Sophie Herxheimer
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sophieherx.bsky.social
Sophie Herxheimer
@sophieherx.bsky.social
880 followers 240 following 38 posts
Artist, Poet, Londoner, Mother, Teacher, Draw-er of Stories, Maker of Books, Ink Enthusiast, Collagist, co-anthologist with Bill Herbert
@ghostfurniturecatalogue, submit?
www.sophieherxheimer.com
www.poetryteapot.wordpress.com
(More settled on instagram)
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
tomjenksuk.bsky.social
Very pleased to have a poem up at Ghost Furniture Catalogue, from my Mum & Dad sequence. Thanks to Bill Herbert and @sophieherx.bsky.social

ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2025/10/27/t...
Tom Jenks: from ‘Mum & Dad’
‘Exciting opportunities make me tired’ Dad complains,‘like board games, opera, or the countryside.’Dad just wants to drink Tizer and remember things,like when the nuns learned to roller skateor the…
ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com
October 28, 2025 at 6:57 AM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
carolineanjali.bsky.social
Happy Monday ✨ I am pleased to announce the publication of my article 'London Blakeans' in vol. 89 of 'Publishing History'! Thank you to all who contributed ❤️❤️
www.proquest.com/scholarly-jo...
www.proquest.com
September 1, 2025 at 4:43 PM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
billherbert.bsky.social
Many thanks to the poets who took part in the #EcoSonnetChain:

#LindaFrance, #EmmaMust, @calebparkinpoet.bsky.social, #AnnSophieBalzer, @janeburn.bsky.social, #TishaniDoshi, #JemmaBorg, @jsaphra.bsky.social, #JacobPolley, @sophieherx.bsky.social, @helenmort.bsky.social, #SteveEly, & #GlynMaxwell.
August 18, 2025 at 11:45 AM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
billherbert.bsky.social
“…Our Wandsworth teacher told us
how to tell ‘the black bib male sparrer’
from ‘the laidee one’, in her once common, now rare
south London chant... She’d yell from out
her Clapham grave to hear of sparrers in decline.
‘Parrakeets! You what?’”

@sophieherx.bsky.social #EcoSonnetChain (4/4)
June 20, 2025 at 10:11 AM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
billherbert.bsky.social
Sophie’s sonnet, #10 in the sequence, brings together the toll of species loss and the parallel threat to social cohesion posed by gentrification by posing the interesting question: what do we mean by ‘common’?

#EcoSonnetChain #NewBootsAndPantisocracies @sophieherx.bsky.social

(3/4)
June 20, 2025 at 10:09 AM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
billherbert.bsky.social
Except this week, it’s the final poem of Phase 1 of our Thursday posts (by Claudia Court), and the sonnet happens to be by GFC co-editor and New Boots protest calligrapher, @sophieherx.bsky.social.

So it feels like everything is pivoting at once. (No, we didn’t plan this. Are you kidding?)

(2/4)
June 20, 2025 at 10:07 AM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
billherbert.bsky.social
Our tenth eco sonnet just alighted on a nearby branch and it’s by @sophieherx.bsky.social. What’s common and what’s no longer so? Birds and language and identity - each under seemingly equal threat:

newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/2025/06/19/e...

#EcoSonnetChain #NewBootsAndPantisocracies
Eco Sonnet #10 – Sophie Herxheimer
It’s bad because we don’t know what will happen.The bush is singing and it shakes with sparrows.Say a sparrowhawk hurls in and decimatesthe flock. Those that live chirp on. Are their shrieksrelief …
newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com
June 19, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
jobellwriter.bsky.social
Persons of London! I'll be in town soon to launch my memoir Boater - first at the Poetry Pharmacy inside LUSH on Oxford Street (Weds 20 June) and then in Word on the Water near King's X (Weds 2 July, 3-7pm) Both free - and for the Poetry Pharmacy you need to book via the link below. Please come!
Launch of Boater - A Life on England’s Waterways
Join award-winning poet Jo Bell for the launch of her debut memoir at the Poetry Pharmacy, Oxford Street
www.eventbrite.co.uk
June 8, 2025 at 8:29 PM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
annewelsh.bsky.social
Thanks to @sophieherx.bsky.social for a great workshop @royalacademyarts.bsky.social this evening. Erasure poetry FTW.
Erasure poem based on a photocopy of a book about Victor Hugo, including black graphite illustration of Hugo and of me!
May 29, 2025 at 8:10 PM
sophieherx.bsky.social
Where do the essential human tasks of caring for each other and making art meet?
Dan Schifrin & I discuss how these processes do & don’t dovetail in our new podcast series #artandotherpeople

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a...
Care in the Chaos: A Filmmaker's Creative Journey (Sarah Gavron)
Podcast Episode · Art & Other People · 26/03/2025 · 44m
podcasts.apple.com
May 23, 2025 at 9:18 PM
sophieherx.bsky.social
I got round to writing a substack post - looking at paint as a way in & out of the news, and a visit to the Noah Davis exhibition at the Barbican Centre yesterday.

