OVER

I've finished and they've finished and I've put on the version of 'Whichita Lineman' by the Dick Slessig Combo. A lineman is the guy who fixes the telephone wires that stretch between the farapart towns in those farapart states and plains; and it's lonely. So now you know. Steve was great and arousing, I was edgy and demanding. Blang!

r

half time in the city of ice creams

so it's the interval; and I'm blogging. Luska did place poems which were just grand and Robert was very serious seeming, but with handouts for us to take away - and poems about Chlorine itself, that's bananas.

Hand outs!

Chlorine Live Blog Feed

It is Chlorine again! I'm live-blogging it again, and I'm reading and DJing too, so it's a multi-media venture. With a vengeance. So far I put some records on and have chilled out a bit - there was some problems finding the wire to link the laptop - but I found it.

Breeze Men's Poetry

The new Great Works has some stuff by me in it; check it if you wish, it's about quantity surveying. It's from ages ago and I don't know if it's super tiptop, but such is such. There's also a big bunch of rad stuff by other dudes there too.

and this

Wednesday, December 16th, 6.00pm – 8.00pm

Venue: Queen Anne Building, Room 280, University of Greenwich

Followed by a Q&A, drinks and nibbles.

Come and hear 4 Young Poets read new work.

Richard Parker has read at the Crossing the Line reading series & recently completed a PhD on Louis Zukofsky. He produces the letter-pressed poetry magazine 'Crater' & is the regular DJ at the Chlorine reading series.

Jay Bernard’s first pamphlet Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (2007) was the Poetry Book Society summer choice. She was recently poet in residence on two allotments for Apples and Snakes' 'My Place or Yours?' project, and a participant in the 24-Hour Book.

Andra Simons is a Bermudian writer and performer living in London. His debut collection The Joshua Tales was published September 2009.

Vahni Capildeo works freelance for the Oxford English Dictionary and for several Caribbean and international poetry projects. Her third poetry collection, Undraining Sea, appeared from Egg Box Publishing this year.

With support from 5 Greenwich Poetry Students: Amy Bish, Irene Musoke, Nicole Fordham Hodges, James Rippingale and Emma Zielinski

check this

Crater 2 All Gone

Crater 2's all gone, await Crater 3.

Check Breeze at:

MONDAY 30TH NOVEMBER 2009

aka 'Is There Life After Openned?' Featuring four poets:

RICHARD PARKER
STEVE WILLEY
LUSKA MENGHAM
ROBERT ROWLAND SMITH

+ magazines, books & DJing.

at The Hope, Queens' Road, Brighton, BN1 3WA.

£3 concessions, £5 waged.
Arrive 7.30pm for 8pm start.

CRATER 2

Dear Poetry Consumers,

The second number of Crater's out right now; the first in a projected mini-series of letterpress broadsides, Crater 2 contains a sequence of five spiffy poems by Jonty Tiplady called Above Shoes By Some Margin, and a block by Edward Suckling.

£4 all in if you're within the UK, £5 if you're elsewhere. Paypal or cheques or swapsies welcome.

There are just 55 of these, so respond quicksharp if you're after one. Collect the set.

Richard

Walk Me, 8

A’s there
standing his rose
chee
ks brightening sky he doesn’t often see
sky her fingers in
miracle-gro like a C
ND
’s up
tree.

stolen blogging

A couple of months ago, I did something a little bit sad. I Googled myself. I can’t be alone in having done this, can I? We’ve all done it, right? Whatever. I did it.

I was nowhere. For one thing, my name is Richard Parker, which is a name that has 13 entries on Wikipedia (none of which are mine) and includes:

Richard Parker (influential US economist).

Richard Parker (tiger, fictional star of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi).

Richard Parker (fictional mutinous sailor who, after surviving the capsizing of his ship, is cannibalised by his fellow survivors in Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket).

Richard Parker (real life sailor who survives the foundering of his ship only to be – you guessed it – cannibalised by his fellow survivors).

Richard Parker (a second real-life sailor cannibalised by fellow survivors after a ship-wreck at sea).

Richard Parker (mathematician).

Richard Parker (Egyptologist).

It also includes a couple of US congressmen and the fictional father of Peter Parker (aka Spiderman) who is called Richard ‘Ray’ Parker – a fact I mention only because Ray is the name of my grandfather, and my father’s middle name.

For another thing, I didn’t own the url for my name, nor the direct extensions on other social networking sites. And more to the point, I didn’t publish anything online or do anything worth other people talking about online.

So apart from discovering that I’d better be careful around ships and that I’m possibly related to a super hero (something I always suspected), Googling myself revealed that I was fairly anonymous on the web. To the point where the first result for me was on page 17 and was my facebook profile. Not a situation I liked.

So I did a little experiment. I did the following:

1) Started to contribute to this blog

2) Re-posted my blog posts to my facebook, twitter and linkedin profiles

3) That’s it.

Seriously, that’s it.

I’m now, at the time of writing this post, the first post on page 1 of Google (see image).

Here’s the thing though: I’m not tricking Google, or doing anything shifty. I am creating content under my own name, and because I’m distributing it through sites that Google deems relevant (social network sites in my name), and people are clicking on those links and reading the content, I’m moving up the ranks.

It’s something we at Story have done for lots of clients, including our award-winning site for Duchy Originals. So I’m glad I could do it for myself.