virtual worlds Archives - Wolfie Wolfgang

Baudelaire Day at Wolfie’s Poetry Surf

Colin Bell — Sat, 18 May 2024 16:50:37 +0000

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.

Wolfie’s Poetry Surf 2012

Wolfie’s Poetry Surf 2023

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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A new Fibonacci poem inspired by the art of a friend.

Colin Bell — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 17:15:27 +0000

Fight by Nikola Stanković

I first worked with my friend, the Serbian artist Nikola Stanković, in 2018, when I opened a virtual art gallery, Glinka Gallery, in the virtual world of Second Life: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Seaforth/85/198/29

Nikola Stanković’s outstanding paintings formed our first exhibition there, where I was impressed by the variety of techniques he uses, from drawing to classical oil painting, to achieve inspirational, passionate and ecstatic work on spiritual, erotic, wild life and primeval themes.

Glinka Gallery has now held four shows of his work and the latest one, Animal Instinct, currently running, includes his picture, Fight, above, an enigmatic portrayal of two stags in deadly but seemingly nervous conflict. When we were hanging the pictures at the gallery, there was a space next to this work and Nikola asked me if I had a suitable poem to put there – one that reflected some of the themes of his show. I thought about this for a moment or two but had to say no, I had written nothing that could do that job and then, after another moment or two, I said I would try to write him a poem to hang there. The result was a new Fibonacci poem, a Fib, entitled Rutting which I dedicated to him and subsequently submitted to the excellent online poetry journal The Fib Review, https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/ a specialist in Fibonacci poetry and a great supporter of my syllable-based work in this form.

I was particularly happy to write a poem for Nikola and I saw it as a kind of reciprocal act as a few years ago, he painted a picture for me called Remembering Blue, the title of my poetry collection and a quote from the opening poem there, my Haiku. https://www.bookdepository.com/Remembering-Blue-Colin-Bell/9781908742704

Unsurprisingly, Nikola came up with a picture that was totally unexpected, but which penetrated behind some of the things I was trying to say in my collection. It was a kind of artistic tit for tat. I hope we will work like this more often.

Remembering Blue by Nikola Stanković

Our avatars in Second Life...friends in both worlds.

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Wolfie Caged

Colin Bell — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 18:01:17 +0000

How I survived lockdown.

I have finally got round to writing a blog now that, wisely or foolishly, the great British lockdown is being eased. Until now, I haven’t quite managed to write about this, the strangest of times. I was last on here in February for the launch of my poetry collection, Remembering Blue, http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-poetry-colin-bell-remembering-blue.htm After that memorable event, my last public adventure was when I went to London to see the impressive Troy exhibition at the British Museum.

Then the curtain came down on my life outside my home here in Lewes.

Here are some photographs and thoughts to mark the passage from then to now. Just one person’s view on the extraordinary and, for many, the often tragic interruption to normal life that was, and still is, Covid-19. I know that I have been very lucky.

The reality sank in over Covid-19 and the long lockdown when I looked out of my window one evening. Here is my street in those weird days of silence – days went by with no one out there, it seemed. There were no cars either, but all over the world we had a clear and clean blue sky – an unexpected plus.

On TV, I watched the Italians suffering and showing a brave face – it couldn’t happen here could it?

I had been having my roof retiled and, luckily, the job was finished just before the lockdown rules came into force. So, at least, I wasn’t going to be subjected to scaffolding being my only view.

Instead of scaffolding I got this face at my window next morning – the Waitrose van delivering somewhere in my street made me jump in momentary terror when I saw him, this guy, like someone in The Shining, grinning at me.

Being a writer is a lot like being in permanent lockdown. I was used to spending hours alone in an empty room, so I was unfazed by the experience, especially in the early weeks. Good news comes for a writer when you hear of your work being published, , and it helped at this time that I had three new Fibonacci poems published by The Fib Review – http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html making a total of 100 poems published in consecutive issues, over eleven years, in this impressive journal. I was chuffed by the news of those Fibs and then I heard that Ward Wood Publishing http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/author-search.htm plan to bring them all out as a book. I didn’t need to leave the house for any of this.

All over the world, people learned to come together using the new technological wizard on the block, Zoom. I did it for family reunions, personal training sessions, tai-chi and for my regular poetry group meetings. I worked for me, but I know several others found it distressing and isolating. I had been attracted to the internet and most of its offspring since the beginning, so I wan’t sure why people didn’t find it natural and a wonderful opportunity in a time of crisis.

Then came the Spring, not always a season lacking cruelty, but my flowering cherry tree greeted me every time I looked out of the window and I managed even to celebrate the traditional Japanese hanami ceremony as usual with my neighbours – not quite as usual of course, but we raised a glass of wine to each other over the fence, acknowledging, as the Japanese do at this time, the transience of beauty, and, of course, life.

