AI report

 

Around six months after my last experiment, I bearded ChatGPT in its den regarding the poetic output of one Tom Edward Phillips (which it correctly identified as “the British-Bulgarian poet, not the visual artist”). On this occasion, I asked it to write two poems – titled ‘Poetry is the New Rock’n’Roll’ and ‘Portishead’ respectively. Previous AI-generated versions of these poems have been utterly dire – often written in rhyming couplets and with hideously clichéd phrasing. This time the results were noticeably scarier, not because they resemble the original poems with those titles in any way, shape or form, but because they both resemble the poems with those titles I might have written now. Were they in Bulgarian, in fact, they wouldn’t look wholly out of place in the new book, ‘Self-portrait with Tobacco Moustache’. I’ll include the two poems at the end of this document because, in the meantime and intrigued, I went on to ask ChatGPT what it thought are the predominant features of a Tom Phillips poem. Its answer alleged that “habits of attention” are more important than “stylistic tics” (I’d go with that) and that the main qualities of my work are that it’s a) “Meditative without being confessional”; offers “A double cultural perspective”; regards “The ordinary as a portal”; and shows “An interest in etymology and language itself”; are “intellectual but not academic”; exhibits “musical restraint”; has “a preference for ambiguity over closure”; regards “landscape as history”; and exhibits “dry, understated wit”. At this point in the discussion, the machine decides that my “broader literary neighbourhood” incorporates George Szirtes, Michael Longley, Alice Oswald and Seamus Heaney (Elizabeth Bishop gets added a bit later on).

It then asked me which Tom Phillips poems I’ve been reading and I directed it towards ‘Kvartal’ – the poem which, although originally written in English, in many ways forms – in Kristin Dimitrova’s magnificent translation, the core of the ‘Self-Portrait’ book. Now the machine’s interpretation focuses on “its allegiance to the local”, “a documentary impulse”, “a refusal to inflate experience”, “urban pastoral”, “tonal democracy” and “plain syntax”. “Finally,” ChatGPT concludes. “I think his work has a quality that reminds me more of some Central and Eastern European poets than of much contemporary British lyric poetry: history is present, but it arrives sideways.”

And so it goes on – with reflections on my work as a playwright and as a translator, the improved visibility of literature in translation, why a translation of Blaga Dimitrova’s Lavina would be a welcome addition to the ‘modern classic’ English-language library (I am here and available for the task!) and even a concession that AI will never be able to replace human translators of literary texts.

What’s scary, of course, is the rapidity with which AI learns. Six months ago it was vague and evasive. These days it’s chucking out thoughts which aren’t entirely laughable – its subtlest point, perhaps, being that I’m not imitating Bulgarian and East European poetry, but am exhibiting its influence. The whole conversation is doused in flattery, and I’ve been lucky enough to get quite a bit of coverage for recent publications, thereby giving AI more material to ‘scrape’, but the machine is no longer simply regurgitating phrases other people have written, it’s making links, considering, coming up with thoughts which are new to me and, I have to admit of interest in a potentially useful way (“tonal democracy” being one),

Saying all this doesn’t mean that I don’t still regard AI as a threat rather than an opportunity, but it’s been an interesting experiment and one that’s probably downgraded my instinctive DefCon3 to DefCon2 – at least for the moment.

Here, should you be interested, are my poems ‘Poetry is the New Rock’n’Roll’ and ‘Portishead’ rewritten in the style of ‘Kvartal’ by AI:

Poetry is the New Rock'n'Roll

The amplifiers retired quietly.

No ceremony.
Only a low electrical hum
left inside the walls.

Now the feedback comes

from vowels
leaning too hard
against silence.

A poem enters wearing 

yesterday's leather jacket,

its elbows patched
with borrowed alphabets.

It has crossed borders

without learning
to salute them.

It knows that every language

keeps a basement

where unfinished songs
wait beside extinct gods,
cheap cigarettes,
and a grandmother
folding history into pastry.

The crowd is smaller now.

 A dozen listeners, perhaps.

Enough
to start a weather.

The microphone
has become a page.

The page,
a dangerous little stage
where metaphors refuse
their assigned seating.

Watch carefully.

A line break
can throw a government
further than a guitar solo.

The old rebellion

travelled by volume.

This one
travels by echo.

A child copies a sentence

into the margin of a textbook.

 A stranger underlines

one impossible image
on a train.

Someone translates it badly.

Someone else
misunderstands it perfectly. 

The poem survives
by changing accents
without changing pulse.

Call it quiet
if you like.

Seeds are quiet.

Fault lines are quiet.

The moon
never needed a drum kit.

When the lights come up,
there is no encore.

Only people
walking home
with unfamiliar words
beating time
inside their pockets,

as though language itself
has remembered

that it was always
the loudest instrument.

Portishead

The sea arrives

without insisting
on being the sea.

It is content

to be mud,
a mirror with poor eyesight,
a long conversation
between tide and stone 

People learn patience here.

Not because they choose it,
but because water
keeps rearranging
the meaning of arrival.

Gulls annotate the morning
with their untidy script.

A dog discovers
that every stick
has travelled further
than anyone can prove.

The high street
wears its decades lightly.

