Last Thursday (16th May 2024), I finished a three-year marathon, reading the whole of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (155 poems in English and in French) at my weekly on-line poetry event called Wolfie’s Poetry Surf which will have been running for exactly twelve years this coming Thursday.

I’ve hosted poetry events in my home town of Lewes over the years and read my own work at a number of venues in London, in the US and elsewhere, but, I have discovered, over a number of years now, that no audiences have been as diverse as those that can come to events on-line. Virtual worlds, such as the original player, Second Life, are open to anyone, anywhere in the world, and the audiences for my weekly events, may never be large, seldom more than 25 or 30 people, but they have come from the UK, the US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Serbia, the Netherlands, The Republic of Georgia, Portugal, Singapore, China, Japan, The Philippines, Brazil, Argentina, Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. They often attend at unsociable times, early morning or late at night depending on their time zone, we meet at 2pm, US EST, and it has been a wonderful experience to hear poets reading their own works from so many different countries, and, often, in a number of different languages.

Every week, apart from holidays and illnesses, I have appeared in my avatar form, Wolfgang Glinka, to host an open mic read poetry hour for all comers, where I also read poetry, my own, and mostly complete poetry collections, a poem a week, by some of the greatest names of poetry.

In these twelve years, I have read a lot of my own work, often trying out new pieces, I have always started the event by reading from three featured poetry books, three poems, each taken from the our three ‘guest poets.’ I’ve read William Shakespeare (The Sonnets), William Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience) Alfred Lord Tennyson (In Memoriam), Arthur Rimbaud (Les Illuminations and A Season in Hell), T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets), John Donne (Songs and Sonnets), Tomas Tranströmer (New Collected Poems), Ocean Vuong (Night Sky with Exit Wounds), Frank O’Hara (Lunch Poems), Eduardo C. Corral (Slow Lightning), Billy Collins (Horoscopes for the Dead), Ezra Pound (The Cantos – all except without the Chinese Mandarin language ones), T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land), Rae Armantrout (Versed), Elizabeth Bishop (North & South/ A Cold Spring) and Charles Baudelaire (Le Spleen de Paris and Les Fleurs du Mal),

It felt special this week when I got to the final poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleur du Mal, not only because it has been a genuine marathon, maybe the first time the work has been read in its entirety online in French and in English, but also because Baudelaire’s poetry is so important, he was maybe the first ‘Modern’ poet, and the complete work was intended to be read as a whole, leading to the longest and grandest poem at its conclusion. Le Voyage, is a journey, just as the reading of all 155 poems was a journey too. A journey through life, one that in Baudelaire’s world-view, doesn’t reach an expected end or a simple conclusion. He is talking about life as much as death, and the two are, of course, inter-connected. No Romantic denouements for Baudelaire. We have been taken on a journey through a life that has seen misery, unfairness, the joys and tragedies of love and an honest close-up look at the erotic with all its dangers, delights and poisons. We must always search, he says, always move on, usually this is away from the boredom, the ennui, of our mundane lives, but, sorry, guys, he says, what do you find in the end? Maybe we’ve journeyed from boredom and tears to find only more of the same.

If Baudelaire was the great poet of boredom, he was never boring.

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I know, it’s been too long, but I’m back. I noticed in amazement and a touch of horror, that I last posted a blog on this site last December. Forgive me. I’ve been busy with various writing projects – a third novel all but completed, a fourth on its way and a poetry collection coming out very soon. So yes, busy. I’ve also been doing my weekly poetry readings online every Thursday and, until Christmas, most Fridays.  I’m getting ready for one now. Each week, for over a year now I’ve been starting the hour with a Shakespeare Sonnet, read in chronological order of publication. This week we’re at Sonnet 63. In that time I’ve also been reading Blakes’ Songs of Innocence and Experience, Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen prose poems and now, Shakespeare continues, of course, but he’s joined by Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Rimbaut’s Les Illuminations in John Ashbery’s translation. It’s been truly inspiring focusing on each individual poem in these collections, one at a time, each week. Inspiring too the wide range of poets from all over the world who attend and, often, read.  Poetry is far from dead. Hurrah! Anyway, I’m back.

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If you’ve found my website then you’ll be at least partially internet savvy and, before you hurtle off on your travels around the worldwide web, I’d like to thank you for stopping for a moment and, while you’re here, I’d like to tell you about some of my adventures in cyber space.

I’m lucky enough to spend most of my working day writing – either poetry or fiction – so a lot of my life unfurls in front of my trusty computer up here in a small room at the top of my house a small market town in the UK. Anyone who has ever written anything of any length on an old-fashioned typewriter will know that computer word-processing has replaced typing hell with a walk in the park. Computers are an essential in my life,  no matter how many luddites bemoan the effects of computers on the modern world.

It’s not just the word-processing that has revolutionised my life. The world-wide web, the internet, has opened up so many opportunities for writers, like me,  who mostly live solitary lives alone with their obsessions. It’s not just the access to information that has helped me in my struggles, it is the access to an international community of writers whom I can meet on-line without having to leave my cosy nest. I’m not just talking about social media even though sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide marvellous opportunities for those ‘water-cooler’ moments when you don’t work in an office or a factory and you fancy a break from writing. Over the years, I’ve made many good friends over the internet many of whom, I’ve gone on to meet face to face. I love the way I can mix my writerly need for solitude with the extrovert joy I get from conversation – so easily achieved with a click on a keyboard.

The biggest online difference to my life as a writer has come from my experience in those often misunderstood sites known as virtual worlds. Some years ago, I found the most famous of those sites, Second Life, and experimented with it as an amusing game. The idea was to imagine what it would be like if you really could have a second life. You had to create an avatar, at first a clumsily comical animated cartoon, and then there you were – it was all up to you. That was when I ‘created’ my avatar Wolfgang Glinka who was really just another manifestation of Wolfie Wolfgang my cyber name but, of course, agelessly youthful and shamelessly trendy.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the more I experimented in this alternative life, I merely found more of myself. Wolfgang Glinka, Wolfie Wolfgang, Colin Bell, three-in-one and one-in-three – actually, technology apart, they are, of course, the same person. If Colin Bell is a poet and a novelist in the ‘real world’ then so is Wolfgang Glinka in Second Life.

It didn’t take long to enter the various writing communities in Second Life and, for a number of years now, I’ve been hosting my own weekly poetry event called Wolfie’s Poetry Surf with an open-to-all open mic hour mixed with readings of my own poetry. It is now an established event with poets attending, in the wonderful way of the internet, from all over the world. We’ve had Brits, Americans, Australians, Dutch, Chinese, Singaporeans, French, Georgians, Germans, Italians, Jamaicans, Spaniards and Portuguese among our regulars and many more nationalities besides. The worldwide web makes us truly international just as you, my blog readers, come from every nation in the world.

I particularly value the opportunity to test out new work at these meetings with such a great community of writers. Last night, I tried out recent re-writings that I’ve been making to some of the poems I wrote when I first dared to try my hand at poetry. What looked OK on the page, didn’t always work when read out-loud and I found myself making alterations as I read. It is a wonderful opportunity for any poet wannabe so I’m forever grateful to Second Life.

If you fancy turning up for one of our sessions, it’s not as difficult as you’d think. We meet every Thursday at 1pm American East Coast time (9pm Greenwich Mean Time) and all you have to do is follow this link into Second Life (which is free) and spend a short time making a simple avatar – all is explained and, believe me, it is very easy.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cookie/56/238/21

It would be great to see you there.

Here are some of my other Second Life poetry events:

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