Month: September 2016

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Seven Questions for Poets #9 – Rosemary Badcoe

This is the penultimate post in this ‘Seven Questions’ series, I’ve hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have – there have been some really interesting and surprising answers, but also a fair bit of consistency – particularly when it comes to recommendations for non-poetry readers, and reactions to being asked to read at the Festival Hall!

Rosemary Badcoe is well known as one of the editors of Antiphon, an excellent online poetry magazine. But, just like many poetry magazine editors, she’s an accomplished poet in her own right. I sometimes think poets who submit their work to magazines may not know (or imagine) that the editor is also a poet, and also submitting elsewhere themselves. I know this was something I was ignorant of when I started sending work out. Editing a magazine has to take time away from the business of writing, so my feeling is it’s the least we can do to help promote them as POETS. (Ooh, I sense another blog post coming here…)

So – my thanks to Rosemary for playing this particular game, and on with the questions.

1 – What was the last poetry book you read, that you would recommend?

The latest poetry book I’ve read is Millstone Grit, which is a new anthology we’re creating as part of Sheffield Hallam University’s Catalyst festival. I’m working with fellow Antiphon editor Noel Williams and journalist and Senior Lecturer Carolyn Waudby, but I’ve given myself the job of designing and creating the book. It’s been a great learning curve, tackling typesetting software and layout, but we’ve just received the proof copy and are delighted with it! It’s the first book we’re publishing via Antiphon Press. But the proper answer would be Dark Matter, by Christine Klocek-Lim. All the poems are based on images from the Astronomy Picture of the Day website but are personal and moving.

2 – Philip Larkin and Dannie Abse are both alleged to have said they only wrote one or two decent poems a year. How is it for you?

I find however much I write I tend to end up with about one poem a month that I’m really pleased with. But book creation has got in the way of that recently.

3 – What would be your ideal place for a writing retreat?

Hmm, not sure I’d be good with a retreat! I like the internet too much. And bookshops…

4 – Do you enter poetry competitions?

No, not generally. I can never guess which poems they might like!

5 – You’re asked to give a reading at the Royal Festival Hall, to thousands of people. What goes through your mind?

Aargh!  Followed by ‘I wonder if they’d mind a quick plug for Antiphon?’

6 – Why is end-rhyme considered a good thing in performance poetry, but rarely found in contemporary magazines?

Possibly because if not used carefully end-rhyme can swamp the rest of the poem. It works best in poems with a proper rhythmical format, which performance poetry often has, but which people don’t always use on the page.

7 – A murmuration of starlings, a murder of crows etc – what would you call a group of poets?

A confusion? Is there a word for a group of people all staring in different directions?

 

QUICK PLUG:

Rosemary Badcoe’s collection Drawing a Diagram is coming out with Kelsay Books early next year. As well as the main Antiphon website, there is an accompanying blog featuring recordings of poets reading from the issue.

Previous ‘Seven Questions for Poets’:
#1 – Clare Best
#2 – Jill Abram
#3 – Antony Mair
#4 – Hilda Sheehan
#5 – Ian Humphreys
#6 – Claire Dyer
#7 – Louise Ordish
#8 – Anna Kisby

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Seven Questions for Poets #8 – Anna Kisby

I first met Anna Kisby at the Brighton Poetry Stanza and was struck by her writing. Sadly for us, she then relocated to the west country. But it’s always a joy to come across her work, and we met again recently at the South Downs Poetry Festival, where she was awarded first prize in the Havant Poetry Competition. Last year she was commended by Faber, and she recently won the BBC Proms Poetry Competition. Here are Anna’s answers to the seven questions…

1 – What was the last poetry book you read, that you would recommend?

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe, recent Poet Laureate of New York State. I’m interested in how she writes about the actuality of life – using plain language and metaphor only very sparingly – but the poems lift off the page.

2 – Philip Larkin and Dannie Abse are both alleged to have said they only wrote one or two decent poems a year. How is it for you? 