Behind windows
someone is making tea,
someone is leaving,
someone has forgotten
that departure
often looks exactly
like staying.

Across the estuary
another shore
pretends to be closer
than weather allows.

Distance has always been
the harbour's favourite illusion.

Evening lowers itself
into the boats.

Ropes tighten.

Metal cools.

The last light
collects in puddles
where the sky,
unable to decide
whether it belongs
to land or water,
settles briefly
for both.

You leave believing
nothing happened.

Then, days later,
walking somewhere inland,
you notice
your thoughts

still keeping time

with the tide.

The third man not on the moon

 

I’ve always thought of Mike Collins

circling above Neil and Buzz

as they performed their moves

on the lunar surface.

 

That would have been me:

the one in the wings while Hamlet

strode out on stage to give

his stepfather his due.

 

In Cambridge, 1983,

neither the KGB nor CIA

knocked on my door –

not even the sixth or seventh

 

or eighth or ninth man –

so, of course, nobody

looks twice when

I get on the trolley

 

even though my beard

appears to have

Marxist aspirations.

America’s shouting

 

as it always has –

war on earth (Vietnam, Iran)

and space distractions

conveniently arriving.

 

Oh, Mike, I think of you,

how I stayed up all night

to watch that American flag

being unfurled by someone else.

 

 

 

 

Balkan connections

 

Although several of my forebears had connections with countries like Russia and the Netherlands and, through their business interests, with the East Indies and the Virginia Colony, I’d yet to find any links to SE Europe anywhere in my family history.

Given that my mother’s ‘official’ maiden name was Joan Thompson – even though her biological father was my grandmother’s then lover Eric Butler rather than her estranged husband Percy Thompson – it seemed possible there might be a connection, albeit a somewhat indirect one, via Frank Thompson, the British officer who liaised with Bulgarian partisans during the Second World War, was captured and executed by the Nazis, and has a Bulgarian village named after him. That Percy and Frank Thompson’s fathers both lived in Oxford at one time was suggestive, but if there is any ancestral relationship between the two Thompson families, I’ve yet to find it.

It was when I happened to follow up links to a number of academic papers about one of my Elizabethan ancestors, Thomas ‘Customer’ Smythe – of interest to historians as the chief collector of custom duties for Elizabeth I – that I discovered one of his grandsons was granted a hereditary peerage and made the first Viscount Strangford (a so-called ‘Irish peerage’). This grandson was the son of Sir Thomas Smythe, Customer’s most well-known son, and not my direct ancestor (my family line runs through Customer’s third surviving son, Henry Smythe, reputedly the family renegade), but, out of curiosity, I looked up the Viscounts Strangford online. The Viscountcy came to end in the nineteenth century, but the sixth Viscount’s brief online biography revealed that he’d worked in the British diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople and had an interest in Balkan languages. It was his younger son, Percy, the eighth Viscount Strangford (the seventh, his older brother having died without an heir), and, more importantly, his wife, Emily, daughter of Admiral Beaufort (of the famous Beaufort Scale) that provide direct links to both Bulgaria and Albania.

The two met in unusual circumstances. Emily (pictured) was an avid traveller and published a book about her travels in Egypt and Syria. Percy, newly returned from Constantinople owing to ill health, gave it a sneeringly negative review, but this resulted in a correspondence with the book’s author and, with surprising rapidity, their marriage. In 1863, Emily set out on her travels again. This time her journey took her to Albania, partially retracing Lord Byron’s steps to Ioannina (now in modern-day Greece) and then northwards to Butrint, Saranda, Durres and Shkodra. Her account of the journey, On the Eastern Shore of the Adriatic in 1863, was published soon after, with her husband – who’d not accompanied her – providing supplementary material of a rather drier historical nature about the parts of northern Albania she’d not visited herself. The book places Emily among the female pioneers of travel to this part of the Balkans – of which there were several – who serve as precursors to Edith Durham, the great champion of Albanian independence from the Ottoman Empire.

Like his brother, however, Percy Smythe died relatively young (and without an heir), and it was the now widowed Emily who turned her attention to Bulgaria at the time of the 1876 April Uprising against the Ottoman occupiers. Appalled by the brutal suppression of the uprising, she travelled to Bulgaria and engaged herself in humanitarian work, earning herself a reputation as a ‘friend of Bulgaria’ that is now memorialised in monuments and street-names in various parts of the country – most notably, a sculpture in Hisarya and a street-name in Plovdiv. The great Bulgarian poet Ivan Vazov even wrote a poem dedicated to her - 'На леди Странгфорд' - which is available online in Bulgarian here.

I’m no great believer in ‘destiny’ and Emily Strangford is not a direct ancestor of mine, but her husband Percy and I do share a common, if somewhat distant-in-time ancestor in the form of Thomas ‘Customer’ Smythe and it’s interesting that, of all the countries in the world, she had connections with two Balkans countries with which, more than 150 years later, I have developed deep and enduring connections.

Recent and forthcoming publications

Links to poems and translations both (by me and of my work) published in the last year or so, plus a couple of forthcoming book publications. NB In some instances the links are not directly to poems etc, but the relevant location is usually easy enough to find.   

