June 2017 – Robin Houghton

Blog/ 21/06/2017

A midsummer stock-take

It’s the longest day of the year here, and the hottest. I love these long days and warm evenings and we’ve been making the most of the garden and living by the sea. Somehow blogging seems less appealing!

However, having just been inspired by Marina Sofia’s Fortnightly Round-up, I thought maybe it was time for another quick stock-take.

Submissions

I’ve a few poems I should send out out – somewhere, right now, considering the longer I leave it the slimmer the chance of getting them placed anywhere before 2018. And one of the poems in question will be in my Cinnamon pamphlet, so if I want to see it in a magazine first I need to get a move on before it’s too late.

Currently there are only 5 individual poems out, three to a magazine and two to a competition, or six including the one I sent to Poetry News, but if they’d wanted it I would have heard by now, so I’ll be sending that one out again.

Quite a few poems are forthcoming – Brittle Star recently took a poem for their next issue which launches next week at the Barbican Library in London, I’ve got one in Magma in July, and in August three in Obsessed with Pipework and one in Prole.

I missed the Bridport deadline, not that I ever seem to do much in that, but you just never know. In the recent Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition it was great to see Katy Evans-Bush’s name among the winners. Katy is of course an established poet, but she’s also well-known as a poetry blogger and I wonder if for some people she’s a blogger first, poet second. So it’s good to see her poetry taking centre stage. I assumed my own entry for the comp had sunk without trace but then I had an email from Peter Sansom to say my collection had been shortlisted, which I was genuinely pleased about. I know I tend to dismiss the whole shortlist/longlist thing generally, but when it’s a big prize I can now see why people might put it on their biog. Although I’ve no public evidence for said shortlisting as it’s not published on the website. Oh well! It’ll be our secret!

One good thing about not submitting too much is of course you get fewer rejections. Three poems were returned to me recently by Poetry Review, so no luck there yet. In fact anything with ‘Review’ in the title tends to reject my stuff. Oh well, the challenge continues.

Current projects

I have a project bubbling under at the moment and although my first attempts to tackle it are a little rough around the edges, I’m taking my time. By way of research I’ve been reading The Poetry Cure (Bloodaxe, 2005) an anthology of illness edited by Julia Darling and Cynthia Fuller, as recommended by poet friend Sarah, and Of Mutability (Faber, 2010) by Jo Shapcott, as well as Granta issue 138 on ‘Journeys’.

On a different note, (ha!) in two days’ time I’m taking a Grade 6 singing exam, something I decided six months ago it would be fun to do, and it’s turned into a huge test for me – both to overcome my nerves, and my attitude, which is to expect to sound like Cecilia Bartoli on just a few lessons and the odd bit of practice. I am a fool! Or a glutton for knockbacks!

Great article

I was browsing Wayne Burrows’ website recently and came across this excellent interview he gave a couple of years ago – there’s so much in it I’d like to quote, instead I’ll just recommend it as a great read. His answers to questions about his influences, his writing habits, his regrets, and things such as ‘do you find it irritating when someone misinterprets your work?’ and ‘is poetry a dying art?’ are fascinating and entirely free of any self-importance or sense of ‘lecturing’ his reader.

Events coming up

I’ve got a busy poetry week ahead. This weekend I’m going to Anne-Marie Fyfe’s workshop at the South Downs Poetry Festival in Lewes, and I’m also looking forward to seeing Anne-Marie again at the Troubadour on Monday evening, where I’ll be one of the massed ranks of poets reading at the season finale on the theme of planets, stars, constellations etc. Do come if you’re in spitting distance.

On Thursday 29th June I’ll be going to a Cinnamon pamphleteers reading in London featuring Neil Elder, Tamsin Hopkins and Sarah Watkinson.

Next Friday 30th June I’ll be one of the Hastings Stanza Poets reading at The Bookkeeper bookshop on Kings Rd, St Leonards on the opening night of the St Leonards Festival. Free! Come along!

OK that’s it, I’m off for a dip (OK, maybe a paddle) in the sea!

Blog/ 07/06/201708/06/2017

Poetry magazine windows & comp deadlines coming up

*UPDATED 8-6-17* to include the Prole Pamphlet Competition, deadline 30th June.

Windows

It’s been a while since I checked submissions windows. I realise a few have just closed (e.g. The North – you have to be sharp-eyed to get in there!), but here are some that are currently open…

Agenda – the website says it’s currently open, and you have submit via email, and there are very specific house style rules. They say they aim for a 12-week turnaround, and after that time it’s OK to submit elsewhere.