Sometimes there are poems that, as a friend describes it, ‘Come out whole, like laying an egg’. I always feel affection for poems I write like that as opposed to the ones I labour over, which start to get on my nerves.

3 – What would be your ideal place for a writing retreat?

That hotel in the Alps where Hemingway and his wife Hadley stay in the 1920s (as described in A Moveable Feast.)

4 – Do you enter poetry competitions?

In phases – at the moment, yes! A mixture of the biggies (worth a try?) and smaller ones tied to local festivals.

5 – If someone has never read any poetry, where would you suggest they start?

A predictable answer but: Staying Alive (Bloodaxe, ed Neil Astley). It set me going again.

6 – You’re asked to give a reading at the Royal Festival Hall, to thousands of people. What goes through your mind?

New shoes.

7 – Can you remember the first poem you wrote? What was it about?

Living in America, aged 8, a long rhyming poem about sisters Primrose and Camomile Brown – it was flowery and quite self-consciously English. The important thing was that when I showed it to our neighbour, a craftswoman, she made me feel it was the best poem she’d ever read, bought me a special Poetry Notebook and took me very seriously as a writer. I rather let her down by not focusing on poetry again for another 30 years…

 

QUICK PLUG:

Anna Kisby’s most recently-published poem is included in the Live Canon anthology 154: contemporary poets in response to Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. On 4th Nov 2016 the Live Canon ensemble will perform a selection of poems from the anthology at Oxford Playhouse – details available here.

Previous ‘Seven Questions for Poets’:
#1 – Clare Best
#2 – Jill Abram
#3 – Antony Mair
#4 – Hilda Sheehan
#5 – Ian Humphreys
#6 – Claire Dyer
#7 – Louise Ordish

Angst/

To travel hopefully…

On the cross channel ferry at dusk

..as a teenager I remember being set this title as the subject of an essay competition, and I charged off on what I thought would surely be the winning entry. Sadly it was not – but then again if I’d known the rest of the phrase was ‘…is better than to arrive’ it would at least have given a me clue. Ah, those heady days before the internet, when we had to ask people things, or look things up in the library!

I’m never quite sure about the idea of going on holiday in order to recharge the batteries, or coming back thoroughly relaxed. I tend to come back dog tired. Which is what happened this weekend, arriving home late on Friday after driving several hundred miles that day; on Saturday I had to sleep most of the afternoon.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful thing to be able to go away and feel unleashed from day-to-day concerns back home. I’m very grateful to have done such a thing. A friend said to me recently she’d never had a holiday of longer than two weeks. When I was working in the US, nobody took two weeks off (mainly for fear of your desk not being there when you returned.)

I never did do the ‘travelling’ thing when I was younger but I did have the luxury of a month-long vacation in South America after leaving one job and before I was due to start at the next one. The combination of both knowing and not knowing what I was coming back to  – a job, yes, but a new job in a new country – combined with a certain amount of experience (being in my thirties) gave the trip a really feeling of a break. Something did break inside me, but in a good way, like an opening up.

So this time I’m back from more than three weeks away, when each day brought its own challenges (linguistic, cultural, logistical). Did I take a notebook? Not really, because I struggle to write longhand. But I took my laptop, and wrote both a diary (‘first we did this, then we did that’) and a kind of thoughts & feelings-journal. I can imagine referring to both, should I end up writing about any of it. But will I? The usual counterweights in my head never seem to take a vacation. Not another poem about the beauty of an Italian garden (yawn) …. or nobody who’s only visited a place once has anything meaningful to say about it … etc. But who knows.

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On a short break…

By the time you read this I will be in Italy, where I’ll have been for a while, so that’s one reason why I’ve not been all that proactive on here, nor on social media generally – at least, I hope not, as I’m trying to have a little break from it all!

Thanks for reading, and normal service will resume in a week or so.

