Month: October 2017

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Roundup | a good poetry week

Bit of a roundup post. Last Tuesday evening at West Greenwich Library I got to hear some super poems inspired by the Mary Evans Picture Library, by Sarah Westcott (who I almost didn’t recognise because her new, chic pixie haircut was different to her Twitter pic!) Lorraine Mariner, Mick Delap, Peter Wallis and others – including Sarah’s father Richard, who was also kind enough to buy my pamphlet (!) I bought Lorraine Mariner’s collection There will be no more nonsense (Picador) and have romped through it. Recommended!

lorraine mariner - there will be no more nonsense

I wasn’t able to go to my regular Hastings Stanza group on Wednesday which was a shame, but on Thursday there was a bit of a poets’ reunion at Needlewriters from which I came away enthused – about recent writing, about our plans for Telltale Press, and about catching up with poet friends.

Then on Saturday I was in Brighton for a small group workshop given by Jackie Wills. The day started well (trains running!), until I realised I’d gone to the wrong address entirely. So after a leisurely twenty minute walk from the station, I then turned into a crazy woman trying to find her way across town to the actual venue – and let me tell you Brighton is hilly! So I arrived 40 minutes late, red in the face and carrying all the layers I’d taken off en route while overheating. I then started developing a headache from hell so by the end of the day I was very grateful for sharing a taxi back to the station with two of my fellow poets. I somehow managed to run for the train and then sat through the journey with my eyes closed, praying not to be sick.

And yet! I enjoyed the day very much – Jackie presented us with a series of exercises that were all based on poems by quite different poets, from Thomas Sheridan to Adrienne Rich. I came away with plenty of writing roughs that felt work-uppable.

Meanwhile I have The Rialto still to read properly. It was bittersweet to see two of my poems on a double page spread. It’s always brilliant to get something in The Rialto, but (and I don’t think this is unusual) part of me worries straight away that everything around it always seems so MUCH better. And instead of enjoying the moment I’m thinking how high the next hill is to climb. I did read a very insightful piece recently which I thought shed light on this – how focusing on goals means that satisfaction is always in the future or the past – The Problem of Living in the Present. It’s not about ‘mindfulness’. Worth a read if any of this resonates with you.

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Currently reading/listening to | upcoming events

As usual I’m a bit late to the party on a few things, namely Ocean Vuong, whose Forward-winning collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Cape) I haven’t yet read, but I was fascinated by yesterday’s Guardian profile of him and this video of him reading was just so compelling I had to stop drinking my tea and let it get cold:

I’m currently reading Lara by Bernardine Evaristo (Bloodaxe) which was recommended to me as a kind of ‘novel in verse’ although it doesn’t have a straightforward narrative by any means. The various characters are revealed to us in a fragmentary way, sometimes like film scenes, other times more impressionistic. It’s pulling me along. I hadn’t realised that Bernardine is pretty much from the same town as me, or at least, she was at school there. Which feels kind of strange, and strange that I think it’s strange, as if I thought I had some sort of proprietary rights over it.

Meanwhile I’m nursing myself out of a fluey cold that’s dragging on, hoping to be on better form next week as Tuesday 10th October I’ll be reading at West Greenwich Library (not a million miles from my aforementioned manor) at a special event put on by the Mary Evans Picture Library. It features poets who have contributed to the Poems & Pictures blog – we’ll each be reading our own poems and one or two by other contributors who can’t make it along themselves. I’ve chosen to read Valerie Morton’s ‘The Northern Line’, and ‘Show of Hands’ by Ayesha Chatterjee.

It’s a great list of readers. In particular I’ll be excited to meet Lorraine Mariner. I remember reading her poem ‘And then there will be no more nonsense’ in The Rialto a few years back and I can’t explain it but it just jumped out at me – I had to keep going back to it, keep re-reading it. I never thought so much could be loaded into what appeared to be a small poem. I so wished I had written it.

Also next week (Thursday) is the quarterly Needlewriters event in Lewes, featuring poetry from James Flynn & Linda Black, and prose from Matt Freidson.

I’m then looking forward to a day-long small-group workshop with Jackie Wills, whose Woman’s Head As Jug (Arc) I talked about on this blog a while back. As well as her poetry collections, Jackie has also written an ebook called The Workshop Handbook for Writers which sounds like a really useful resource.

 

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Flogging old drafts – ‘do I still want to say this?’

digging out old poems to recycle

No, not flogging in the sense of selling, although who knows? Maybe there’s a market for it – poets could sell their old given-up-on poems to others who might be able to make something of them.

But what I’m talking about here is old stuff that you rediscover years later and think ‘hmm… maybe there is something in this.’

I don’t know about you but I have tons of folders on my computer, actually it’s sprawled across two computers, both of which are current, just to add to the mess. ‘Poems Archive’, ‘Old poems’, ‘Old bad poems’, ‘Poems to work on’, etc. There are also folders which date from various ‘poem a day’ exercises, courses and self-styled retreats, going back seven or eight years.

When I find myself trawling the current ‘working on’ folder and finding nothing to inspire me, I sometimes open up one of the old folders for a peek. But I think the trick is not to do it too often, because you want to surprise yourself with stuff you’ve forgotten about.

Sometimes I just need reassurance. ‘Wow! look at the tat I was writing in 2009’ or whatever. Or to see how fruitful a certain retreat or course had been. In March 2015, for example, I took myself off to Standen for a three day retreat. When I looked at the folder of ten poems I started or worked on while I was there, I see that two were subsequently published – after a lot of work though – in Prole and The Interpreter’s House, and one eventually came second in the 2016 Stanza competition. On the other hand, the May 2013 ‘poem a day’ folder only contains three poems (!), none of which made it to publication.

But more exciting is to find poems I just could not get to work, but when I read them again now I’m thinking ‘I still want to say this.’

So after today’s hunt through the various rejected-by-myself piles, I have found seventeen poems worth revisiting, on the basis that each of them have something, however small, going for them. Yes, they are riddled with tired phrases, poor line breaks, too much ‘telling’, portentous last lines and the rest. But that can all be worked on, and it will be fun to do so. Most importantly, they make me think ‘yes, I still want to say this.’