Peter Kenny
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The Nightwork
Satisfaction, vulnerability and a strange sense of shedding an old skin. It’s not every day you see your name on a new cover. I collected a box of author’s copies of The Nightwork this weekend. Thumbing through the pages looking at the poems it contained, each one arising from (though not necessarily about) a particular episode of my life. It’s…
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Five flavours of self-sabotage: #1 Making light of your own work
Picture the person at who at a poetry workshop will tirelessly explain the profundities of their poem, while marvelling at your lack of comprehension even though the poodle snoozing under the table can tell it’s ruff at best. Not a poet? Then why not pop into your nearest gallery of visual art, and treat yourself…
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Five favourite marketing aliens
As Jim Morrison of The Doors sang, People are strange, when you’re a stranger. And you don’t get stranger than aliens. Here’s my list of top five aliens in British marketing. 1. The Argos Aliens. These aliens are useless boring blue things with spindly necks, and poor dress sense. They spend their time loafing about…
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Recovering an untold story
Last week I was unexpectedly given a plastic bag containing 13 boards with illustrations by my grandfather, Alex Stowell. Evidently these were intended for a children’s story, which was never published, and the text – if it ever existed – has been lost. The pictures from The adventures of Jumper Frog, suggest a story in which Jumper Frog works as a…
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Moby Dick in a Paul Smith Window
In the window of Paul Smith in Covent Garden this lunchtime. Not the greatest photograph, but a white whale shaped stapler on a large piece of crumpled blue paper filled the entire window. So elegant and simple. Managed to speak volumes about the Paul Smith brand without a single item of clothing. Class.
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Brighton Fringe – Relationship Status: Desperate
In the week or so since I saw Relationship Status: Desperate I have been forcibly reminded of the sheer power of getting off your butt making something happen. Beth Symons, as well as being my new stepdaughter, is also an actress with absolutely natural comedic chops. In partnership with her fellow actor and writing partner Emily Mawer, they staged their…
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Brighton Fringe: The Shakespeare Heptet
In the last year or so, The Shakespeare Heptet have morphed from a beguiling two guitar two piece, (with the shade of Shakespeare making up the former Shakespeare Trio) into the barnstorming Shakespeare Heptet who, in its current iteration, also features percussion, bass and banjo. The result is that their mix of blues, folk and magpied scraps…
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The Nightwork cover illustration
Just received the cover illustration by Hannah Clare for my forthcoming Telltale Press pamphlet The Nightwork. And I am really pleased with it. It is deceptively simple, but the more I look at the more I notice in it. I wish I’d actually finished neurotically finalising the selection of the poems inside it. Luckily my old friend, the excellent Canadian…
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HMRC undeclared income campaign
I encountered the new HMRC campaign for the first time this morning at a cashpoint. As I was waiting for my hard-earned cash to be vended, a pair of piercing blue eyes stared up at me from the screen, with the line ‘We’re closing in on undeclared income’. It was the most unpleasantly Orwellian moment…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 