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Seven Questions for Poets #7 – Louise Ordish

A name you’ll have come across often in the poetry magazines is Louise Ordish. She is a talented poet who has had a number of high profile successes, including a shortlisting for the Poetry School/Nine Arches Press Primers Vol 1, and a poem nominated for the Forward Prize. I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of her work. Louise was more than happy to take the Seven Question challenge…

1 – What was the last poetry book you read, that you would recommend?

I’ve just been reading Paper Aeroplane, Simon Armitage’s selected works 1989-2014. When I first started writing poetry properly about 5 years ago, his ‘Book of Matches’ was the first e-book I had. I remember how reading his poetry felt just magical, a discovery of something that I hadn’t known possible.

2 – What would be your ideal place for a writing retreat?

Anywhere where there is no WIFI but there is a kettle, a bed, a view… either isolated or city centre… must be a coffee shop or bar. That gives me quite a few opportunities.

3 – If someone has never read any poetry, where would you suggest they start?

One of the hugely successful Bloodaxe anthologies in the Staying Alive trilogy. There’s such a range of work in them and editor Neil Astley has done this amazing trick of finding strong, ‘real’ poems that are accessible.

4 – You’re asked to give a reading at the Royal Festival Hall, to thousands of people. What goes through your mind?

Wahay!

5 – Why is end-rhyme considered a good thing in performance poetry, but rarely found in contemporary magazines?

Performance poetry has more of a chance of being engaging, understood, even, if it has strong rhythm and rhyme. It gives the listener more clues as to what’s being said and engages them on a different level from the words, through the musicality. The same musicality can make end-rhymes on the page a bit over the top, or infantile. Having said which, I love to use half rhyme in my poems and usually as end-rhymes. The ‘slanter’ the better. One Poetry School tutor admired my rhyming of ‘domestic’ with ‘lest it’ in a poem that included an image of my Dad making Angel Delight.

6 – Can you remember the first poem you wrote? What was it about?

Totally. Totally. My starting to write was sudden and volcanic and in a supermarket. The poem was about 6 lines long and was in response to someone’s drawings.

7 – A murmuration of starlings, a murder of crows etc – what would you call a group of poets?

Hmmm. Depending on my mood and the poets, it could be a passion of… a pomposity of… or a pamphlet of…

QUICK PLUG: Louise is the rep for the Reading Stanza of the Poetry Society, which provides two opportunities to meet and share poetry with other poets. There’s a monthly workshopping group and, from November 2016, Stanza is proud to host the long-standing monthly event, Poets’ Café, combining a reading by an invited guest and an open mic session.

Previous ‘Seven Questions for Poets’:
#1 – Clare Best
#2 – Jill Abram
#3 – Antony Mair
#4 – Hilda Sheehan
#5 – Ian Humphreys
#6 – Claire Dyer

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Seven Questions for Poets #6 – Claire Dyer

Claire Dyer is a fine poet and novelist who I first met at a launch reading for The Interpreter’s House. She seems to be one of those people who quietly produce one good book after another, without any of the kind of angsty fuss some of us like to indulge in. If you get a chance to hear her read, do so, she has a relaxed but commanding style. Here’s how she responded to ‘Seven Questions’…

1 – What was the last poetry book you read, that you would recommend?

Slant Light by Sarah Westcott (Liverpool University Press, 2016)

2 – What would be your ideal place for a writing retreat?

Somewhere quiet and near the sea.

3 – Do you enter poetry competitions?

Yes.

4 – If someone has never read any poetry, where would you suggest they start?

I’d suggest they read ‘Ode to Autumn’ by John Keats and The Mersey Sound by McGough, Henri and Patten.

5 – You’re asked to give a reading at the Royal Festival Hall, to thousands of people. What goes through your mind?

I’d panic, worry about tripping over my feet as I walked across the stage but then once behind the mic and lectern, I hope I’d think I’m just at home rehearsing in front of my cats as is my wont!

