What happened to Baroque in Hackney?

Hi! This post is a sort of prefatory note to the website. The website isn’t a new Baroque in Hackney, as you can see. The website is the main point here, and the aim of the blog is to support that.

This news page is more like a replacement, not for Baroque in Hackney, but for the little intermittent Mailchimp newsletter I’ve been sending out to a few hundred people. for the past few years. It was called the Baroque in Hackney newsletter, but in practice it’s been an undefined workshop-based update, and far too infrequent as I’ve never really got the drift. So this blog, as an integral but slightly peripheral part of this new site, is going to act as a more vibrant and relevant, chatty and informal series of news updates.

I’ll use this space to flag up new workshops, workshop ideas, ideas about creative writing, reflections on writing in the pandemic, maybe some prompts, and so on. If you’re interested, all you have to do is subscribe to it and you’ll get the latest straight into your inbox!

As for Baroque in Hackney, the site fell into a sinkhole last year. The theme it was built on ceased to be supported, and all the emails I was sent about it went into the ‘social’ folder on gmail, so I never saw them. To be honest, I’ve been in a bit of a sinkhole myself since May 2018, and I just wasn’t ready to be dealing with anything like a collapsing website. When it did collapse, and I suddenly realised what was going on, I raked over my hard drive, my Dropbox, and the contents of two external hard drives, only to find that there was not even one backup of Baroque remaining.

Baroque, started on a whim, became the foundation of my writing career,. One day in 2006 my friend Jane taunted me: ‘Do you seriously mean to tell me you’re trying to get a poetry book published and you don’t have a blog?’ Oh, I said. And took my laptop to my favourite Turkish café , ordered a dry white and aubergine meze, opened up Blogger. And it said, ‘TITLE’. So I typed in, Baroque in Hackney.

I had a vision of a sort of magazine blog, or a general interest poetry blog—not just about ‘How I revise my poems’, or ‘My latest set list’, but a blog about a poet’s life, about the things that might interest poets. I wanted it to be funny and be the sort of thing I might like to read. It took a year of googling, following leads, reading everything I could find, Saturday after Saturday after Saturday, to realise that it wasn’t that the other blogs like mine were hard to find. They didn’t exist.

John Field, who later started the wonderful poetry review blog, Poor Rude Lines, saw this too, and wrote:

Katy’s blog, Baroque in Hackney, was and still is a one-off. When Poor Rude Lines started, all I could find online was self-published poetry. Discovering Baroque in Hackney was a shot in the arm. Katy is disarmingly well read, humane and infectiously engaging.

It’s a thrill to read these essays [Forgive the Language, 2015] from our foremost blogger. It’s testament to her talent and a validation of blogging in general. Flicking through these essays on Negative Capability, Dylan Thomas, plagiarism and poetic metre, Katy’s significant contribution to British and international poetry becomes clear. You could set your watch by those tedious little posts asking whether poetry is dead. Meanwhile, with characteristic chutzpah, Baroque in Hackney has just been getting on with the business of creating the sort of online space and conversation that poetry lacked but needed. Erudite – yes. Academic – no (well, not in that way). Baroque in Hackney is for us, for general readers, and surely continues to bring new audiences to contemporary poetry.

The blog had its life and ran for over ten years. It fell prey, really, to natural causes, and to the disruption when I lost my flat in 2018 and had to leave London, and my life changed, and Hackney disappeared… I’ve managed to get hold of a database backup of the whole blog. And the up-to-2012 version, baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com, still exists. And there are little bits of it on the Wayback Machine. And it was archived by the British Library. So it’s not gone forever, and I’m really hoping that this year I can reconstruct some of it in an accessible form..

In the meantime, there’s plenty else going on. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be launching a regular page for my own work, called A Room of Someone Else’s, which will be about writing out this pandemic year, and finishing my memoir of 2018 for CB Editions.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in knowing about workshops and general doings, do subscribe to this blog, which is my new newsletter.