Once There Was Spring: full-length collection of my translations of the poems and prose poems of Bulgarian poet, translator and literary activist Geo Milev from Worple Press, Oct 2025

Scripts of I Went to Albania and Coastal Defences translated into Bulgarian by Zlatko Enev, Winter 2025 

Five poems translated into Serbian in A Too Powerful Word, Winter 2025 - print only  

Four poems in The High Window, Winter 2025 

Interview in Bulgarian re: Geo Milev translations, Literaturen Vestnik 43, Winter 2025

Poems, translations of various Bulgarian poets and a guide to contemporary Bulgarian poetry in translation, BODY, Fall 2025 

Translations of poems by Tzotcho Boyajiev in Ballast and tr.review, autumn 2025

Poem on New Boots & Pantisocracies, July 2025 

Three poems translated into Bulgarian by Kristin Dimitrova in Sofia Metaphors anthology, May 2025

Translations of poems by Kristin Dimitrova, Ilanot Review, March 2025 

Translations of poems by Petar Tchouhov, Littoral 35, March 2025

Translations of Bulgarian poets, ‘Bulgarian supplement 2’, The High Window, March 2025: 

Four poems in Littoral 32, October 2024 

Three poems translated into Bulgarian by Alexander Shurbanov in Потомството на Чосър (The Descendants of Chaucer) anthology, autumn 2024  

Coming soon

Автопортрет с тютюневи мустаци (Self-portrait with Tobacco Moustache), ДА издателство за поезия, 2026: new collection of my Bulgarian poems plus a selection of poems originally written in English and translated into Bulgaria by Kristin Dimitrova, Petar Tchouhov and Ivan Hristov 

A Moment Short of Perfection, White Pine Press, 2026: full-length collection of my translations of poems by Kristin Dimitrova

 

The Vermeer connection

 

When I was a child, among the family legends about a Victorian actress, bankruptcy, a World War One fighter pilot, a grandfather who shot a swan by mistake, unexploded bombs in the Blitz and a scientist who kept a pistol under his pillow, there was a story that one of my ancestors on my mother’s side had written a book. A Catalogue Raisonné of Dutch and Flemish Painting. I tracked it down via Bristol City Library. A multi-volume tome published in the early nineteenth century by my great-great-great-great-grandfather John Smith. That was long before the internet and quite a lot more information about him has seeped into the public domain since then, thanks largely to former National Gallery director Charles Sebag-Montefiore taking an interest in him and publishing a book of his and his descendants’ letters.

Born in Trowbridge towards the end of the eighteenth century, John Smith went up to London to train as a picture framer. He was obviously very good at his craft and, once he’d set himself up in business in New Bond Street, his clients included John Constable and the Prince Regent. This success is presumably how he was able to afford trips to the Hermitage in St Petersburg – without realising, I assume, that one of his first wife’s ancestors, Thomas Smythe, had been in the same city during the early days of Boris Godunov’s reign – and, more importantly in the longer term, visits to the Netherlands where he encountered the work of Rubens and Vermeer. Both artists not being especially valued at that time, John Smith began to buy their paintings and take them back to England where his picture framing business rapidly transformed into an art dealership. He bought and sold paintings for the rest of his life, as did his son and his grandson, before my own great-grandfather blew the profits on various indulgences and had to sell the business after a pleasingly complex series of Edwardian scandals.

On the one hand, it seems that John Smith was instrumental in creating the modern art trade and all its absurdities – it’s perhaps no accident that either Sotheby’s or Christies occupy the premises he once owned in New Bond Streets – while, on the other, he also seems to have played a key role in ‘saving’ Vermeer from oblivion. According to various scholarly sources, it was his inclusion of Vermeer in the Catalogue Raisonné and possible purchase of Vermeer’s works for his illustrious clients that led to the Delft genius being recognised as the important figure in European art he undoubtedly is. It would, of course, be pleasingly spectacular to conclude this story with the revelation that when the last of my ancestors on that side of my family – my mother’s aunt – died last year, we found a long-lost Vermeer in her attic. But we didn’t. It is, however, rather nice to know that my forebear played at least some part in putting Vermeer on the map.

 

Geo Milev translations now published in book form

 I'm delighted to be able to say that Worple Press has just published my translations of the poems and prose-poems of the late great Bulgarian modernist Geo Milev (1895-1925). The book, Once There Was Spring, includes all of Milev's major poems/prose-poems as well as a number of his critical writings and a brief introduction offering some context. In the UK, you can currently order copies from the Worple Press website via this link. I will also be in the UK to promote the book early next year and have a few copies in my hot little hands here in Sofia. Milev was undoubtedly a key figure in both Bulgarian and European poetry in the early twentieth century and I am indebted to everyone who has helped and supported me during the lengthy gestation of these translations. 

Pamphlets from Sofia

Here are the links to the five short pamphlets I've put up on here for free download over the last few summers.

How Much He Knew: prose speculations about my father

Scenes From Unfilmed Cinema - poems

And Now Rousing Music - poems

Foreign In Europe - poems

Present Continuous - poems

Ellerker Gardens

Learning to count to six, out of habit,

as, standing in Ellerker Gardens,

you’d watch, each night, the fire curtain

draw across the roofs of London;

you were listening for a silence in that storm,

the absence of an unexploded bomb.

