Geek Poetry in fridge magnets (photo: James Kemp)

The more observant and regular visitors among you will have noticed that I’ve not posted much for a couple of weeks. Well there’s a very good reason for that. I’ve been busy setting up Castlegreen Publishing, and sorting out its first proper project. This is a poetry anthology titled Geek Poetry. {That’s not a typo, I haven’t missed an R.}

What is Geek Poetry?

Poetry is really an oral form, and it works best when it speaks to real people and avoids disappearing up its own fundament. So Geek Poetry is the sort of hyper modern stuff that lives in the 21st century and speaks to the inner geek about all the stuff we love, whether it’s computing, role-playing, Doctor ho, Lego, Science Fiction, movies or whatever else gets us excited. I’d class most of the poetry I’ve written in this, even the short Coffee Cravings belongs in this genre.

I’m not the only one that writes this sort of stuff, there are others out there, use your favourite search engine to find some yourself. What doesn’t appear to be out there though is a decent outlet for it. It’s probably not literary enough for most of the traditional poetry journals. I had to do some research on suitable publication outlets when I did the last assignment and that was when I decided that I would find other geek poets and publish an anthology.

Got some Geek Poetry?

So there are two parts to this project. The first one is to collect up Geek Poetry that Castlegreen Publishing can publish. So to that end we’ve put out a call for submissions. In summary you need to send your Geek Poetry to them by 31st July. Here’s the link with more details on what they want and how to send it in.

http://www.castlegreen.org.uk/doku.php/blog/2014-06-10-call-for-geek-poetry

Want Geek Poetry?

The other part is getting people to back the Kickstarter project so that we can fund the production costs for the anthology. These are pretty modest, we need to pay a professional to design a book cover. We need to pay the poets that have submitted poems for the time and effort they put into it, and we need to pay printers and proof readers etc for a short print run of paperbacks to reward the Kickstarter backers and also give the poets some copies of the anthology that they can use for promotions, gifts etc. I’ll also be ensuring that there is a contract for a print on demand that ensures that the anthology will be available in libraries, forward thinking bookshops and from the likes of Amazon. There will also be an e-book version for those that like to read that way.

To do all that I estimate that I need to raise about £2,000 to cover it all. If you think that this is a worthy cause then do please go over to Kickstarter and back it. If you aren’t sure and would like to know more, there is a video on Kickstarter and some more info. If that isn’t enough then do ask questions and I’ll answer them as best I can.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1662901553/geek-poetry