Month: November 2012

Readings/

The last Pighog night for 2012

Brendan Cleary - Robert Hamberger
Brendan Cleary - Robert Hamberger
Brendan Cleary and Robert Hamberger reading at the Redroaster in Brighton

Had a lovely evening last night at the Redroaster in Brighton, at Pighog’s last event of the season. As well as the winners of the Moss Rich competition, we had sets from Brendan Cleary and Robert Hamberger both of which I really enjoyed, and an eventful open mic, more about which later. Brendan (who I’d not seen perform before) lived up to the image of the ‘Irish poet’, reading poems mostly about booze, pubs and women… very funny and great delivery. Having said that, also included a number of very moving unpublished poems about his late brother.

I had a slight moment of panic when Robert Hamberger turned to me in the queue for the drinks. “Hello! I’ve seen your blog!” he said and I suddenly recalled the video blog I did a few weeks back, when I read a poem of his. “Oh… you … saw me reading your poem…” Thankfully, he didn’t seem to mind, and said he enjoyed hearing someone else read it. Actually I can’t remember if he said it was interesting or whether he liked it .. he might just have been being polite!

On my table I got talking to a lovely couple from Burwash one of whom turned out to be Richard Ormrod, the second prize winner in the Moss Rich competition. I told them about our forthcoming Brighton Stanza event at the Redroaster (ooh, I must blog officially about that soon) and they in turn told me about open mic events at the Troubadour in London. I do get all the emails about the Troubadour, but I’ve never summoned up the courage to go and read there. Maybe that’s one of my goals for 2013.

The evening drew to a close with drama at the open mic – I’m always moaning about open mics being too hurried, but in fact this was one where I wish the readers had been limited to one poem. A couple of people rather took the (open) micky a bit by going on at length. Plus, the last reader only managed about 3 lines of his poem due to the fact that he’d ‘been to the pub’ and couldn’t read what he’d written. Several LONG minutes later and after he’d called upon a member of the audience to ‘help’ him, a few more aborted goes at reading the sodding thing, some grappling and grabbing of the mic, a bit of F-ing and blinding, he left the stage peacefully and we all breathed freely again. That’s poets for you!

Workshopping/

Brighton Poetry Stanza – new reading group launch

Brighton Poetry Stanza

Brighton Poetry Stanza

The Brighton Poetry Stanza is expanding. Jo Grigg has done a fabulous job of nurturing this group over the last few years, with a diverse group of people meeting once a month to workshop their poems. There are a number of regulars and many more who come along when they can.

Stanzas are regional groups loosely under the auspices of the Poetry Society, but organised entirely by volunteers ‘on the ground’, and they vary in terms of what they offer – some are workshopping groups like ours, others meet less often and are structured differently. But they are open to all, you don’t have to be a paid up member of the Poetry Society.

Now Miriam Patrick, one of our Brighton members, is setting up a reading group under the Stanza umbrella. The group will meet monthly at the same venue as the workshopping group (but on a different night!) with the aim of ‘close reading’ contemporary poems that members have enjoyed, possibly from Poetry Review, or other journal. The new group kicks off this coming Monday, 3rd December, at the Caxton Arms in Brighton, 7.30 – 9.30pm. I’m certainly looking forward to it – I really enjoy hearing what other people get from poems as it really adds to the experience, even sometimes turning me on to a piece that I might have otherwise given a wide berth!

We’re also planning a poetry reading in Brighton – more on this in another post. To celebrate all this ‘expansion’ we’ve even launched a Brighton Poetry Stanza Facebook Page – yeeha!

A plea for help! Even if you’re not local, please visit our Facebook page and ‘like’ us – when we reach 30 likes we can access the stats and things can really start to build. Thanks in advance 🙂

 

Mags & Blogs/

Getting published/entering competitions – tips from the experts

The weather’s terrible, I am a ‘music widow’ today and I feel the urge to reconnect with what makes poetry good, and conversely what’s BAD about the stuff I’ve had rejected lately. Yes, it’s time for some serious reading and some BIG edits!