substack.com/@sophieherxh...
‘Painting for my Dad’ by Noah Davis. Shows the back view of an older Black man in jeans and t shirt looking from a rocky chasm into the cosmos.
May 3, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
sashadugdale.bsky.social
The Polish poet Krystyna Miłobędska (1932-2025) died last week. She was an important poet, her work experimental, scrupulous, spare, but also deeply enjoyable. Here’s part of her script for a rare public reading, tr. by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese & published by me in @mptmagazine.bsky.social in 2013
Truthfully, my autobiography as a writer (and not only as a writer) looks like this: A crow settles on the tip of the thinnest twig, though the seat is neither comfortable nor safe, and the swinging itself is a mere trick to keep balance. It is scared. Pretends to be a lighter bird. I am a creature that is heavy, awkward, hard of seeing, hard of hearing, hard of speaking. This creature wants to appear nimble and weightless to itself and to others. It pretends that it knows well how to live and write smoothly, without any effort. And yet, all the time, it is learning life and writing. It is scared of its own awkwardness, scared that others might notice. To talk about oneself and one's own writing is to talk about imperfection. I will remain this heavy bird.
April 24, 2025 at 5:32 PM
sophieherx.bsky.social
This gave me thrill this afternoon #colour
Two plump bright green parakeets in a flouncy cherry blossom tree in Brockwell Park.
April 2, 2025 at 10:28 PM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
billherbert.bsky.social
It’s Monday, and that means there’s an empty space in the #GhostFurnitureCatalogue that needs filling with - another empty space.

Thanks to Joan Hewitt for this melancholy exploration of the Italian root for ‘stanza’:

ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2025/03/24/j...
Joan Hewitt: The Empty Stanza
It must be swept clean, kept aired,the window opened on a real or an imagined scene.It scarcely matters if a boy slithers over snowin dirty trainers, or an improbably violet seadoes the moon’s bidd…
ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com
March 24, 2025 at 5:38 PM
sophieherx.bsky.social
#mimosa
March 21, 2025 at 11:09 PM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
billherbert.bsky.social
#ExecutiveDisobediences #3 is by Beth McDonough and is in the form of a recipe written in opposition to Executive Order 14160: ‘PROTECTING THE MEANING AND VALUE OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP’:

newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/2025/03/20/e...

#NewBootsAndPantisocracies
Executive Disobediences #3 – Beth McDonough
Responding to Executive Order 14160 ‘PROTECTING THE MEANING AND VALUE OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP’ When oranges are the only fruit: a recipe.Ingredients: Get every fruit you can.Pick up the…
newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com
March 20, 2025 at 6:55 PM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
clairecollison.bsky.social
My poem, to be whispered widdershins, is featured today in the marvellous #Ghostfurniturecatalugue
March 3, 2025 at 2:47 PM
sophieherx.bsky.social
Defy AI with observational painting & other diversionary tactics
poetryteapot.wordpress.com/2025/01/30/p...
postcard in watercolour
Cold January strimmer work at the allotments It seems like forever since I wrote a blog post, I trust you were not on the edge of your seat? My impulses have been diluted by a sideways step into Su…
poetryteapot.wordpress.com
January 30, 2025 at 11:45 PM
sophieherx.bsky.social
If you see this post, quote with a bridge from your gallery
The wooden bridge across the estuary and its reed beds at the beach in South Milton - Devon
January 24, 2025 at 7:57 AM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
greeningpoet.bsky.social
Every furniture catalogue (even a ghost one) needs a bed. #Rilke knew a thing or two about beds & ghosts. He certainly spent time in richly furnished property. Thanks to @billherbert.bsky.social & @sophieherx.bsky.social for posting one of my translations of New Poems, out this autumn from #Baylor
billherbert.bsky.social Bill Herbert @billherbert.bsky.social · Jan 20
There are a couple of ways in which #Rilke's lovely line about a bed, 'Here and nowhere else our true theatre', could be understood.

I'm inclined toward dreams being a type of performance by a sort of cast. But read @greeningpoet.bsky.social and see what you think.

#GhostFurnitureCatalogue
January 20, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
tomjenksuk.bsky.social
January 17, 2025 at 12:41 PM
sophieherx.bsky.social
A beautiful piece of writing by Rosa about Conrad.
They are both such fantastic people, I am a v proud mother.
open.substack.com/pub/rosaherx...
Brothers
In primary school, I started many an exercise book as if I were starting a memoir, opening with: “when I was two and a half, my brother was born”.
open.substack.com
January 17, 2025 at 9:51 PM
sophieherx.bsky.social
Fabulous invigorating poetry tonight @southbankcentre.bsky.social for #tseliot prize
we laughed we cried
Congrats all shortlisted
#katrinaporteous #rachelmann
#carlphillips
#gustavparkerhibbett
#karenmccarthywoolf
#helenfarish
#petergizzi
#hannahcopley
#gboyegaodubanjo
#raymondantrobus
January 12, 2025 at 11:12 PM
sophieherx.bsky.social
A reflective gem to conduct us from the old year to the new through a mirror - @fionalarkin.bsky.social has joined the stacks of intoxicating goods at the emporium I co run with @billherbert.bsky.social
ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/f...
January 6, 2025 at 10:19 PM
Reposted by Sophie Herxheimer
billherbert.bsky.social
Here’s a link to the #NewBootsAndPantisocracies website:

newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com

And here’s a lovely pic of the pamphlet, with a cover by @sophieherx.bsky.social

(2/2)
January 4, 2025 at 1:09 PM