Could you be so absorbed you’d not recall

an insect bite, a broken date,

the instinct for survival which ensured

you kept well clear of the house

until your father had been and gone?

Just heroism of the ordinary sort

among lattices of blown-out beams

would see you safe, in some way at least,

as you searched through the blackout and blast

for whatever fate was lying, waiting,

cradled in the sixth silence.

AI Horror Show 3

 And finally, before my brain collapses, here's what ChatGPT came up with when I asked it to write a poem about rakiya in the style of my own book Unknown Translations:

Rakia: A Translation

It starts, they say, with the first fruit
on the far side of the valley,
where vines twist into language
and the sky pulls at its seams.
Rakia,
thick as a laugh shared in the dark,
it slips from the bottle like a long breath
held too long,
and burns with the promise of forgetting.

I watch as they pour it,
clear as the first line of a poem
you’d never write,
the golden light caught in the glass
shimmers with the quiet scandal
of things unsaid.

One sip,
a sudden leap into the afternoon's gravity,
where thoughts bend like branches,
too heavy to hold in your hand,
and your tongue thickens with something
close to truth,
but not quite.

"To the mountains," they toast,
hands low, steady
like the rise of dusk,
like the curve of a road that doesn’t quite
meet the horizon.
They speak of home,
of ancestors,
of rivers swallowed in one gulp,
as if the words too might dissolve
under the weight of the drink.

But here,
between laughter and the haze
of forgetting the last word,
the land becomes something else.
What were you holding onto?
Nothing.
You hold nothing now,
just the pulse of fire,
the quiet hum that runs through
the veins of anyone willing to listen
close enough.

Another sip,
and the names start to lose their shape,
the drink a language
too old to be remembered,
but never quite forgotten.

AI Horror Show 2

 And here's what I got when I asked ChatGPT to write a poem about money in the style of J.H. Prynne:

Currency for the Static

Whispers leak through slow hands, folded over
coins older than names—these stretched hours
in the quiet wash of surfaces turning,
the threadbare edge,
insistent.
Numbers breed in compartments under skin,
a slip of ink that lives longer than memory.

You follow the shift in the air
where bodies scatter in metallic breath,
the unspoken glue of green veins,
black veins,
no one speaks of the margin
where value stays without motion,
a waiting stillness that can carry the day.

You grasp it—no,
it pulls through fingers like dust or silk
or the absence of both,
as the gears grind with a velvet ease,
and the check of the hours
still counts by what can’t be held.

Time shudders beneath the weight of change,
reduced, composed.
A map unfolded too late—
not to the edge,
but within it,
hidden behind the print,
where the pulse of surplus rests.

Flourish, faint, in the flicker
of what cannot return,
the door swung wide by an exchange
too deep to see,
too sharp for the blur of
the passing,
counted but never known.

AI Horror Show 1

 And so here is what happened when I asked ChatGPT to write a short story in the style of Richard Osman about two old men meeting in a remote Bulgarian village:

The Two Old Men and the Remote Bulgarian Village

Gerald and Malcolm had been best friends since their youth, or rather, since the youth of a very different time. They’d lived long enough to have seen an entire era of the world unfold in front of them. And while the rest of their peers had taken up knitting or leisurely gardening, Gerald and Malcolm had developed an affinity for… well, peculiar holidays.

"We're not exactly the golfing sort, are we?" Gerald had said on one of those fateful mornings when they were looking for a new adventure. “I mean, I don’t even know what a 'birdie' is, and frankly, I don't want to.”

“No, no," Malcolm had replied, adjusting his glasses, “and I’m still unclear on why anyone would willingly leave a nice warm pub to chase after little white balls in the freezing cold.”

And so it was that the two men found themselves in an old, rusted minibus bouncing along the crumbling dirt roads of Bulgaria’s most remote mountain region.

“Do you think we should have checked the map?” Gerald asked, squinting at the landscape through the foggy window.

“I’m certain we’re in the right place,” Malcolm said confidently. “I mean, this is where the postman said the village was. We just need to get to the end of the road, and we’ll be there.”

The driver, a man whose thick mustache seemed as permanent as the hills, gave them a smile that seemed both knowing and mildly amused. He had dropped them off at what appeared to be a crossroads, with only a ramshackle sign reading “Panteleymonovo” in shaky Cyrillic letters.

“Are we sure about this?” Gerald asked. He had, by now, gotten used to Malcolm’s more adventurous streak, but this seemed just a little too far out.

“Trust me,” Malcolm said, with a twinkle in his eye. “The world needs curious minds like ours. We're explorers.”

“Explorers of what?” Gerald muttered, more to himself than to his friend, as he picked up the rucksack with what he hoped was enough supplies for a few days of…whatever they were going to be doing.

The village was small, no more than a few dozen houses scattered haphazardly across a valley that looked as though it had been carved by the hands of giants who had lost interest halfway through. The air was sharp, with a faint whiff of wood smoke from chimneys that sputtered and huffed, struggling to send their tendrils of warmth into the chilly afternoon.

The two old men made their way to what appeared to be the village square, though square might be stretching it. It was more of a vague open space between two buildings, with a hand-painted sign hanging lazily over a wooden door that read, “Inn.” In fact, the door had been hanging off its hinges for years, but somehow it still managed to function as the hub of activity.