Being locked-down meant there were less interruptions to my life than usual, so , during this period I finished my third novel, Over the hills is a long way off, and sent it off to the publishers Ward Wood Publishing. A great moment.

Then the tulips in my garden got into full keeping-Wolfie-happy mode. Was it lockdown, or was it one of the loveliest English Springs in memory? A bit of both, I suspect.

Even the flowerpots were seductive in the extraordinarily hot weather that dominated the beginning of lockdown and made life bearable for anyone lucky enough to have a garden.

Lilies and fuchsias started to flower as the temperatures soared and I started to spend longer out in the garden where you can’t feel isolated, self-isolated or any other kind of isolation, because there are the bees, butterflies but, yes, also evil lily beetles ready to devour the seasons most elegant flowers – gardens are seldom as peaceful as they look.

Then, it was Summer. The main event in my garden in any Summer is always the roses – and, this year, it was actually quite difficult to feel down when they were in full bloom. Mine are not just beautiful to look at, but they are shamelessly aromatic. On a hot morning and, for others, early evening, you don’t even have to stick your nose into their petals to get the fragrance.

My little poetry notebook came into its own out in the garden too. I have used this small book for writing poetry, mostly the Fibonacci ones, for over a decade now. It sits comfortably on the garden table and wears the smudges on the cover put there by a shower of rain in Florence when I first started writing these little poems. It is always there for those emergency poetry-writing moments.

Summer by the dustbins can be inspiring too – especially the tiny pond, a French washing bowl from the 1950s, with its irises and waterlilies….

…and, of course, the frog. She has been here in the garden now for three years and, I am not sure if I imagine it or not, but she seems like a friend when she pops out of the water to stare at me. I stare at her too. It feels like a rapport. I resist thinking that she recognises me, but if she happens to be in the pool, she always puts her head up out of the water, and, yes, we greet each other. I often wonder if there can be a relationship between man and frog.

As Summer became hot and sunny here in southern England, and the lockdown continued, I felt extremely fortunate to live in such a lovely place with the leafy Bronze Age mound to the rear of the traditional Sussex flint walls, When the study window is open, I even get a bit of a sun-tan and feel almost out-of-doors when I am at my computer.

In June, up there in my room, my novel-writing surge led me to finish my next book too – well, almost finished, it is the fourth draft of my fourth novel, In the lovely month of May. My time in lockdown has been well-spend completing two fiction projects and writing some new poetry too.

As lockdown eased, and social distancing became a priority, contractors were allowed back from furlough. Electrician Lloyd returned to complete the works that were interrupted in March. The final touch on home-improvements, illuminating the garden and allowing it to be a sanctuary day and night.

The gardening lighting system makes the garden a magical place by night….

….a glass of wine on a humid evening with the roses lit from beneath, and I felt I was living in a movie….

….sometimes waiting for Count Dracula to call.

Novel-writing on pause, Dracula asleep, the sun came back and things apart from just writing came to fruition, like the surprisingly good harvest from the little cherry tree that I planted in a pot last year.

The next important job after so many writing projects had reached completion was to catch up on reading The New Yorker – perfect summer reading was their fiction edition with a ‘new’ Ernest Hemingway short story and one, a rather good one, by the fascinating Haruki Murakami, unpredictable, cryptically profound and witty in turns – I am a fan.

Some idle rose dead-heading resulted in this accidental flower-arrangement in my birdbath. ..all seemed calm and still that day. Yet, I thought of others a lot less fortunate than me. Those that had lost their jobs, who had to live with a family of small children in a one-bedroom flat, the many elderly victims of the virus in Britain’s inadequate care home system, or those who weren’t even lucky enough to have a protective wall against infection, like the Brazilian slum-dwellers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. I hope the world will learn to care about its endangered people after inequalities are so brutally exposed in this terrible time. It’s too easy, maybe, for me to say this from the privileged environment of my own back yard.

My garden, I know is an oasis. It was a good place to continue my study of the complex modernist poetry in Ezra Pound’s Cantos which I am reading, one by one, in chronological order, at the on-line poetry readings I give every week in the virtual world of Second Life. Beyond Pound’s unpleasant enthusiasm for Fascism and anti-semitism (recanted, I hope), I have found many parallels between the troubled world he was describing and our own. Like Wagner, and other ‘bad guys’ who were also geniuses in our culture, we have to hang on to their good bits – we can learn from them, and find inspiration there too.

My virtual world avatar is Wolfgang Glinka, or Wolfie for short, and his weekly poetry event, Wolfie’s Poetry Surf has been running without a break since 2012 http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cookie/57/238/21 – during lockdown, I have not been the only one to appreciate the value of these virtual communities of writers and artists that gather together from all over the world in the much misunderstood virtual world of Second Life. Wolfgang Glinka now runs an arts complex there known as The Glinka Gallery and, during lockdown, opened four new buildings with a festival of fine art, poetry, photography, music and dance. when real life arts venues were all forced to close.

