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Hi everyone.

Just a quick message to let you know that the NICKY JONE MY LIFE IN POEMS book will not be released until the end of August.

Sorry for the delay. It is due to printing and typesetting queues. Almost there....the book goes to print on tuesday.

It will be well worth the wait!

NICKY JONES - MY LIFE IN POEMS will be launched at the end of July.

Nicky has taken the unusual step of writing her autobiography in the form of poems. Each poem tells of a significant event in her life, something which led to change and growth. This is not an autobiography in the conventional sense. The poetry stands alone, but the poems are linked with a short paragraph of prose, thus setting the scene and filling in any gaps in the story. Using the poems as a tool, Nicky takes a warts-and-all look at the things that have happened to her. Married four times, she tells of her determined search for true love, and also of her spiritual search, which led to peace of mind and a greater understanding of what it means to be human.

Reviews:

Nicky Jones has a magical way with words. Her frankness and honesty, sensitivity, and compassion, and sense of humour manage to draw the reader into her poems, so much so they can easily relate to her life. Catherine Johnson. Lecturer & Teacher.

Nicky Jones’ poetry is vibrant and engaging. Her work manages to artfully catch snippets of her life, which she then infuses with universal meaning. The joy is contagious. Gianni di Miele. Poet.

Nicky Jones captures what all poets strive for - to tell a story and relate to others.This bookis what poetry is all about. Cyndi Dawson: Performance Poet.

Please leave your email address in the newsletter section on the homepage if you would like to know when the book is available to buy.

Nicky's work can also be viewed at http:/www.writewords.org.uk/nickyjones/

What is poetry? A short piece of imaginative writing, of a personal nature and laid out in lines is the usual answer. Will that do?

Poetry definitions are difficult, as is aesthetics generally. What is distinctive and important tends to evade the qualified language in which we attempt to cover all considerations. Perhaps we could say that poetry was a responsible attempt to understand the world in human terms through literary composition.

The terms beg many questions, of course, but poetry today is commonly an amalgam of three distinct viewpoints. Traditionalist argue that a poem is an expression of a vision that is rendered in a form intelligible and pleasurable to others and so likely to arouse kindred emotions. For Modernists, a poem is an autonomous object that may or may not represent the real world but is created in language made distinctive by its complex web of references. Postmodernists look on on poems as collages of current idioms that are intriguing but self-contained — they employ, challenge and/or mock preconceptions, but refer to nothing beyond themselves.

Discussion
What distinguishes poetry from other literary compositions? Nothing, says a vociferous body of opinion: they are all texts, to be understood by the same techniques as a philosophic treatise or tabloid newspaper. But that makes sense only to readers of advanced magazines, for poetry does indeed seem different. Even if we accept that poetry can be verse or prose — verse simply having a strong metrical element — poetry is surely distinguished by moving us deeply. In fact, for all but Postmodernists, it is an art form, and must therefore do what all art does — represent something of the world, express or evoke emotion, please us by its form, and stand on its own as something autonomous and self-defining.

Suggestions
1. Poetry may well be the art of the unsayable. A good poem lies somewhere beyond mere words: it is the intangible, an exultation in things vaguely apprehended, something which emerges out of its own form, and which cannot exist without that form. Any poem that can be completely understood or paraphrased is not a poem, therefore, but simply versified or emotive prose (though not the worse for that).

2. Poems are an act of discovery, and require immense effort — to write and to be understood. The argument against popular amateur poetry is not that it uses out-of-date forms (there is no authority here, and art is always an mixture of elements coming in and going out of fashion) but that popular poetry finds its conceptions too readily. Contrary to contemporary dogma, poetry doesn't have to be challenging, but it does have to explore the nature and geography of the human condition.

3. A poem is something unique to its author, but is also created in the common currency of its period: style, preoccupations, shared beliefs. You may therefore grow out of the habit of writing Elizabethan sonnets, if indeed you ever write them, not by colleagues telling you that the style is passé but by understanding the limits of that Elizabethan world.

4. Poems are not created by recipe, or by pouring content into a currently acceptable mould. Shape and content interact, in the final product and throughout the creation process, so that the poems will be continually asking what you are writing and why. The answers you give yourself will be illustrating your conceptions of poetry.

