Month: August 2012

Upcoming poetry events in Lewes, Brighton & Seaford…

Seafordcrypt

Very pleased to be invited by Tom Roper to be one of the poets reading at Seaford Live this year on September 12th. Last year I did the open mic. It’s an intimate venue – the Crypt Gallery – rather lends itself to ghost stories or something creepy. I’ll see what I can conjour up…

Then two days later it’s Pecha Kucha Night at the Lighthouse in Brighton, and I’m planning to present a kind of poetic ‘happening’. PK is all about showing 20 slides, each for 20 seconds, and providing some commetary to go with them. I’m doing something very similar to the last time I took part which was a couple of years ago now, when I showed photos by my talented friend Simon Dale, acccompanied by some poetry they inspired. No ditties of publishing quality but it was certainly different, and even if you don’t care for the poetry you can enjoy the photos! There is always a fantastic range of subjects at a PK night so worth coming along to.

And then on October 4th it’s National Poetry Day and the launch of Poems from the Old Hill at the Needlemakers in Lewes, which will mean reading in front of quite a few REAL poets – ooo-er!

Photo of Seaford Crypt Gallery from http://www.littlemissmortar.com/

Writing musings/ submissions etc

I’ve been grabbing the odd hour here and there to write while my other half watches the cricket highlights each day.

I need to submit some new stuff, so I need to write some new stuff. I’ve tentatively been trying to come up with something ‘humorous’ for the Moss Rich Prize. Yes I know I’ve told myself not to bother with competitions but as this one is local, has extended the deadline (so may be short of entries – ha!) plus the ‘humorous’ tag may put off many of the usual suspects.

So I’ve whipped up four shorties to try on it. Not sure if they’re ‘funny’ as such but should raise a wry half-smile with luck. But that’s just time and money down the drain really, whereas sumitting to magazines is more my bread and butter. I’ve work out at the moment for consideraton at Ambit and Poetry London, neither of which I’ve tried before and I’m not sure if I’ll hear from either for several months. That leaves 2 or 3 poems that are almost publishable, I think. But where to send?

Are they quirky enough for Obsessed with Pipework? Agenda and The North have both closed submissions for the time being. The Rialto has just published one from me and I don’t like to push my luck too often with them as I feel I’m in there by the skin of my teeth. Three forthcoming in Iota but they too seem to have significantly slowed down their production schedule. And Smith’s Knoll? I don’t know… I know the quick turnaround is great but in some ways it seems worse to get a rejection so quickly… it’s extra demotivating somehow, so I’m reluctant to try them again (it would be my 3rd time, and I tend not to pursue a publication more than twice without an acceptance – stupid I know, but there’s something psychological about it.) Plus, their website talks about the current publication being 2010 – I guess it’s hard to keep a website up with that strict 2 week turnaround to stick to, you’re too busy reading submissions. Nevertheless it makes me lose a little confidence in a publication and wonder if they still have an active publication schedule.

Both Charles at Obsessed with Pipework and Patricia at Agenda were most generous about work I have submitted before so I’m inclined to try them again. If what I’ve written is suitable. But then again I could always writing some more. Hmmm!

Out now – The Rialto 75

The Rialto: bedside reading for this week at least.

Very proud that I have a poem in it on page 50.

Rialto-75-cover-print-1-small

The Last

They’ve been coming since posters were invented:
sometimes in dreams, to the tipping of cowboy hats

or dressed in Liverpool shirts. Each one appeared
in my diary, in code. My mother wouldn’t explain,

I couldn’t ask.  And still they would come, insistent.
They left my body as they found it: I never wanted

them to stay, or change things. It’s been a while since
I wrote a diary. I don’t know how many there were,

I wasn’t counting.  Too busy getting on with
the business of getting on. For the last, though,

I would have thrown a party, marked the occasion
in some way, worn something red, if I had known.

Summer holiday – some beautiful places we’ve been

The video of the bees going about their buzzi-ness, the manor house and the waterlilies were taken at Great Chalfield in Wiltshire, an absolutely idyllic National Trust property (hard to find and blissfully free of hordes of visitors). The pic of the large pot was taken in the Orangery at Dyrham Park. The other two are of Bath – we stayed in a Georgian apartment very close to The Circus where these pics were taken. Fabulous place to stay.

Circus
Circus2
Dyrham1
Great_chalfield1
Waterlilies

Now all roads lead to France

Edward Thomas

My book group friends aren’t really into poetry. At all. But someone suggested we read Matthew Hollis’s biography of the last years of Edward Thomas, ‘Now all roads lead to France.’ So I’ve brought the book on holiday with me to Wales and am engrossing myself in the detail of the life of a poet I previously knew very little about.

I’m enjoying so much about this book which examines very closely Thomas’s progression from being a professional working writer (of everything from literary reviews to what would nowadays be called creative non-fiction) to poet. He didn’t start writing poetry at all until the last couple of years of his life, and only then after being encouraged by Robert Frost. His early efforts weren’t exactly received well, and he struggled to get anything accepted for publication. Hollis explains this in terms of Thomas being ahead of his time, writing in a style that was so different, critics didn’t understand his genius, and being too honest and ‘unpolitical’ for his own good.

I wanted to like Edward Thomas, but I can’t say I warm to him – his perpetual neglect of his wife and family, the utter self-absorption, the self-loathing brought on by having to churn out commercial writing in which he had no interest, the desperate need for critics to like his poems… and the lack of humour. When Frost sent him a copy of ‘The Road Not Taken‘, Thomas saw it as a slight and for some time carried on a petulant correspondance with Frost on the subject. Not the reaction of someone with a talent for empathy and communication, which I tend to associate (perhaps mistakenly) with poets.

Interesting also in how other poets of the time are treated in this account – big names such as Ezra Pound, Walter de la Mare and even Rupert Brooke don’t get presented in a great light. Thomas apparently disliked Brooke’s showmanship, and considered the five sonnets for which he is best remembered as immature and possibly even insincere.

I haven’t yet finshed the book but will be interested to hear what my non-poet friends thought of it. It spends a lot of time talking about both poetry writing techniques and also the business of poetry at that time – the styles, trends, publications and publishers. Fascinating to a poet, but I wonder if other readers may find it heavy going.

There’s plenty of good anecdote and character detail, however. To an outsider, Edward Thomas’s world looks like a bitchy, cliquey, political, incestuous, closed community for which families and the outside world were an irritation on the periphery of the real business of writing, and the war was an inconvenience, or at best an opportunity to prove or discover something about themselves or their writing.

Having said that, I am enjoying the book and it is making me want to learn more about that period in English (and American) poetry, to understand better how we have arrived at where we are today.

Photo of Edward Thomas from Wikipedia