I even got to become a dancer in the virtual world in my collaboration with the creative talents of the Sway & Dance Troupe – we have also made animated films together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAuvt2MOi_E

The Glinka Gallery has been an inspiring project which will, I hope, live long after lockdown ends. Believe it or not, it has kept me in the real world during this strange time when it is not always clear what is real and what is imagined. My virtual gallery is now a recommended venue on the Second Life webpage. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Nolidae/122/233/3001

It would have been all too easy to get really unfit during lockdown but, luckily, I was able to continue my weekly personal training sessions with my excellent and dedicated trainer, Gyles Abbott. https://www.wearesoulfit.com/, who carried on doing our one-to-one classes via Zoom before we were allowed again to meet up once more at his studio. I now have a custom-built weights cupboard in my study and, during lockdown began to do a second personal training session with Gyles’ weekly notes. I have not felt so fit for a very long time.

I am not alone in thinking that many of our new lockdown habits will continue long after the dreaded virus has been defeated. Certainly I am determined to keep up my training at home as a brilliant extension of my fitness regime.

Over the last few weeks I have a new fitness challenge thanks to my friend Vanessa Newman who nominated me to take part in an online push-up marathon #25pushupchallenge on Facebook, when I had to do 25 pushups a day for 25 days to raise awareness of anxiety, depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder issues. Problems, I suspect, only intensified by the lockdown. I hope my efforts, along with all the other participants, did some good. It certainly got me going and I enjoyed it immensely. I got better at push-ups too with online advice from my personal trainer, Gyles, and my ever-vigilant kungfu instructor, Neil Johnson http://www.whitecranefightingarts.com – an example of the positive value of social networking, not just when we are socially isolated. I shall continue to challenge myself with these press-ups – a classic from of exercise.

After three months when I had hardly left the house, some of the restrictions were lifted and, gradually and cautiously, I began to go out to places where social distancing was easiest – like the ruins of Lewes’ 11th century Cluniac Priory…

…or the wide open spaces of the Sussex Downs near Lewes, along the River Ouse…

…and over the hills – but not far away….

then after more restrictions were lifted, it was even possible to do the 6 miles journey to the sea at Seaford…..

…and then to Worthing in West Sussex to visit my mother, who had been socially isolated in her flat over-looking the sea.

In August, we entered another stage in the nation’s retreat from lockdown, I took a train to London for the first time since February. Masked and gloved, I reached the nation’s relatively deserted capital.

I was heading for the National Gallery and an exhibition postponed when all the country’s public venues were forced to close. I have never seen Trafalgar Square so empty.

Practically empty too was the National Gallery’s Titian exhibition, Love, Death, Desire which reunited Titian’s Poesie – six late masterpieces painted for King Philip II of Spain in the late 16th Century and not seen together for nearly 500 years until the National Gallery brought them all together again in London. It was a moving, and, after so long a time of social isolation, an overwhelming experience to see these powerful pieces in an almost perfect setting. Maybe there was a benefit in it being a bit of an effort to book ahead, to arrive at a precise time and to go round the gallery in a small group where everyone could see and appreciate the art on display. It has been a long time since I remember seeing such a serious group of art gallery visitors where people stood, often for ten minutes of more in front of a single painting and, yes, looked.

There was plenty to think about when I was back in my garden, but, of course, tempting though it is to think of the ending of lockdown being the end of Covid-19, that is far from the reality. I hope that people will carry on being careful and responsible in this long campaign against the 2020 pandemic. I hope too, that we will take some of the lessons of this period with us into the future. Let’s try not to pass on our germs to others in public places. Let’s value our personal spaces more, respect the time we need to spend alone in our own heads, and feel closer to our fellow human beings in a world where the virus treated us all as equals. I hope too that we will remain cautious over traffic pollution, and the excesses of early twenty-first century ‘First World’ hedonism.

Finally I have to reiterate my own sense of my own good fortune during this time. I wanted to share my experience of the lockdown, but I am well aware of how different it was for so many others far less fortunate than myself. I have to add too that I usually have the common cold at least several times a year, maybe even too many times a year, but, since lockdown, I have been 100% infection-free – I have learnt a lesson there. I wish us all a new world where, just maybe, there will be a vaccination that works to prevent all future pandemics.

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I’m reading one of my Remembering Blue poems in the Virtual World.

Colin Bell — Sat, 03 Aug 2019 11:40:53 +0000

My poem The Imperial Stamp was filmed in the virtual world Second Life three years ago. I’m playing it here to celebrate its inclusion in my new poetry collection, Remembering Blue.

My avatar Wolfgang Glinka reads my poetry in Second Life.

