Mike O'Brien

Mike O’Brien has worked with words ever since he bought a sparks album as a youth in the 1970s and was delighted by Ron Mael’s lyrics on the inner sleeve.

He spent the next 40 years in a half arsed attempt to become a pop star. This is recounted in his book 60 Odd Songs, which contains many of his lyrics and stories about how they came into being.

As his chances of pop success dwindled to vanishing point, he turned to poetry as a route to success. So far, he has been published in a handful of literary journals.

He created a website, 60 Odd Poems, as a home for his rejected work, again employing the format of poems accompanied by essays about how they came about. Realising that he owed much of his development to other poets who he knew, he started another site – 60 Odd Poets, taking the role of editor rather than writer.

60 Odd Poets spawned a series of ten printed volumes, each containing work by six poets. This done, he moved on to publishing a quarterly – Odd, the Journal of the Fellowship of the 60 Odd Poets.

He has been described as a very nice, funny, intelligent and down to earth bloke. If you like reading stuff by people like that, you might enjoy his work.

This is an example of it, written by Mike in the third person. He understands this to be a common practice in the literary world.