I am currently getting ready for [drum roll] my first solo exhibition, and this is the boxed and unboxed chaos in the room that I work in. I am installing the work next weekend in The Front Room at the Anteros Art Foundation on Fye Bridge Street, Norwich.

We are having a public, Private View on 20th February starting at 7pm, and from 8pm there will be poetry readings from George Szirtes and myself, new prose from Ian Nettleton and music from Paul Finlay of Das Fenster and the Alibis, and Girl du Bois.  The exhibition will run till 7th March, and as it’s right in the window it might be hard to avoid if you are walking past!

I was delighted when Flik Hemmant who is the new Director of Anteros invited me to exhibit there.  I may start calling myself an ‘artist’ very soon.  I’ve only just tentatively started calling myself a ‘poet.’  I like Gwyneth Lewis’s quote: ‘In England, if you say you’re a poet, it’s as if you have a personal hygiene problem.’  But mostly, I think it’s because where I come from, it’s like giving yourself airs and graces.  But I do write poems, so I must be a poet.  If I call myself an ‘assemblage artist’ this takes the pressure off the second word and leaves me with something I can maybe live with.