I recently came across Tim Love’s excellent LitRefs Articles blog – and read again his piece about getting poetry published in the UK, a very useful resource, and it got me looking out a few other pieces I had bookmarked about getting published or entering poetry competitions.

For example, on Staple Magazine‘s website there’s Wayne Burrows’ lovely piece entitled Five Reasons Why A Writer’s Work Might Be Returned By An Editor…* (*…that have nothing to do with whether it’s actually good enough for publication) – read the comments too, they are entertaining.

Happenstance has a free download The Dos and Don’ts of Poetry Submission – to access it you have to go through a registration process and possibly input your credit card details (I think, although I didn’t get that far), although you’re not charged anything. I mention this article because I’m fairly sure I’ve read it on a blog at some point and found it useful even though it’s now behind a registration wall.

The Poetry Society has some useful FAQs about poetry publication amongst other things…

On the subject of entering competitions – on her blog, Abegail Morley recently interviewed Bill Greenwell about what judges look for in poetry competitions, and here’s George Szirtes’s interview with Ian Duhig on the thorny question of what poetry competitions are actually for… (George S is himself of course a veteran of the poetry competition judging scene, and there are plenty of his wise words on the subject elsewhere on the web)

And finally, a feast of tasty information (huh?) on Abegail Morley’s The Poetry Shed which includes an interview with Helen Ivory on judging competitions, ‘recipes for success’ from various magazine editors, and a bonus piece at the end about drafting a poem, by Kim Moore.

These are just a few articles I’m aware of – do you have more to add to the list – pieces on getting published or winning competitions, that you’ve found helpful/entertaining/informative? Do share – thanks!

Angst/

Are anonymous submissions a good thing?

Masks

Masks

I came across this article recently, in Anon magazine, setting out the opinions of three writers as to whether anonymous submissions to magazines were a good idea.

I rather like Kathleen Jamie‘s conclusion, that actually by creating a so-called ‘level playing field’ for all poets, regardless of reputation, a magazine like Anon (championing the cause of anonymous submissions) is perpetuating the mistaken idea that there is some sort of conspiracy among well-known poets to keep everyone else out. She suggests the problem is not that the pages of poetry magazines are dominated by the same few names, far from it. But rather this:

No editor fears receiving a sub-standard poem by Seamus Heaney, if such a thing exists. What he fears, understandably, is receiving shed-loads of dreadful half-baked so-called ‘poetry’ accompanied by pages of testimonials, CVs and special pleading.

In other words, an anonymous submissions process doesn’t make it any easier to get poems accepted. If they’re mediocre, that’s the end of it. And big-name poets don’t submit to small magazines anyway. They don’t need to.

Plus, as Gerry Cambridge points out in the same article,

Unpublished poets are deluded if they believe they can’t get published because they’re not known names. After all, those known names were once unknowns, too.

and

… any editor of an individual cast of mind would like nothing more than to print the work of an unknown or little-known poet whose writing, in the editor’s opinion, is excellent – or even promising and individual in a way that marks it out from the majority

Anon isn’t the only magazine with an anonymous submissions process – South also insists on anonymity, as does Iota. Having had work in both, I’ve always wondered if I’ve been a beneficiary of the process. Then again I’ve also wondered if having an androgynous name also works in my favour. We can speculate on all these things and more, I suppose. (And to be honest I quite enjoy it – I find the intrigue, arguments and gossip an essential and entertaining part of the poetry scene – but then again I’m only really an amateur onlooker, so I can see how easy it is for me to say that, and how frustrating it is for others who hate the shenanigans and just want to get on with their writing.)

What do you think? Do aspiring/nascent writers benefit from anonymous submissions? Or is it insulting to editors to assume they are swayed by who the poet is rather than the quality of the individual poems?

 

Image credit: South Peace News

Poet's Tips/

Mimi Khalvati on vowel music and editing with form

Notebook

Notebook

Our last workshop of the year with Mimi Khalvati on Saturday, and the subjects of vowel sounds and form were big topics. Here’s an extract from my notes, on the things that struck home for me this month.

