Equinoctial

 It’s just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead, we push ourselves ahead.

(Dar Williams, ‘The End of the Summer’)

Autumn equinox will be reached in the early hours of Tuesday 23rd September. 2.29 am GMT. A good point from which to reconsider both the season past, and the season arriving.

I’m travelling up to Glasgow every week now for my new lectureship at the University of Strathclyde, and I’m full of that peculiar mixture of excitement and sadness a new term in a new place always seems to bring.

The next major event in my poetry calendar is the Wordpool Poetry Prize Awards Ceremony on National Poetry Day (Thursday October 2nd) as part of a day of poetry events Wordpool are hosting. After the winners and commended poems are announced, and we hear the poems, a coach will take everyone round to the site of the poetry illumination, and the winner will switch it on. An animated film of the winning poem is being made, along with the illumination, and I can’t wait to see what the artists have created. I’m pretty excited. Dr. Who has touched that switch, in two different regenerations. As David Tennant noted when he switched the illuminations on in ’07, ‘Red Rum once did this with his hoof’. It’s not often poets get a chance to stand alongside timelords and race horses in any listing, so this will be rather special.