Inside, a woman with hair the color of midnight and a gaze that could freeze a sheep in its tracks looked them up and down. “You’re looking for something, yes?” she asked, her voice thick with an accent they couldn’t quite place.

“Well, we’re just passing through,” Malcolm said, trying to look casual, though Gerald could tell by the slight twitch of his friend’s eye that Malcolm was already plotting to uncover some grand village mystery.

“You want to stay?” the woman asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

Gerald shot Malcolm a look. “Do you think we’re supposed to be here?”

“No, of course not. But what’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like we’re on a plane to anywhere dangerous.”

The woman gestured vaguely to the empty tables around them. “We have… soup.”

“Soup?” Gerald said, his mind turning over possibilities. “What kind of soup?”

The woman seemed to ponder this for a moment. “The kind that warms you.”

“Right,” Gerald said, mentally adjusting his expectations for dinner. “We’ll take two.”

The village turned out to be just as charming as it was puzzling. At night, they found themselves sitting around a long wooden table in the dim glow of the inn’s only lamp, a group of weathered villagers who nodded politely at their presence. The soup was hearty, though neither man could say exactly what kind of meat had been involved in the making of it.

“So, what’s the story with this place?” Malcolm asked, after a few too many rounds of strong, homemade rakia had loosened his tongue.

One of the villagers, an elderly man with a woolen cap that seemed to be the most stylish thing in the room, leaned in and gave them a long, silent look. Finally, he spoke, his voice low, as though he were revealing a great secret.

“There’s a legend,” the man said, “about a treasure buried beneath the ground. Hidden for centuries.”

Gerald raised an eyebrow. “A treasure? In a tiny village like this?”

The man nodded. “Yes. But it’s a curse. The treasure brings misfortune.”

“Oh, lovely,” Gerald said, making a mental note to steer clear of any unexpected mounds of earth. “And who knows where it’s buried?”

“Only those who have come before. But they’ve disappeared, all of them.”

Gerald leaned back in his chair, considering this for a moment. “Well, I can’t say I’m particularly interested in a treasure hunt at my age.”

“No,” Malcolm said thoughtfully, “but if we happened to stumble upon it…”

“Malcolm,” Gerald warned. “This is not the time for treasure hunting. We’re here for a quiet little escape.”

But as the night wore on, and the rakia continued to flow, both men began to wonder whether the legend of the treasure might, in fact, be the most interesting thing about Panteleymonovo after all.

Perhaps, just this once, they could go a little off the beaten path. Maybe just a small dig around the garden. After all, who could resist?

The next morning, after a hearty breakfast that involved more soup (how?), they found themselves outside, peering over the landscape with a renewed sense of adventure. Maybe they weren’t real explorers. But perhaps, just this once, they could get away with it.

And so, with that thought in mind, Gerald and Malcolm set off, two old men with nothing more than curiosity and a sense of humor to guide them. And maybe, just maybe, the beginnings of an entirely unexpected treasure hunt.

As they walked down the dirt path towards the village edge, a voice echoed from behind them.

“You’ll need a spade,” the innkeeper called after them. “But you’ll never find it without help.”

Gerald sighed and turned to Malcolm. “What have we gotten ourselves into this time?”

Malcolm grinned. “Who knows, Gerald? Who knows?”

Fantastic lover

 

We've never met and we won't

though we've spoken on the phone

a bit - well, a bit of business

(if that counts) and phones are dumb.

Our vast and scintillating characters

get stuffed down hi-tech fibre.

You never know who's listening

on spider thread, tenuous lifeline.

You can't hear a bloody thing.

And they won't come and fix it

unless you've got shares.

 

Ah well. I'm not about

to sew my heart on anyone's sleeve,

say "let's chuck everything -

meet me after work at Temple Meads" -

get drunk on cheap Bulgarian wine

(just to make sure) and wander back

to your flat where you'll make coffee:

splutter, gurgle, cough. I'll know

it's instant - but who the Hell cares?

And then we'll think about the risks.

 

There'll be a picture of your lover by the bed.

He gets switched off with the light.

 

In the morning we'll do it again

after I've been to the cashpoint

and - more awkward - Boots.

 

Then, then, yes, then,

we'll walk down by the river

and tell the truth for a change

till, after one more coffee,

I'll get back on the train

never to be seen..... perhaps.

But I'll phone. Tomorrow.

Some recent publications

 A few links to poems that have appeared online and in print in recent times: 

‘In a time of fragility’ - One Hand Clapping, March 2022: https://www.1handclapping.online/post/tom-phillips-a-poem

 ‘Eyrie’ - Litterateur RW, April 2022: https://litterateurrw.com/magazines/march_22/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3SPJOicq1twyZceuDf9G9O35JT9VVE0Qa4zUAV5uOci5r7XCkhuS9uF6E

‘Men Fishing at Sawtell’ & ‘Redirecting the Stream’, Pulp Poets Press, September 2022, https://pulppoetspress.com/2-poems-by-tom-phillips

 ‘Blues for a Total Poetry’, ‘Against Silence’ – Littoral, February 2023 https://littoralpressuk.jimdofree.com/littoral-magazine/

