September 2017 – Robin Houghton

Blog/ 20/09/2017

To Liverpool, 28 drafts later

It’s wonderful how software like Illustrator allows non-designers like me a chance to play around with layout, typefaces and graphic design. I really value how digital has made good quality print projects possible for amateur creatives. We can all be publishers now. Producing your own zine, poster, wall art or whatever is cheap and easy.

Perhaps this is what gives the handmade or hand finished object extra appeal. I haven’t seen the magazine Coast to Coast to Coast yet – it’s only on its second edition – but when I came across a tweet asking for submissions, and read about it being hand stitched , I knew I wanted it – and to be in it, if possible. The magazine editors are Maria Isakova Bennett and Michael Brown. I knew Maria’s name from her poetry, but she is also a fine artist, and the magazine is designed to be a work of art, a beautiful artefact in itself. (Fuselit, edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone, is another handmade, limited edition magazine which I have a few copies of, and they are small things of great wonder.)

When Maria emailed to say they had accepted my submission I was excited for several reasons – firstly obviously to have a poem in the magazine and alongside the work of many fine poets, secondly because this particular poem has been in development for A Very Long Time, and lastly because the launch event is at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, it means I get a good reason to go visit.

“The greatest team in Europe…”

When I was a teenager I worshipped Liverpool FC. My girlfriends and I were happy talking about Kevin Keegan all day. I never saw my team play at home, because a journey to Liverpool was inconceivable – at that time I lived in London and I’d never been north of Derby. But I recorded each season’s match results religiously in my diary, an early version of which also bizarrely contained a ‘Club News’ section, written up in my best fourteen-year-old’s sports journalist style, even though no-one read it but me!

Although I’ve only been twice to Liverpool, the thought of going up there in December to hear some lovely poetry, in an art gallery, to stay the night in the city and to take away a handmade piece of art fills me with a ridiculous amount of joy. Ironically I don’t follow football any more.

So what about the 28 drafts?

The poem features a fur, or an alleged fur – depending on how you read it (perhaps it was always destined to appear in a tactile/textile magazine?) Anyway, the first draft was in 2011, and looking at the computer folder I see it has had 28 drafts and six different titles over the last seven years. This has to be a record for me. I know I workshopped it at least three times, each time resulting in my thinking it rubbish and putting it away. I submitted it several times in the early days, but stopped over the years as I lost confidence in it. But I couldn’t give up on it entirely. This year I got it out again for more redrafting. It felt much better – as if I’d had to grow into the poem. And now it’s finally found a home, and I’m absurdly grateful.

Hurrah for the handmade and the labours of love!

Blog/ 15/09/2017

Those poetry ‘banned words’ again

Another perennial topic that poets always seem to enjoy debating – what are the ‘banned’ words? The word ‘shard’ came up the other evening at Hasting Stanza and I couldn’t help but mention that it was ‘on the list’ – to which the response was, ‘can you do a blog post about this?’

Is it really the case that certain words, inserted innocently into what might be an otherwise excellent poem, can somehow poison the entire piece? That it can ruin your chance of getting the poem published, shortlisted, or even taken seriously? What are these words? And who decides what they are?

The debate has fascinated me ever since I first fell foul of the banned words police, using – yes – shard, in a poem that I took to workshop a few years back. There was no mass outrage, just a gentle murmuring about it having to go.

The first thing to remember is that many people will say the banned words thing is ridiculous. The second is that those same people will often, when their buttons are pushed, turn out to have their own personal list of words they’d never use. I don’t think there are words that everyone agrees should be avoided. Even the most commonly-quoted ones (shard, myriad, tesserae) sometimes slip through. But editors/judges/tutors have their own opinions, and you can’t always know what they are.

I also think that, like language generally, the list is probably in continual flux. The point being that the ‘banned words’ aren’t necessarily evil or tasteless in themselves, they’ve just been overused, misused and abused. But if everyone studiously avoids ‘cumulus’, there will come a day when it will sound fresh, and we’ll start using it again. And you’ve only got to look at today’s poetry magazines to realise there’s a new generation of words that are shaping up nicely for membership of The List. I also think there should be a ‘bad sex in poetry’ sister award to that for Bad Sex in Fiction. But that’s another post!

If you’re interested in avoiding the banned word landmines, Frances Spurrier lists a few classics here. Mary Lou Taylor attributes a number of them (including ‘shard’ and – one on my personal list – ‘soul’) to Bill Greenwell.