The Interpreter’s House – open until the end of June. Submit by email. They ‘prefer not to receive simultaneous submissions’ and previous contributors are asked to wait out three issues before submitting again. I rather like this and wish some other magazines would stipulate it, as it would prevent certain people from flooding every issue of some mags with their stuff. Just saying.

Under the Radar – now open until June 30th – via Submittable.

Tears in the Fence – currently open for submissions by email or post.

Long Poem Magazine – open until June 30th for poems that are at least 75 lines long ‘but not book length’. Submit by email.

For a list of some UK magazines which are open to submissions all year, see my post from last year.

A few competition deadlines coming up

All details are provided in good faith, but I can’t guarantee I’ve got them all correct – please go to the competition page to check and to read the rules, cut off dates etc.

Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition – Judge Sinead Morrissey. Prizes £2,000, £400, £200. Entry fee £7 per poem. Deadline 19th June. Is it just me or does the ‘women only’ rule feel a little anachronistic in this age of greater understanding of gender fluidity, cis vs trans women and so forth? Just saying. Mslexia are also holding their annual Pamphlet competition which has the same deadline.

The McLellan Poetry Prize – Judge Maura Dooley. Prize awarded by the Arran Theatre and Arts Trust as part of the annual McLellan Arts Festival – winners are invited up to the Isle of Arran for the prize giving in September. Prizes: £1000, £300, £100, plus 6 commendations of £25. Entry fee: £5 for the first poem, £4 thereafter. Deadline 21st June.

Prole Pamphlet Competition – Judge Fiona Pitt-Kiethley. This is Prole Magazine’s first pamphlet competition, for collections up to 35 pages. The winner will receive £50 and 15 copies of the pamphlet. Entry fee £12. Deadline 30th June.

Live Canon International Poetry Competition – Judge Clare Pollard. One prize of £1,000, plus £100 for a poet ‘living, studying or working in the London Borough of Greenwich’. Shame it can’t be extended to poets born and bred in the (ahem!) Royal Borough of Greenwich, because that would make me eligible. Oh well. Entry fee £6. Deadline 1st July.

Ambit Summer Poetry Competition – Judge George Szirtes. Prizes £500, £250, £100. Entry fee is £6 per poem. Deadline 15th July.

Winchester Poetry Prize – Judge Sarah Howe. Prizes £1,000, £500, £250. Entry fee is £5 for first poem, £4 for subsequent poems. Deadline 31st July.

And with a little more time to prepare…

The Manchester Poetry Prize – judges Adam O’Riordan, Mona Arshi & Pascale Petit. £10,000 prize for the best portfolio of three to five poems (maximum combined length: 120 lines) Entry fee £17.50. Deadline 29th September.

Troubadour International Poetry Prize – Judges Michael Symmons-Roberts and Imtiaz Darker. Prizes £2,000, £1,000, £500, plus a swathe of other prizes (magazine subscriptions, champagne etc). A reduced first prize this year, but still a prestigious one to win. Entry fee £6 for the first, then £4 for each subsequent poem. Deadline 16th October.

Good sources of info re poetry competitions and reading windows are:

Angela T Carr’s A Dreaming Skin – poetry competitions and opportunities

The South Bank Poetry Library – competitions listings, plus details of UK poetry magazines & publishers.

Cathy’s Comps & Calls – monthly blog post detailing a huge ton of writing comps (not just poetry), many free to enter.

As ever, good luck!

Blog/ 04/06/2017

Recipe for Water

Yes that probably sounds familiar, being the title of the 2009 collection by Gillian Clarke. I’ve been thinking a lot about water lately, and flow – great rivers, the mouths of rivers and the place where they become sea. Just riding the ideas at the moment and not rushing it. As Clarke puts it, ‘The sea turns its pages, speaking in tongues’ (‘First Words’)

I’ve been thumbing through some lovely watery poems. This, from Lynne Hjelmgaard’s A Boat Called Annalise: ‘We are in the Ocean’s mouth, / territory unknown’ (‘Night Watch’). Or this, by Philip Gross:

Scroll up the chattering, brief brilliances
and long abradings, sweeping up of everything

that we let slip, the murk-dynamics
that we might mistake for memory.

(‘Reeling in the River’, from A Fold in the River.)

It’s been just over a year since we moved into our flat which is only a few minutes’ walk from the sea (well, not an ocean but the English Channel), and it’s starting to seep into me. Last week we took a trip to the other end of Great Britain, the northernmost tip of Scotland, and stayed in a room that seemed to teeter over the beach and watch over the North Sea beyond.

On the last day we managed to fit in a trip to Loch Ness. But a highlight for me was crossing the Cromarty Firth on a ferry with only room for one car (ours). Like a sort of river taxi! The river here is full of decommissioned oil rigs which have a sort of bleak beauty.

Month: June 2017