 ‘Cross country to the coast’ – London Grip, March 2023: https://londongrip.co.uk/2023/03/london-grip-new-poetry-spring-2023/#contents

Three poems

 

Sofia Metaphors 2022/Tom Phillips

 

1 Grid

 

Knowing the place of old

from walks home over the hill,

but brought back now to look again

at ancient brickwork, renovations,

the old bell, coppery green,

displaced in its tree …

 

Orange petals flame-like in the sun,

this late September morning,

and drying seedpods turning brown

among a crowd of many voices –

languages moving in and out of range –

and this one gathering for a celebration

with cameras and flowers …

 

We approach along horizontals,

come together, exchange, move apart

beside the church’s verticals:

rooftop dome, latticed windows,

mortar growing less orderly

down through centuries,

down through space

where this couple will be married,

down to mosaic pavement, foundations,

and still further, underneath all,

what remains of Roman tombs.

 

Above first small drifts

of the coming autumn’s leaves

and play of shadows

across tile and earth and faces,

the sky holds onto its blue.

 

2 Perspective

 

Drinking beer in old Lenin Square,

overlooked now by Saint Sofia

and authoritarian buildings

repurposed by new authorities,

there’s warmth coming on

in this tail-end of summer.

 

History finds its feet

in the everyday – theirs and ours -

sharing its shifting proximities.

How to look is where to start.

What lurks among shaded tables,

traffic noise, vaulted arcades

and things that might have been?

 

The statue is turning a blind eye

to ambitions that were transformed –

as they always will be –

from anticipated immortality

to more modest survival – here,

where Lenin once surveyed the square,

overlooked now by Saint Sofia.

 

3 Flow

 

A temple to water –

Philip Larkin’s religion –

in this city so far from the sea.

We could navigate by fountains –

from City Gardens to Presidential Palace

to the endlessly repeating fleur-de-lis

in Banski Square, the old baths

now housing city history,

and, beyond that, the hot flow of the springs.

 

Tram announcements cut across

the muezzin’s call. One man unrolls

his mat by red and silver flowerbeds,

another taps messages on his mobile phone

and a third asks me for a cigarette.

 

Apollo holds his place, discretely.

He is modest in bronze,

head turned away as if unsure

where to look while his acolytes

haul and clank empty bottles to the taps,

trusting in the hope that each drop

will grant them health, long life, as they

haul and clank full bottles from the taps,

carrying with them more than a mere commodity.

 

Tom Phillips, 24/9/2022

How Much He Knew: prose pamphlet

For the last few summers I've published little pamphlets gathering up poems from the last 12 months or so. This year, however, it's a piece in prose about my father and the circumstantial evidence that he might have had another secret life. As with the previous online pamphlets, it's entirely free to download and you are more than welcome to read it by clicking on this link.

Dubliners on the Adriatic

Dubliners on the Adriatic

La mia anima è a Trieste…

1

Trieste. Trst. Tristesse.

Rustle of sea birds rising

from this doubling bay,

suggestive echoes along the Canal Grande:

here, of all places, to stumble on

Joyce among the Hapsburgs,

blind bronze staggered mid-stride.

 

Unhinged from its hinterland,

this polyglot port’s piazza’s fading

hulks outline a century’s diminishment:

‘the last foothold before…’ etc, etc,

(barbarism, in short),

Austria-Hungary’s gravestone wedged

in the crotch of the Adriatic.

 

Distant Istria fumes blue in the heat.

White Miramar – from where

reluctant Maximilian despatched

for Mexico (and Manet) – plunges

foolishly above the sea,

imperial mockery mocked,

the silver, unmoving sea.

2

City of sighs,

where the wise

keep their eyes on

the empty horizon,

though no ships come

and the quays are dumb

as Franz Ferdinand

lumping up the Corso,

dead. Or the Risiera

where the Jews were killed.

 

3

But staggering mostly, by ill-repute,

he was, from quay to quay,

until Consul’s counsel held sway,

and he teetered off to the bahnhof.

 

Under palms, under plane trees,

Joyce whistled off-key by the Chiave D’Oro,

(girls there knowing him, by ill-repute),

for his Triestine tryst with Nora.

 

With other tongues loose in his mouth –

Honest, Jim, she’ll smell them on your breath! –

and her fresh-flustered from the Zurich train,

he fanfared her exile into his free world,

waltzed her through statued gardens,

his animated, Babelous greeting:

‘Per donna, jam hors de clay.’

