November 2017 – Robin Houghton

Blog/ 19/11/2017

Loose Muse & other news

Sorry about the title of this post – no, wait – never apologise! As I wrote it I was thinking ‘Hugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grump’ – aka the fireman in Trumpton. I’ve probably got the names a bit wrong but that’s how I remember chanting them as a child. An early poetic influence..?

So – to Loose Muse – I had an invitation to read some months ago from Sue Wrinch, who runs the monthly group Loose Muse at the Discovery Centre (aka the Library) in Winchester. I’m always excited to be asked to read, although I admit I was daunted when Sue said it would be alongside the mighty Sasha Dugdale. Sasha is a poet, playwright, translator and editor who is, I’ll be the first to admit, in an entirely different league from me. Among her many achievements: her long poem ‘Joy’ won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and is the title poem of her new collection from Carcanet.

I loved Sasha’s reading of an extract from ‘Joy’, which is written in the voice of Catherine Blake, who was wife to William. The poem is both riveting and moving, formally inventive and not without humour. Sasha read sensitively throughout, and I was much relieved to find her a very warm person and not the slightest bit grand. Unfortunately she had to leave early to catch a train but not before we exchanged a few words and I managed to get a photo.

I was reasonably pleased with how my reading went and I think I finished a bit early – but I’d always rather do that that go on too long. Most exciting to sell a few pamphlets – including the first three copies of Foot Wear!

Loose Muse is a well-supported event and I was struck by the fact that the open mic was clearly a key part of the evening. Sue kept things moving but there was a definite sense that every reader was important, not just the ‘feature’ readers. Those who read appeared comfortable and seemed to trust their audience – the overall effect was one of a reading and writing group rather than the kind of ‘free for all’ car crash craziness that often seems to occur at open mics. Sue even does a full write up of each event – you can read last Monday’s one here. All in all a generous and hard working host. I’m very grateful to Sue for the invitation.

And in Other News … Jeremy Page has very kindly accepted a new poem for The Frogmore Papers. Fab news, especially as it was one that came out of the lovely Jackie Wills workshop day when I was suffering from some sort of age-related migraine. Joy indeed!

Meanwhile, at Telltale Press we are putting together an anthology to come out in the Spring, with contributions from our many ‘Friends of Telltale’. It’s at a very exciting stage, at which we start to discuss and order the poems. Now I need to finish my own contribution – ack!

Blog/ 15/11/201715/11/2017

Foot Wear – a handmade mini-pamphlet

So there I was with a handful of poems from my ill-fated ‘Business Class’ collection that couldn’t find a home. What to do? I started thinking about the themes: workplace tensions, multicultural office environments, illicit relationships, anomie…and shoes! Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I was working in the sports shoe industry. And I realised shoes have been a theme in my life – from doodling enormous platform boots all over my rough book at school, to my first job in a shoe shop, to persuading my bosses at Nike that netball was a viable sport and players needed netball shoes.

I picked over what I had, chose a few unpublished poems and adapted a couple that had been published, added in a few new shoe-themed poems, and the little collection made a good narrative arc.

Shoes are made by hand, so why not the pamphlet?

I wanted this to be a small collection of poem ‘vignettes’, semi-autobiographical, related to my life in shoes, in limited edition. I wanted each poem to be accompanied by a photo. I also wanted to make the pamphlets by hand, as much as possible – not hand written and not handmade paper (would be nice, but very expensive) – but hand-bound and finished. The point is that the trainers we wear are by and large handmade – from the pattern cutting to the stitching, dyeing, glueing and finishing – by hundreds of assembly-line workers in the far east, and it’s skilled work. The least I could do, to pay homage to that process, was to make the pamphlets myself.

A bit of info for stationery geeks

My plan was to print the inner pages on my office printer. I was excited to find A5 paper for sale online, and I ordered it in 170gsm, a bit heavier than normal printer paper. I thought perhaps there’d be less chance of a printer jam and the heavier weight would look classier. I hadn’t really considered the thickness of the finished article. But with only twenty pages it turned out fine in the end. Similarly, I had the covers printed in 380 mic pulp, which turned out quite thick – but I don’t regret it. I had no trouble folding the pages in the end because I had a lovely bit of kit called a bone folder.

A noob at numbering

The first challenge was to print the pages in the right order, with the correct back-to-back pagination. This proved harder than I thought and I wasted quite a few sheets of paper in my frustration!

Anyway I succeeded in making a mockup, glued together, which became my blueprint. There then followed the sloooow process of printing the pages. Ten at a time invariably meant a misfeed of the paper, which when it was side two being printed meant reprinting all over again both sides. Ugh.

Meanwhile I created a cover design using a photo of the tongue label from my trainers and a background image suggesting a cardboard box. This I had printed at an online printers.

