I've been writing poetry for almost 43 years. Sporadically and in an amateurish fashion for 30 of them; for the last 12 years, in cahoots with fellow cyberpals, regularly, seriously, scoring a few modest successes on the way. All of this has been achieved under pressure of time, in odd moments, amongst the chaos of a busy working life and the absorptions of a delightful family life. Consequently my work is scattered randomly across various computers, not properly proofread and exists in multiple versions on various on-line poetry workshop archives.
With redundancy looming, creating the prospect of having some time to myself, I feel it's time to get myself sorted out. Maybe I have enough decent material to form the basis of a first collection so part of the idea behind the blog is to establish definitive versions of everything I've written to date, polished up for publication.
The other issue for me is I feel at some sort of crossroads writing wise. I've explored formal verse mainly; rubbed shoulder with the tribal elders of New Formalism; hung out on its backstreets with their baby boomer overgrown boho wannabees - maybe it's time for a change. So, I thought it may be useful to reflect a bit on how each of my poems came to be, what I learned when writing them, what worked and what bombed. Maybe that way I'll work out - where next?
About Me
- Pete Turpie
- Pete Turpie grew up in Northumberland, England. He studied History of Art and English Literature at Manchester and Open University. Pete worked in Further Education management for almost 30 years. Writing under the pen-name 'Alan Wickes', his poetry has been published extensively in the UK, North America and Australia, appearing in Aesthetica, Znine, Worm, Loch Raven Review, The Chimera, Envoi, The Raintown Review and Angle. His sonnets have won Ware Poets national competition twice, in 2004 and 2009. Cannon Poets awarded first prize to his poem "Parting Shots" in November 2006. In November 2007 his chapbook Prospero at Breakfast was published by Modern Metrics. His work has featured in anthologies and he is included on 'The Hypertexts' site as a spotlight poet. In 2012 the sonnet sequence 'Nighthawks' was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Pete retired in 2012 and has recently completed an M.A. in Humanities with the University of Derby. In the longer term he is looking forward to travelling more extensively, enjoying family life and to have more time to further develop his writing.
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