There’s an ever-evolving list (although I’m not sure if anything ever gets taken off it) at the suspiciously anonymous Pretend Genius. Gems here range from the obviously archaic ‘quoth’ to the more baffling ‘Jennifer’ (number 46). Jennifer? Really? (If you know why, please let me know!) Anyway, I can say with 100% certainty that I have fallen foul of this particular list many times. (‘Black’? ‘Leaf’?) Plus, ‘death’ appears twice… so maybe I’ve just been had. Good fun though 🙂

If you agree or disagree please tell us – have you done well in the NPC with a poem about shards of light peeking through the cumulus? Perhaps you’ve been told never to use the word ‘potato’ in a poem? We need to know!

Angst/ 12/09/2017

Tackling poetry readings – angst & a few ideas

September always feels like a new start, and as I’m gearing up to a pamphlet launch in early 2018 I’m trying to get some readings set up. I’ve queried some poet friends, sent a few polite emails and things are taking shape.

Not everyone responds to query emails, which is a shame, but I suppose they get a lot of requests to read and they may not know me from Adam. At the Needlewriters in Lewes our waiting list for potential readers is about three years long, so I’m not fazed when people offer me something in 2019!

Anyway, I’ve had a bit of a readings hiatus, so I’m thinking again about reading technique, memorising, putting a set together and so on. (Warning: angst alert!)

I’ve never been on a ‘how to read poetry to an audience’ course but such a course is tempting. I hear great things about Live Canon in this respect, indeed I’ve seen (and been very impressed by) their alumni. But of course, reading one’s poetry presents different challenges to different people.

A poetry reading – how I try not to cock it up

I tend not to get overly nervous, in fact I enjoy readings, but only if I’m well prepared, and if I haven’t done enough prep then the cracks quickly appear. They may not always show to the audience (fifteen years of marketing presentations taught me a lot) but I feel them, and the whole thing starts to be not fun. If I’ve decided to memorise something, I then see it as a great failure if I dry up. Luckily, unlike actors, ‘page’ poets have the choice of reading from memory or not. So I must learn to only read off the book if I know I’ve practised enough.

Also, I know that my voice can be a weakness – I have an accent that occasionally wavers inexplicably, especially if I think about it as I’m speaking. I put it down to some deep-seated social anxiety, but I’m also what linguists call an accommodator, which means you have a tendency to unconsciously mirror other people’s accents. Another problem is that when ‘projecting’ to an audience I can get lazy and stop using my diaphragm to breathe, so my throat tightens up, the sound is forced and afterwards I feel I’ve strained it. Working on singing technique has helped with this a lot. If I were a school teacher it probably wouldn’t be an issue, as teachers learn quite early on how to not misuse their voices.

Yet more angst about it

Then there’s the worry of appearing over-confident, or even over-casual about it all. I love going to readings where the poet is confident enough in themselves to let the poetry do the talking, where there’s no anxiety being communicated from reader to audience (even if it is there), where they are well prepared, know what they’re going to read next, know when to finish. But there’s a fine line between this and appearing overly slick, or possibly even enjoying the sound of one’s own voice. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t worry about this – everyone’s threshold for ‘fakeness’ is different, and you can’t please everyone…in fact, just writing a blog is, for many people, a de facto example of enjoying the sound of one’s own voice, so I’d better shut up now.

Something useful

If you’re interested in this topic (or if I’ve made you more anxious than you were already), poet and voice and voice specialist Marek Urbanowicz produced this PDF tipsheet for Agenda – How to Improve Reading Your Poetry.

Live Canon as I mentioned do run occasional courses in performing poetry, and also offer coaching in ‘voice, breath, preparing poems for performance, combatting nerves, microphone technique’ – oh NO, microphone technique, I don’t even want to go there!

Tell me about it

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on poetry readings – either as the poet reading (how do you prepare? any tips?) or as the long-suffering audience member (what can poets do to make it work for you?)

Blog/ 05/09/2017

Another reason to track poetry rejections

Thank you to everyone who requested the PDF of submissions windows, and all the lovely comments. I’m very pleased that it’s useful. Thank you also for the corrections and additions you’ve given me. There are a couple more publications I’ve since realised should be on the list. I’ll add them when I do an update.

Meanwhile, I was just updating my own submissions record and thought you might find this interesting – when a poem is accepted somewhere, I go back and highlight all the times it had been rejected beforehand (or versions of the same poem). This reminds me that what might not work for one journal can still work for another.

In the screenshot above I’ve blurred out the journal and poem titles but basically it shows a list of the poems I had rejected in the first half of 2015, and those highlighted in yellow were subsequently published elsewhere – some only just recently. I find around a third of rejected poems still go on to get published, albeit in some cases after a bit more work.

So basically the lesson is not to give up on a poem, if you believe in it, just because it’s been rejected a couple (or more) times.

Month: September 2017