 

Tom Phillips

From 'Recreation Ground' (Two Rivers Press, 2012)

It's Christmas

Hello,

 

First of all, apologies that this isn’t a directly personal letter. I had good intentions, but then there were booster jabs to be sorted, applications to get our Bulgarian residency permits changed in line with the new post-Brexit regulations before the 31 December deadline, Sarra’s extraordinary Birds.ofthegarden art project, day-to-day work stuff and so on and so on. And now it’s a few days before Christmas and there’s the usual pile-up of things to get done before the holidays and so …

 

Like many people, we’ve spent most of 2021 adjusting to the various adjustments that we’re all having to deal with. And then adjusting again when the adjustments get adjusted. The situation in Bulgaria has been relatively calm - despite the scary reports in the autumn that it was the ‘sick man of Europe’ with the highest Covid mortality rates - and people are now finally getting themselves vaccinated: I think we’re up to 50% of the population for a first jab, which isn’t great, but it’s better than it was. Bulgaria also now has a government, which will probably help. There have been three general elections this year, the first two of which didn’t deliver a viable coalition. Now we have the so-called ‘Harvard boys’ - under the banner of a brand new party called We Continue the Change - who have vowed to defeat the endemic corruption that’s blighted Bulgaria ever since the so-say transition from communism to capitalism began back in 1989. “Good luck with that” is probably the most reasonable response - especially as they’ve had to form a coalition with the Bulgarian Socialist Party, whose record on corruption isn’t exactly pristine. Still, on the day the new PM went to the Presidential Palace to sign on the dotted line we saw him twice on the streets of Sofia - once waiting at the pedestrian crossing at the junction of Rakovski and Tsar Osvoboditel and again outside the Palace surrounded by reporters (in four years of living here we hadn’t seen the previous incumbent Boyko Borisov in person so much as once). No limos and security guards with flak jackets and pistols for the new guy - well, not just yet anyway.

 

Despite recurrent lockdowns, it’s not been a year without things actually happening. Poems and translations have seen the light of day in various journals; I put out another free online pamphlet of poems in the summer; and the book of critical essays I edited, Peter Robinson: A Portrait of his Work, was published alongside his own book of essays A Personal Art, by Shearsman in the autumn. As some of you might know, the book of critical essays has been several years in the making so it’s been especially pleasing to see it in print (albeit only held up to a laptop camera by Sam during a Zoom call). In other book-related news, the translations of the Bulgarian modernist Geo Milev that I began producing as my first ‘lockdown challenge’ last year have also appeared in various guises - after Raceme in Bristol published a sizeable sample last year, The High Window followed suit with what are arguably Milev’s most famous works, The Icons are Sleeping and September, while the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation - which promotes Bulgarian literature in translation - invited me and my translation buddies from Sofia University, Angel Igov and Bozhil Hristov, to stage a webinar about the project which received some very positive comments from the ‘big names’ in attendance (whose presence was thankfully unknown to us at the time as it would have cranked up the anxiety level!) The upshot of it all being that, this time next year, a selected Milev - poems, prose poems and some critical texts - will be published by Worple Press in the UK - the first major publication in English of work by a writer who’s a key figure in both Bulgarian and European modernism in general.

 

Sarra too has been busy. Although Artist Tree Sofia dissolved as a public art project/space last year, we’ve kept the studio on for Sarra to work in - at least when it’s not perishingly cold. Over the summer, she also came up with the idea for Birds.ofthegarden which came to fruition in the autumn when, early one October morning, you might have spied us wandering through Borisova Garden, leaving her small hand-crafted clay birds under benches, on tree stumps and in the clefts of branches. Each one has an Instagram link attached - the idea being that anyone who finds a bird can take it home, give it a name and post a photo of it in its new home. To date, we’ve ‘landed’ some 90-odd birds in five parks and gardens in Sofia - Borisova was followed by Zaimov Park and we’ve just completed three special Christmas ‘editions’ in City Gardens, Crystal Garden and the garden of the Church of the Seven Martyrs. Not everyone who’s found a bird has posted a photo, but the project’s obviously proving popular and there are some regular ‘fans’ who have become quite obsessive about tracking the birds down. Bulgarian National Radio broadcast a short interview with Sarra only the other day and she’s now preparing an even larger flock to be distributed around South Park for 1^st March - i.e. Baba Marta, the day we all adorn each other with red and white bracelets in order to cheer up Grandma March and ensure that the weather behaves itself in the first month of spring. Do go and have a look on Instagram and Facebook.

 

Needless to say, various days jobs have accounted for much of my time: writing articles about contactless technology (I am now something of an authority on China’s experiments with digital currency), teaching a couple of Bulgarian businessmen English (or rather listening to them speaking English fluently and occasionally correcting minor mistakes) and running various online creative writing courses for Sofia University. Indeed, this year has seen the creative writing ‘department’ (i.e. me) expanding its activities so that I now have a first-year course as well as a fourth-year course and an MA module - which was run in partnership with the University of Bokhara in Uzbekistan last year and I’m hoping will be again as it means I have a real mix of Bulgarian-, Chinese-, Russian- and Uzbek-speaking students, each of them drawing on different cultural traditions, even though for my course they write in English. It also means that I’m sent homework assignments that begin ‘I was sitting on the train to Samarkand …’

 

Our own travel ventures have, of course, been somewhat restricted, although we did manage to get to the Black Sea over the summer, following a tried and trusted route from Sozopol in the south and then northwards via Nesebar and Varna to Balchik and then a night in Veliko Tarnovo on the way home. When she wasn’t on a train or bus, Sarra spent most of the time in the sea, while I reclined on a lounger with Henry James and Cervantes for company (yep, four years into ‘Don Quixote’, I’ve still only reached the early chapters of the second part). Beachside cocktail bars also seemed to figure quite prominently and there was a particularly splendid moment when we were sitting on the terrace of one such bar in Varna and realised that what we were looking at were sea otters frolicking in the sea.