Vowel music – paying attention to the vowel sounds of words (NB not how the sounds are written – it can’t be done by sight.)

Sometimes a chain of sounds emerges and this can reveal something about the emotional feel of it. Listen to the sound, what does it tell you? For example – the UH of but, come, cup etc can have an up-in-the-air feeling, a feeling of wonder, whereas the short I sounds of pin, trip, kin, can sound excitable, light. Think of the longer vowel sounds and diphthongs of peel, need, close, bows, low, ground – in being longer they are more settled, grounded, slowing down.

Working with vowel sounds is a good critical tool – sometimes you can hit on the right sound but it’s the wrong word. This is a common problem – you can’t let the word go, because you know there’s something right about it, but you don’t know why it still seems wrong. Lots of things sound similar, you have to work through other words with the same sound.

Still thinking about sounds – if you use a foreign name or word, should you worry about people not reading it with the right pronunciation, and thereby spoiling their ‘hearing’ of the poem? Mimi says you should trust a ‘good reader’ to make the right call and go with it. ‘Don’t write for bad readers!’

Form – when the form doesn’t quite work you must wonder about it. Form is an unforgiving editing tool. Go through and look where you’ve put line breaks, enjambments, stanza length, anything that sticks out (eg a strong, unintentional rhyming couplet in the middle of free verse) and try playing with the form, stanza and line length etc.
On the other hand, don’t force your poem into a specific form if it doesn’t quite fit, eg by ‘padding’ in order for the metre to be correct. Trust in the direction the poem is going and don’t be wedded to an idea if the language suggests otherwise.

Mags & Blogs/

A feast of first lines

Wordsworth manuscript

Wordsworth manuscript

First lines. Ack! It’s worse than a job interview. You have 2 seconds to make an impression. Or something like that.

Do you find yourself going back to the first line and re-writing because it’s just not strong enough? And as a reader, do you ever read the first line and immediately your mind says ‘uh oh’ and you’ve already got a prediction in your head of where it’s going? I know I do both of these things, and more. After the title, the first line has to be pretty good, do you agree?

In a moment of stupor I thought I would try to finally CRACK the first line thing by doing some research. Ha ha! The appliance of science – always worth a try!

So I dutifully recorded all the first lines from every poem in The Rialto 74. Call me crazy if you like, but it was a fun exercise. And the resulting list of 55 first lines actually reads like a poem in itself, although I don’t think even the (theoretical) love child of Selima Hill and Sam Riviere could come up with this. (Love them both though! No offence intended! But they can be pretty left-field!)

So here we go. If this is a breach of copyright, I apologise – all credit to the poets, but if anyone would like their line pulled from this post, on the grounds of non-attribution, please say.

Hard to think about infinity

We’re the lucky ones

The postman listens to Roxy Music on her iPod nano

Down with poetry! It’s all over the place

We lean into the soft brake BLUES

Some people are bad for the soul. Avoid them.

In the museum-without-proprietor

The bound book lay open on the desk

At least you can sleep, folding us and the hours

You’ll have had me, the view of me, down on the sand

At the high pass, forward scouts report,

You are welcome, you arrive to embraces and chatter

There’s a red spot in the centre of today

Laura shows up in time to have to wait

I reflect on their defects. They give me

spine faded, pages yellowed, corners turned down

What would you do if I died right now, here, you asked,

Until recently we were very pleased with Roger.

We were litte upstarts; our causes imperceptible, inflamed

The bathtub, the Frigidaire, the gilded tap,

We learn why things happen

The inn on the Tokaido Road has

Standing at the sink

The others are glad not to be the corpse

are discussing provocation: holding law up to the light.

Across the road the decorators have finished;

In the last August of the war, my

Dear little damp foot

Really I want to keep this to myself

You tell that story again

A girl is two eggs waiting to be a cake, or a sun; Our Father going round and round in her song.

