Hello! This is a post to announce Ink-Blue Thoughts, a new poetry podcast (at least, I think it’s a podcast…) ‘n general self-indulgent endeavour by me!
Over the last ten years, I’ve written over 400 poems & a number of longer works – some poetry, some prose, some poetrose, coming in the form of longer poetry, short stories, novellas. I’m currently trying to turn one series of my poems into a TV show & another series of my poems into a play, along with actually continuing & finishing both of those currently only part-done poem series. This podcast is the next step in my DIY, self-publishing journey, and my unending, very, very marginally successful attempts to get my writing in front of as many eyes (and now into as many ears) as possible!
After spending a number of years sharing my writing only online via WordPress, & eventually Instagram, I began to experiment with sharing it offline. I started this with my first novella, The Floating Harbour. I serialised it by taking each chapter, giving them title pages with photos of the relevant area of the Bristol harbourside & Old City (which is where the story takes place), and then left them – printed and stapled – in different cafes throughout Bristol. I also created some little poetry collections – again, these were simply printed, folded, stapled. I left them in the same kinds of places – some to stay as café or library copies; others in piles to be taken freely. I’ve also used a printing company called Mixam (that’s not a sponsorship, but hey – one day?) to produce some slightly less low-budget collections, complete with artwork by family, which I have attempted to sell, both via sitting with the booklets and a card reader and via leaving them with a price list and a QR code as honesty box for payment. I have made leaflets that act as teasers, or crappy little posters, for longer works, with the title and a cover picture on one side; an extract, short blurb, and QR code on the other side (the QR code taking people to a free, downloadable PDF of whatever it is the leaflet is for). And I hope to eventually set up an online shop, also called Ink-Blue Thoughts, where I can sell those less low-budget collections, as well as handwritten poetry books. I want to add more poetry collections as time goes by and eventually my long stuff too. As far as traditional publishing goes: I’ve done a bit of increasingly begrudging grovelling to the gatekeepers here & there, but, aside from a tanka published in the journal Atlas Poetica and a poem published in the collection Bring Me Gold: Fifty Poems For Palestine, I’ve had no other luck going the traditional route.
The poems will begin from the second episode, as the first is an introduction. I will be going through each of my poems chronologically, one per episode. When I reach a longer work, such as The Floating Harbour, I will stop the main series of poems to serialise the longer work over a week or few. Essentially, they will be like mini-series asides to the main series.
Now, because the main series episodes are going to be readings of my poems, they will vary in length – sometimes, massively. I mean, there are going to be episodes where the intro music and me reading the title will be longer than the poem itself! There are also some cases of visual poems, or poems where the experience of them is entirely in the way words are spelled and formatted, and reading them out loud would lose the point – do not forget that writing is a visual art, and a poem created to be read, to be brought to life by the mind’s eye voice of a person as they experience the poem on the page or screen through the active engagement of their eyes, cannot be heard. I will still include these, and still give the title and publish date as normal, but then discuss the poem instead of reading it.
At one point, a few years ago, I was self-learning Japanese, and, as part of this, I wrote some poems in the language. Having long since abandoned that goal, I’ve gotten myself into the rather strange situation of no longer being able to read a bunch of the poems that I myself have written… So, when I come to those, I will have to remind myself of what I was writing & how to pronounce it! I’m now self-learning Egyptian Arabic so… we’ll see where we end up with that.
I also want to eventually get around to making different kinds of episodes. For example: an episode of thoughts on copyright, Creative Commons, and licensing; an episode on particular types or forms of poetry, and my coming to know them and experiment with them; an episode on what I’ve found through teaching writing to children. Maybe it could even be interviews! It would be super interesting to talk with others about poetry and writing. If this is ever a platform of any size whatsoever, I would absolutely love to share it with others. Otherwise it’s just gonna be me reading out stuff by me until there’s no stuff by me left for me to read…
Going forward, my plan is to release 4 episodes per week – on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, & Sundays. On some of those days, I will release two episodes, usually when one or both poems are very short. I’m sure that, as I go along, the way I do things will change, adapt, revert, evolve. I’m really excited to start sharing my writing in yet another new, and yet deeply different, way, through another medium. I might be talking to the void – but I don’t mind speaking my writing to the void.
If you would like to read my writing (written will forever be its truest form, and reading it for oneself is something that I hope anyone who discovers my work through this podcast will experience) you can find all of it here on this WordPress.
You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts (can’t quite believe I just said wrote sentence), and you can follow it on Instagram @inkbluethoughts, and you can follow me personally there @williamaltoft. I also have a Patreon under the name Ink-Blue Thoughts. I’ve created some tiers that people can choose from as different levels of support, & there is a PayPal too if anyone would like to throw coins into the upturned hat. However, as ever with my writing, it will all be freely available for all for always. Giving my writing but the briefest chance before your eyes or ears is all I would request – anything more than that is beyond expectation, and wonderful.
So, hopefully see you there! First two episodes available:
1) Introduction
2) Poem #1 – Go Tell The Gods
Links:
Contact: inkbluethoughts@gmail.com
william altoft 