1.
POETRY TO MAKE YOUR SCALP TINGLE 4 Jun 2008 Review by Peter Simmons.

This collection of new poetry is stunning, each page contains a jewel and each one sparkles in a new light. Some major new talent here, I think we will be hearing more of all of them in the coming years. Can't wait for the next volume in the series. I just love it.

2.
THE NEW POETRY : 4 June 2008 Review by Nicky Price.

This is a book to dip into and find a piece for whatever mood you are in - romantic, happy, sad, cynical, humorous. Eleven skilled and committed writers are represented in this collection of poems to remember.

Hi Nicky... I was on my friend shirleys myspace page and saw your comments...I could not resist checking out who you are...and low and behold you have published one of my sweetest poet friends in the UK...Dianne. She was the first poet I read on myspace. I am an ardent fan of hers and consider her a friend! Im so excited to find that you are publishing some of us. I have long thought an anthology of the incredible talents on myspace, would be a marvelous idea. I am glad you had the time and tenacity to accomplish the task to become a publisher. I'm even more delighted you are having a second go of it! I will look into the resources of my inventory as i would like to submit a love poem or two. I'm glad i found you! best, Carol from Oregon.

COPELAND BOOKS’ POETRY COMPETITION 2008

PRIZE: PUBLICATION IN THE NEXT COPELAND BOOKS POETRY ANTHOLOGY

ENTRY IS FREE TO ALL MYSPACE MEMBERS

CLOSING DATE FOR ENTRIES: JUNE 30TH 2008

We are looking for romantic verse in any form, poems about love and about falling in love. No breaking up, no unrequited love, no heartbreak. Just LOVE.

We are looking for unusual poems, quirky, mysterious, passionate, mystical, and magical, beautiful, ethereal, strong, weird, fabulous. (Not necessarily all at once!!)

Poems can be up to 40 lines and must be previously unpublished. Poems posted on MySpace, and poems that have been printed in magazines and newspapers, are eligible. Poets may enter up to 10 poems. If entering the competition, please do so via the Copeland Books’ email address on their website: www.copelandbooks.co.uk The address begins info@.....
Please add your name to each poem, and also include your postal address and email address with your entry/s. If entering by post, please send each poem on a separate page, again clearly named with covering sheet bearing contact details.
Our postal address is also on the website.

A full list of winners will be posted on the Copeland Books website as soon as the winning poems have been selected. They will also be posted on MYSPACE.

And Good luck!


General

Hi Nicky, I received the book and I love it. Naturally, the first poems I've read are yours and they are great. I always need to read poems many times before I really absorb them, but I really enjoyed them first time round. Loved them all. New Born captures perfectly that moment. Red Head: an insight and should be sent to all girls who suffer being mocked as 'gingers'. Bunion really made me laugh - feet really say it all!
I'm going to enjoy dipping in and reading poetry once again after so very long.
Glyn

Readings and conventional interviews are losing their power as marketing tools. Will pop-style promos for novelists restore their allure?
March 23, 2007 10:26 AM
I suspect I am not alone in regretting that an author's charisma does not often match his genius. For every Ted Hughes, whose sweat and passion were the perfect foil to his poems, a hundred writers are like Irvine Welsh - dull, uninspired and oddly flat when glimpsed off the page.
This disappointing clash between fact and fiction seems to have provoked US store Powell's Books to recruit a music video director to make short films about authors. Screenings of the films will replace the traditional author reading, and 50 shops already plan to screen the first movie, due to be 23 minutes long and available in June, the New York Times reports.
Ian McEwan will be the subject of that first film, which will include an interview with the author, alongside chats with fans and other writers.
"Some authors go to events and are really captivating personalities," said Dave Weich, the Marketing manager at Powell's Books, with what looks like deep sarcasm. "That does not describe most of them."
Director Doug Biro has previously made videos of pop bombshell Christina Aguilera and glam sensation Rufus Wainwright, and will have to use all his tricks to whip up as much excitement about McEwan, whose performances so far suggest he was wise to avoid a career on the stage.
Will we see the laconic McEwan in a pink thong and basque like Auguillera, or will he follow Wainwright in dressing up as the Lady of Shalott? Time will tell, and he's only the first in the planned "Out of the Book" series.
"The last thing we're shooting for is two talking heads sitting there talking about literature," said Weich. Talking heads are like so last week; conversation is so over: what do you 21st century folks want from a books broadcast - and whom would you like to see delivering it?