My poem The Imperial Stamp from my newly published poetry collection Remembering Blue (Ward Wood Publishing). It was filmed three years ago in the virtual world Second Life by my good friend Anselm Hexicola.

The paperback edition is sold in all the usual places but maybe, best, by Wordery, with free postage worldwide:

https://wordery.com/remembering-blue-colin-bell-9781908742704?cTrk=MTU4MTA4MjIwfDVkMzBhOTY1YTQwMTc6MTo1OjVkMzBhOTQzNWJjMDkxLjAzNDg4OTU1OjgzZTNlYjNl&fbclid=IwAR3b-2JitQhwRHeP77gwSr_V8egSKdczwZ-BMix97230qXZyiZ1rLgmTQKc

The digital edition is also available now Kindle – you can buy it from your country’s Amazon.

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Instagram and I have had our first row. (We still love each other really.)

wolf01 — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 09:38:00 +0000

I’ve had a lot of fun with the new technologies that have revolutionised our lives over the last twenty years or so. I’ve recently been marking anniversaries (big ones) celebrating early online networking platforms and the strange virtual realities of so-called games like Second Life. Actually I was also celebrating good friendships formed over the years with folk I first met in a weirdly improbable coming together through the ether.

It has had its frustrations too, this modern technology. OK, I admit it, I’ve often learnt the hard way, crashing, deleting and sometimes offending by my self-taught gallop into the 21st century.

Last February, I discovered the wonderful world of Instagram where you can take photographs with your phone, write something, hopefully, pithy, and post/publish your thoughts instantly. I’ve loved it and posted almost every day onto the site where I could also see other people’s attempts at instant creativity. I’ve enjoyed the experience and have been inspired by the idea of photographing something everyday – some observation from around the house, in the garden, down the road or whatever. It has taught me that you can always come up with a new thought even if you, like me, often spend time alone in a little room with a computer. Well, my joy in Instagram came to a bumpy end yesterday – a temporary one, I hope.

It was early morning, my phone was by my bed, I know, don’t tell me, I fumbled for it to find out the time and then noticed a message from Instagram to verify my password because I needed the extra security, apparently. I know it would have been wiser to have reacted to this after breakfast, or at least when I was more awake. Sadly, I’m not that kind of guy. No, it was straight in – click, click, whoops, click click, whoops. Then my Instagram account changed in front of my eyes. I was now the proud owner of a new account and, yes, I’m sure everyone else out there will know this, yes, my old account had been deleted.

I don’t think we humans ever had this very specific kind of frustration until the invention of the computer. You know what I mean. It’s the utter helplessness of total and permanent deletion. It’s like death but there are no cyber gods to pray to for deliverance. I went to the Instagram site and convinced myself by reading their attempts at calming words that there was absolutely nothing that I could do to retrieve all those photographs and, by then, my 200 followers who appeared to like them. We know it’s frustrating, Instagram says on its site. You’re not wrong there, mate. It’s important to guard accounts against hackers. Well, yes, we humans are great at inventing new wonders and then moving on to invent ways of turning them into ways of stealing from other human beings. I suspect the invention of the wheel soon led to more sophisticated robberies. Anyway, knowing that I was totally helpless was its own therapy.

I was now no longer user name colinbellwolfiewolfgang and where I had been was now silence. I made a radical change of name and became wolfiewolfgangcolinbell. I know, it all sounds so trivial. There it was my new account. A new name, no photographs and no followers. Tabula rasa. The sad thing was that I was excited by the possibilities.

Then I remembered, in a flash of genius, that I had customarily shared my Instagram posts with those other networking sites Facebook and Twitter and then, after breakfast now, starting to retrieve my old posts. I worked at this all day long, like a man obsessed. Surely you could have done something more useful, I hear you say, You are right, I know, but I just didn’t want to let go.

After reposting 115 of my photographs with their original texts, I felt terrific – I was winning. Then Instagram stopped me posting anything else. There is a limit apparently to how many photographs you can post in 24 hours – I’m assuming it’s 115. this is to stop unscrupulous people swamping the site with spam. Well, that’s human nature as well. So I will have to carry on with the process more gradually. Less obsessively too which is a good thing.

I was touched when I looked at my profile page last night and found that already 59 people, either old followers or new ones, had visited the site along with a whole lot more just casual visitors. It felt good again – a small victory against the night.

So I’m back and when I have restored the site to the best of my abilities, I shall return to the hugely enjoyable habit of trying to come up with a new photograph every day no matter where I am or how unpromising the situation. I’d love it if you shared this with me and came to visit me there. I’m now wolfiewolfgangcolinbell and here’s the link:

https://www.instagram.com/wolfiewolfgangcolinbell/

Oh yes, I’m back on there – look:

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The many faces of Wolfie Wolfgang are really one and the same.

wolf01 — Fri, 23 Jan 2015 13:26:00 +0000

Wolfgang Glinka in the virtual world Second Life.

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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