Adventures in book binding

I was looking forward to binding the pamphlets. I bought a ‘bookbinding starter pack’ from a wonderful shop based in the Orkneys called the Vintage Paper Company, and followed their instructions for how to make the simplest of bindings.

That was it! Or so I thought… I realised then that the pages protruded outside the cover. They would need trimming. After trying unsuccessfully to trim a thickness of 5 sheets using a blade, I realised I’d have to do it singly.

In the end I got quite good at it, although there were a few rough edges I thought that was fine – all part of the quirkiness/individuality of each pamphlet.

Ta da!

The final product is lovely, if I say so myself! I’ve only made ten so far, and there’s going to be a limit of fifty. My plan is to sell them at readings.

In fact I made my first sales on Monday evening in Winchester – more about that in the next post!

Blog/ 11/11/201719/11/2017

Readings, diagram poems and towards a new handmade pamphlet…

Oh dear, looks like it’s been a while since my last post – there’s been a lot going on, including a birthday (and all the stock-taking and reassessing that brings),a reading at the swish new Poetry Cafe in London, and the making of a new pamphlet. Plus the clocks have gone back, we’ve put the garden to bed and I’ve even bought my tickets for the T S Eliot prize readings in January. The year must be nearly over!

With Telltale at the new-look Poetry Cafe

The Telltale Press & Friends night at the Poetry Cafe was a real highlight of the last few weeks. I travelled up with Catherine Smith, who has been such a fantastic support both to Telltale and to me personally in my writing. Hearing her read is always a pleasure, and alongside Peter Kenny too – Peter is a creative powerhouse, and I couldn’t have done the whole Telltale thing without him. (He recently won the HappenStance Dream Poem competition – and just look at the marvellous feedback here from judge J O Morgan.) Compering the night with great élan was Sarah Barnsley, another inspirational Telltaler, and our special guest was Abigail Parry – a hugely talented poet whose first collection is coming out with Bloodaxe in the New Year – and long-awaited I think – Abby has won some very impressive prizes. She’s also one of the most modest and humble poets I’ve ever met. All this, plus a full & appreciative audience (the Poetry Cafe always seems to deliver!) made for a fantastic night.

Peter Kenny at Telltale Poets and Friends, the Poetry Cafe — Peter Kenny

Readings coming up

I’ve got some lovely poetry readings to look forward to now – this Monday I’m at Winchester Loose Muse reading alongside the mighty Sasha Dugdale. I’m grateful to organiser Sue Wrinch for inviting me – and in such great company. I’ll be practising my set this weekend!

Then next month a trip to the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool for the Coast to Coast to Coast vol 2 magazine launch, at the invitation of editor Maria Isakova Bennett. I’m not sure who else is reading at the launch but the list of contributors is a pretty exciting. And a night away in Liverpool at Christmas is going to be great fun!

Illustrators making poetry pamphlets

Coast to Coast to Coast is a hand-stitched thing of beauty. I’ve always loved handmade journals. They feel so personal, as if there’s a tactile connection with the person who made it, and I love the thought of having number 14 (or whatever) of only 50 produced.

I was at the Towner Gallery recently for the Ink, Paper & Print Fair, and came away totally enthused. I picked up two limited edition pamphlets which caught my eye – Bangheads by illustrator Ceri Amphlett and To Eden, Diagram Poems by Matthew Kay. The concept of diagram poems was new to me, and I love it – where each single word really does come loaded, the collages of old-school diagrams with unexpected labels that you feel compelled to examine. The idea of diagrams – traditionally used to express complexities in ways that are supposed to enlighten, to reveal the wisdom behind the facts – as poems, makes sense, and appropriating the diagrams as a means of exploring a relationship feels both humorous and deadly serious.

Ceri’s pamphlet is, she admitted, illustration-driven, and she doesn’t claim to be a poet, nevertheless I liked the accompanying short poems a lot.

All this got me thinking again about hand-making a pamphlet, just in limited numbers, using some of the poems I’ve had no luck in getting published, or versions of them. I love the design aspect of pamphlets and being involved in every aspect of the visual presentation.

The themed sequence I’ve had knocking around for a few years now is the ‘Business Class’ series of poems based on the years I spent in the sport shoe industry. I always bring a couple of them out at readings, and they’re often the ones people comment on, or seem to remember. Most of the poems have been published individually in various journals, but I’ve given up on finding a publisher for them as a pamphlet. The idea once felt original and unusual but maybe no longer – I recently heard of another poet bringing out a pamphlet based on his workplace experiences called – you guessed it – ‘Business Class’.

But I still think the sequence has legs, so I changed the emphasis slightly and decided to focus on the shoe theme. I then realised I’ve actually had a bit of a life in shoes! In this way a short collection started to take shape. I’ve combined the poems together with some relevant grainy photos, and produced a semi-autobiographical sequence called Foot Wear.

This post is already quite long so I’ll talk more about Foot Wear, and my adventures in book-binding, in another post…

Month: November 2017