6 – Can you remember the first poem you wrote – what was it about?

Yes, it was about being stuck in the lounge at my grandmother’s house and not being allowed out to play. I can’t remember why I’d been told to stay indoors, maybe it looked like it might rain, or something like that!

7 – A murmuration of starlings, a murder of crows etc – what would you call a group of poets?

A doubt of poets!

QUICK PLUG: Claire’s novels are published by Quercus and her latest collection, Interference Effects, is due from Two Rivers Press in October 2016. She also runs Fresh Eyes, an editorial and critiquing service.

Previous ‘Seven Questions for Poets’:
#1 – Clare Best
#2 – Jill Abram
#3 – Antony Mair
#4 – Hilda Sheehan
#5 – Ian Humphreys

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Seven questions for poets #5 – Ian Humphreys

Today’s poet ready for a grilling is Ian Humphreys. I met Ian on the Ty Newydd masterclass we did a couple of years ago. He and I were in a small working group with Lizzie Fincham – which basically meant we holed up in the library, trying to do our homework while comparing notes and reading lines to each other, amongst a lot of nervous swearing and diversionary hilarity. Since then Ian’s made serious progress – he completed an MA in Creative Writing at MMU, and it’s been wonderful to follow his success – most recently winning the Hamish Canham Prize and being selected for The Complete Works III.

1 – What was the last poetry book you read, that you would recommend?

Jutland by Selima Hill. Two books/sequences in one. Akin to a severed doll’s head: innocence and menace combined. Cleverly, the darkness here is more of an itch in the imagination than a telling. The imagery is surreal, playful and shockingly original. A poem can start off beaming with light and lightness, then turn on a pin to become suffocating and sinister. The collection also proves that really short poems can pack a punch.

2  – Philip Larkin and Dannie Abse are both alleged to have said they only wrote one or two decent poems a year. How is it for you?

My definition of ‘decent’ is constantly changing. I consider myself fairly new to poetry so what I thought a successful poem a year ago probably wouldn’t make the cut today. I suppose what I aim for these days is to produce one poem every two or three months I feel would hold its own in a good magazine.

3 – Do you enter poetry competitions?

Yes, not often, maybe three or four times a year. It was early success in a competition that persuaded me to take writing more seriously.

4 – If someone has never read any poetry, where would you suggest they start?

I would encourage them to subscribe to one or two literary magazines to get a feel of what’s happening right now. (And to support our magazines.) My favourite ones lean towards accessible, innovative, quality poetry and include Ambit and Prole (both of which also feature prose), Butcher’s Dog and, of course, The Rialto.

5 – Why is end-rhyme considered a good thing in performance poetry, but rarely found in contemporary magazines?

Heightened musicality and sound texture in performance poetry help keep audiences engaged. End rhymes can really propel a spoken piece forward. With page poetry, using full end rhymes is currently seen as old fashioned, although perhaps it’s starting to make a stuttering comeback. Just one example: Alice Oswald’s opener in her latest collection Falling Awake.

6 – Can you remember the first poem you wrote – what was it about?

I was 13. Prince Charles had acquired a bald patch and it was causing a stir in the press. This seemed daft to me, even at that age, so I wrote a poem about the royal fuss being made. The English teacher read it out in class – I was embarrassed and secretly thrilled. For some reason it took me over three decades to write the next one.

7 – A murmuration of starlings, a murder of crows etc – what would you call a group of poets?

A compulsion of poets.

QUICK PLUG: Since 2008, The Complete Works programme has done important work raising awareness of BAME poets in Britain. Earlier this year, Ian was selected for Complete Works III (ten new fellows are chosen every four years). In 2017, a portfolio of his poems will feature in a Bloodaxe anthology alongside work by TCW3 colleagues.

Previous ‘Seven Questions for Poets’:
#1 – Clare Best
#2 – Jill Abram
#3 – Antony Mair
#4 – Hilda Sheehan