It’s here! Treasure Ground, the last publication of the year, finally done — and it looks gorgeous. I get very parental about all these productions but I am particularly pleased with this one. The collection is a sequence of connected pieces, all arising from day to day life on Woodlands Organic Farm, and it threads its way across the seasons. You need to read it from beginning to end (not, as I often do, backwards).
But Clare (happily for a typesetter) tends to write shortish texts which fit neatly inside one page. They don’t crowd their way down to the bottom line, and there’s space to start them well under the header. I mean, I know poetry is about sound and form and sense — not just how it meets the eye — but some people’s poems are so much easier to present well than others! And Robert, at Dolphin Press, found some lovely dark brown (nearly black) paper for the flyleaves: not a bad representation of the colour of Lincolnshire soil. . . .
Many things are a bit different this time. Lots of these poems originally went out inside vegetable boxes to Woodlands customers, and now 1800 flyers, flagging the appearance of the pamphlet, will go out the same way. It will be the most promoted of any of the pamphlets I’ve ever done — fascinating to see what the result will be. I do hope people who eat organic broccoli and cauliflower and parsnips and carrots will also want to send for (and read) the poems. I’m optimistic.
For some VERY annoying reason best known to technology, WordPress is resistant to my uploading a picture of Treasure Ground this morning. HTTP error, huh? It’s something to do with Mac not talking to WordPress, I think. Instead of scanning, I’ve just photographed it. That seems to work. Sigh.
This is the thing. When this web world works it’s wonderful. When it stops, what kind of ontological panic grips the world of the addict? I must have become an addict without knowing it. My server is Orange and on Friday night, orange not only didn’t rhyme with any other word, it didn’t work at all.
I reconnected every single connection, tested everything. Four account connection faults. Stupid me. The server was down. It’s happened before, but not for ages. Now it was good for me to have a whole night without checking emails, shop orders and that stupid Twitter feed. But did I feel good about it? No. I felt terrible. Like I had just been shut out of my mental home or something.
Yes, I ought to change my ISP. Like I should have changed my gas and electricity but didn’t. I did, however, change my car insurance this year, and the building and contents. Maybe . . .