 

The news from the UK-wing of the family is a little mixed: both my aunt and Sarra’s mum have dementia and my aunt’s has now reached the point where she’s had to move into a care home. Our dog Odie finally shuffled off this mortal coil too, having succumbed to an almost impossible to imagine range of chronic health conditions, but then, he was also a rescue dog from the RSPCA home and had been on ‘death row’ there when we took him on because nobody else wanted him, so he had ten years of life with us that he wouldn’t have otherwise have. Sam, meanwhile, has gone back to university and is currently studying for an MA at thee University of Bristol and Lydia is teaching - although the film she was in with Judi Dench and Eddie Izzard did finally surface earlier in the year and we were able to watch it twice on Bulgarian TV (viewings mostly punctuated with yelps of ‘That’s Lydia! There she is!’)

 

Otherwise there has been quite a lot of reading going on and my ongoing jaunt through Bulgarian literature’s taken me through Zarev’s blood huge trilogy ‘The Tree of Life’ (a sort of ‘Downton Abbey’ set in Vidin), Blaga Dimitrova’s slightly disappointing ‘Journey to myself’ (disappointing after her absolutely wonderful ‘Avalanche’), Elin Pelin’s short stories, Kristin Dimitrova’s fine re-imagining of corrupt Bulgaria as a world populated by Greek mythological figures and, currently, Donchev’s ‘Time of Separation’, which I just know is going to culminate in a huge massacre of Bulgarians who refuse to convert to Islam in the 17^th century. Reading in English has been a bit less dedicated, although reading a slew of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories got me through the languid days of my first Astra Zeneca reaction and subsequent visits to the excellent multi-lingual secondhand bookshop on Gladstone, just behind the City Library, have yielded all sorts of gems, including Naipaul’s ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ and ‘A Bend in the River’, Henry Miller’s ‘The Colossus of Maroussi’ etc - most of which are currently lying around our flat, partially begun.

 

Despite the seemingly inevitable ups and downs, however, we’re generally fine and in no worse a position than we might have been had we not moved to Bulgaria. We obviously miss family and friends in the UK, but we have a wonderful circle of friends here and it only takes a brief hike up the hill from where we live to see the golden domes of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral and Vitosha mountain on the horizon to remind us why we came here in the first place. Chumerna Street (where we live) also remains an endlessly fascinating micro-environment and in the autumn my sequence of poems written on our balcony, ‘Kvartal’ (‘Neighbourhood’), was published in Bulgarian translation (by our great friend Kristin Dimitrova) in the ‘Literary Newspaper’ here as a sort of chronicle of life in this particular part of Sofia.

 

With luck, we’ll be visiting the UK towards the end of January - me for two weeks, Sarra for a month - and then perhaps things will open up a little in the spring, but who knows?

 

The most important thing in the meantime is that you have as good a Christmas and New Year as you can and that we stagger on into a 2022 which might be more forgiving than either 2020 or 2021.

 

Much love from both of us,

Tom & Sarra XXX

 

Scenes from Unfilmed Cinema: Director's Cut

 

Publishing online means that you can change things, so I'm now posting a link to an updated version of the pamphlet of poems that I've written in Sofia over the last year or so ... It is not substantially different to the earlier version published in August, but there are minor revisions to most of the poems it contains ... You should be able to download the updated 'director's cut' version by clicking here.

You can also read four other new poems not included in this pamphlet in The High Windows online magazine via this link.

Scenes from Unfilmed Cinema: new poems from Sofia 2021

 

As in previous summers, here's a little pamphlet of poems, mostly written in Sofia over the last year or so. It's entirely free to download and do share it if you'd like. You should be able to read it by clicking on this link here.

If you cast about on older posts on this blog, you should also be able to read three previous summer pamphlets from Sofia.

Bristolian/Bathonian readers might also like to know that the cover photograph features a Stothert and Pitt dockside crane made in Bath, England, that now resides unused on the harbourside in Thessaloniki.

Online activities

Here are links to various online events I've taken part in this year - posted here, perhaps, because it's easy to start thinking that you haven't done anything at all during the pandemic. Most of the links lead to online poetry readings, but there are also videos from live events, conferences and so on. 

10 July: Poets and Writers International Studio, online reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DsXS-cQvjo

9 July: Back to Back/Face to Face, Sofia Literature and Translation House reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDlr9rS36NM

27 June: Poets without Borders, online reading: https://www.facebook.com/DonNKrieger/videos/10220450504639863/

13 June: Poets without Borders, online reading: https://www.facebook.com/DonNKrieger/videos/10220367299639790

6 June: Poets without Borders, online reading: https://www.facebook.com/DonNKrieger/videos/10220327372601639

2 June: Saloanele literare “Familia” #4, online reading: https://www.facebook.com/revistadecultura.familia/videos/1281932195543437

23 Apr: All the World is Translation: conference in honour of Alexander Shurbanov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fINz552y9o

17 Apr: Poets with Borders reading for Coracle Europe Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NpzyEiK5ZU

26 Mar: Translating Geo Milev with Angel Igov and Bozhil Hristov for Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, online seminar: https://youtu.be/ifVLejgLd7g

(Photo of me and Kristin thanks to Sofia Literature and Translation House.)