How the heart wire snapped and on the loose my heart

Wriggling, it pulls. The tip of the tail

Robert makes two cups of tea

Each of my poems is

And this too will pass into spring

You tie my scarf so it drapes like Madonna’s,

It is not the rusting of summer into inevitable

A man coughs like a box

I am an old book troglodyte

For years nobody had been to the library

Make do with my father, speeding

Love was the boy you broke up with years ago

Grief was the flash bloke with the bleached teeth

The smell of bonfires. Autumn in the garden.

I’m sat on a bench on the promenade

And how many men are stood like this in their socks

I ride the famous tourist bus for hours,

He’d forgotten he had his father’s pistol.

He’d never seen such a horse before:

I’m not malicious though have scarred a woman

The stone in me speaks directly into the eyes of a toad

We drive until there are no more mirrors.

We finish and you sigh and gaze up into my eyes

After breakfast I clipped the peonies

(image credit: British Library)

Angst/

Good news, and a few doubts

What a great week. An excellent Bonfire Night, President Obama re-elected, and then I get an email with the subject line ‘Congratulations from Poetry News‘ and find my ‘absent’ themed poem will be in the December edition. Ah, where would we be without small victories?  Because I admit I am STUPIDLY excited.

It’s my first proper effort at using spaces in a poem (instead of commas and my beloved dashes, which are a bit of a habit), something I have Catherine Smith to thank for as it was one of the things she got us doing on a Poetry School course I was on earlier this year.

So here’s to experimentation. But … I’m looking forward to ‘one day’ developing some sort of consistent style. Or is that like wanting to grow up too soon? Is it good to keep trying different things and going off on tangents? Poets I meet when workshopping are often working on bigger, over-arching projects or themes, and I sometimes wonder if I’ll never get to the stage of a publishable pamphlet unless I settle into writing a coherent body of poems, rather than blurting out isolated pieces that have nothing in common. What do you think?

Books/

Where were the ‘Best of British’ poems first published?

Best of British Poetry 2012

Best of British Poetry 2012

Poet friend of mine and soon-to-be-blogger Jo Grigg mentioned she had been reading The Best British Poetry 2012 so I invited her to write about it here. It is Jo’s first guest blog post on Poetgal.

The second volume of this British version of a longstanding US anthology has now thundered through my letterbox. Hurrah! Its 70 poems are selected from the year’s UK poetry magazines.

As with any anthology, how much you enjoy them depends on how much you have in common with the editor. This year’s is Sasha Dugdale and I’m enjoying many of them so far. Along with the poems come each poet’s remarks given in the second section of the book following a brief biog. Some of these remarks are enlightening about the writing process. Others are odd, which is (oddly) reassuring. In the US version you sometimes read ‘the poem should stand on its own without me having to explain it’.

One of the reasons behind the anthology is to draw attention to poets who are not yet published in pamphlet or collection form, because the big prizes select mostly from published collections. There’s also a good showing of established poets. It demonstrates the variety within the poetry mag business, and draws attention to individual magazines.

I looked at which magazines the poems in Best British are taken from – would this represent a ‘best magazines’ list, and if so, might I investigate and then subscribe to one or two of them? Though does having a poem in here mean they are ‘better’ than the many magazines not represented? It is at least a starting point for those unable to get to the Poetry Library at London’s South Bank to spend time submerged in magazines, pamphlets and collections. Here’s my listing:

Magazine / Number of entries

10th Muse 1

13 Pages 2

Agenda 1

Ambit 2

Blackbox Manifold 1

Brand 1

Brittle Star 1

Cambridge Literary Review 2

Clinic 2

Dark Horse, The 1

Delinquent, The 2

Edinburgh Review 1

Fuselit 1

Halfcircle 1

Horizon Review 1

London Review of Books 2

Magma 4

Modern Poetry in Translation 4

New Linear Perspectives 1

New Welsh Review 2

North, The 2

PN Review 7

Poet’s Calendar, The 1

Poetry and Audience 1

Poetry London 9

Poetry Review 5

Poetry Wales 2

Rialto, The 4

Stand 2

Warwick Review, The 2

White Review, The 1

Wolf, The 1

The Best British Poetry 2012, edited by Sasha Dugdale, series edited by Roddy Lumsden, published by Salt, 2012. Cover price £9.99.