school in September and are we teachers all going back to start preparing in a few weeks? How come it was safe to go shopping without a mask at the height of the epidemic in April, but now, when so many other restrictions have been eased, it isn't?

  Thinking onward, wouldn't it perhaps be better if we could look at life as one long transitional, metamorphic state, accepting that the more stable periods we fondly remember with the euphemising lenses of nostalgia were probably just as flawed and difficult to get through as the present and that the long-anticipated future of secure, calm days doing exactly what we want to do will almost certainly never arrive. You only have to watch nature going through its almost daily shifts and changes, its continuous process of making, unmaking and remaking, to understand this on a pre-verbal level. It's high summer now but yellow leaves are already beginning to drift down from the acacia tree at the bottom of the garden, just as in early spring I noted autumnal colours on beeches and poplars coming into leaf. 

  And poetry reconfigures itself out of a parallel process, finding a liminal shape for its own metaphormosis*, coming alive in the moment of its saying before resting back into a pattern of mute stasis as the wings of the book fall closed. It shows us how we can live in "uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after facts and reasons"; how we can continue to value the quiet, inward-looking, home-bound days of lockdown even as we struggle back out into the world again.

  

*The title of a poem from my first volume which summed up a central theory of mine about transforming the world through metaphor, revivifying reality through the tropes and leaps of poetic form