Publishing is becoming a fascinating new world. Thank you for letting me be a part of yours ...

Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.
The appearance of this website is sophisticated
and pleasing to the senses.

Jillian

Extracts posted by Nicky

Stephen Page, president of the Publishers Association argues that in our digital age the relationship between editors and writers is more important than ever.
Saturday March 3, 2007
The Guardian

In February 1934, Geoffrey Faber, founder of Faber & Faber, gave a lecture to the Oxford University English Club entitled "Are publishers any use?" It may come as no surprise to hear that he felt they were, despite "the modern view of a publisher as ... less an arbiter of taste than a parasitic middle-man".

This came to mind when, at last year's Frankfurt Book Fair, I read an article in the Bookseller by an agent who suggested that, in the digital age, writers would no longer need publishers. They would simply post their work online with various retailers and offer their books as downloads or through print on demand. For this they would receive full value for their work, minus a (rather surprising, I thought) 20 per cent commission to the agent. He didn't go into what the agent might do to earn 20 per cent, but he was very clear that publishers were unlikely to add value to this process.

So I am prompted to ask again: are publishers any use? What reasons do they have to exist? What will they do in the future? And, crucially, has the book entered the last phase of its physical life?

I want to begin where our industry begins: with writers. The world emerging at the start of the 21st century is full of threat to those who create. The desire to commodify all art as some form of entertainment, and the growth of a monoculture based around mass-market tastes and distribution, make many writers feel precarious. In the United Kingdom, the declining price of books is resulting in lower royalties and less range in bookshops. No wonder this prompts writers to wonder about a different model where they are more their own masters, receive fuller recognition for their work and feel less brutalised by the experience. The digital world is presented in such a utopian fashion by its evangelists that it seems to provide an alternative model. While none of us knows exactly how this future will evolve, I believe writers will be best served by continued partnership with publishers, though publishers will have to adapt, too.

Publishers are a bridge between the market and writers. While providing an expert route to creating economic value in the work (ie the author's work is rewarded), they can also act as a sustaining and supporting partner.

Publishers also have a role which is about to become much more urgent: ensuring that authors' copyrighted works are sold and not given away. In the digital age, piracy is becoming a serious issue for copyright creators, a bizarre by-product of a technology-driven revolution that has somehow turned into a new manifesto for freedom and democracy. Removing the artist's right to earn a living from their copyright is nothing short of uncivilised: it is not pioneering and attacks the very heart of the culture of every nation. If we learn one thing from the music industry, it is that only to protect artists' rights is potentially disastrous - you have to create value and engage with the new market.

Perhaps the very biggest authors might be able to do this themselves, and perhaps self-published writers will find a small audience they are happy with, but it seems to me that the vast majority of future publishing, be it books, ebooks, pay-per-view or audio download, will require the publisher's expert marketing skills.

But it is of equal importance that publishers continue to do everything they currently do, developing businesses that thrive simultaneously in both the physical and digital universes. You can no more detach these two worlds than you can CD and download sales. And it is my belief that we will be publishing physically and electronically together for a long time to come.

Publishers are not book manufacturers, they are about creating businesses from reading. There will be a revolution in reading around digital technology: there already is in education and academia. But I do not believe that the much-heralded disappearance of the book will happen soon. The history of technology simply doesn't work like that. We will have roll-up books, books on Palm organisers and iPods, mobile phones and PCs. But that is no reason to think that the parallel technology of books on paper will not continue. Also, new technology often reawakens old technology - think of the new audience for radio that has been created by the internet.

The important point for writers and publishers is that it will not be possible to separate these worlds. Online marketing of physical books will have to include the use of content. Content sales online will spin off physical books and vice versa - and this will go on for a long time.