Month: March 2018

Readings, and a Garsdale (re)treat booked

Well the submissions list was popular… I hope you managed to get some poems out before some of the deadlines. I’ve got a few things out now. Although sorry to report that YET AGAIN I didn’t win the National. Oh well! I’m hoping to be at the award ceremony on Wednesday (if my RSVP wasn’t too late) so at least I’ll experience the vicarious excitement of it all.

Off the back of my pamphlet launch I’ve got a few readings sorted. The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society had a last minute cancellation so they slotted me in to read last week alongside Canadian poet Miranda Pearson. I really enjoyed the evening – good venue, good vibe, good size audience and wonderfully attentive – and I got the biggest laugh I’ve ever had for the pamphlet’s title poem. I know that shouldn’t be the criterion for a successful poetry reading, but it’s always fun when people laugh – maybe I should have set my sights on standup. Er, but then again, probably not!

Robin Houghton with Miranda Pearson at the Kent & Sussex march 18
With Miranda Pearson at the Kent & Sussex in Tunbridge Wells

After Easter I’ll be reading in Lewes at the Needlewriters, alongside Nicholas Royle and Jonathan Totman. I’m a member of the Needlewriters collective so it’s home turf for me – which actually makes it a bit nerve-wracking. Not to mention my worrying about a number of poets in the audience having heard all my stuff before. I just have to remind myself that people are unlikely to remember, so I must treat it all as fresh. Never apologise!

Guess who’s going to Garsdale

Now for the big treat – I’ve booked in to a residential week at the Garsdale Retreat in June, with Ian Duhig and Hannah Lowe as the visiting guest. I’m a big admirer of Ian’s work and just know it’s going to be a fab week. I know after my experience at Ty Newydd a few years ago I wondered if I’d ever do another residential. Although that particular experience was amazing and a real boost for my writing, nonetheless I found it exhausting – there just weren’t enough hours in the day to do all the homework, no time to go out and take a walk, so many participants and quite a combative atmosphere, and the dreaded cooking/washing up duties. I’m someone who needs time and space to think, and lots of sleep. So having to get up at 6 to get work done in time for a morning seminar, after a late night the night before (compulsory activities every evening), was a bit much for me.

So… when I found the Garsdale Retreat (I think it was after I’d done a search on Ian Duhig, who I was hoping to ask for a blurb for the Telltale anthology – more on that in a minute) – two things in particular jumped off the screen at me: NO cooking or washing up (in fact the food all sounds excellent) and HALF the number of participants you get on a typical residential. Not only that, but the schedule looks about right in terms of group activity and tutor contact, with a good balance of free time. And it’s in a beautiful part of the country. So now I’m planning with military precision to get hold of Advance train tickets. It’s all very exciting and I feel very lucky to be able to go.

Coming soon! TRUTHS: A Telltale Press Anthology

Something that’s been taking up a lot of my time lately has been the forthcoming Telltale anthology, Truths – it’s been a labour of love though, so I’m not complaining. And working with Sarah Barnsley on editing has made me realise how mediocre I am at proofing – I can’t believe how many ‘straight vs curly’ quote marks and ‘hyphens vs en-dashes’ she spotted and I missed – ha ha! Seriously, Sarah is the queen of all this, and that’s on top of being an insightful and sensitive editor. My job has mostly been to fiddle around in Affinity Designer and stress about fonts and gutters.

A brief aside here – I’d like to offer an (unpaid) endorsement for this Affinity software. When I bought a new computer I needed to replace my Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, but they’re now only available on subscription (each costs more than £200 a year!) So I did some research and found Affinity, who make alternative software called Photo and Designer, with a third, Publisher, due out soon. Each program costs under £50 to buy outright, there are tons of tutorials on the website and the company is British. I’ve been using both programs very successfully and have even found Designer to be more intuitive than Illustrator. It has been a learning curve with Photo, but I’m SO pleased with the results and certainly for my needs I don’t feel the software is an any way inferior to the Adobe equivalents. End of advert!

So the Telltale Press anthology will be going to print this coming week, and the launch is on April 25 in Lewes.  Do come if you’re able – there will be a stellar list of readers. Contributors to the anthology are poets who have read with us at ‘Telltale Press & Friends’ since 2014, as well as a number of others who have supported us in the project. It feels to me like a really strong collection (OK, I would say that, wouldn’t I), and with its theme of ‘truth’, rather timely – it’s been fascinating to see how poets have interpreted the theme.

Editing the Telltale Press anthology
Typesetting hell?

 

 

UPDATED – UK poetry magazines submissions list

It’s that time again – time to update my PDF list of UK poetry magazines submissions windows, with live links to their submissions guidelines pages.

A couple of publications came off the list – Algebra of Owls has closed, and Tender seems to have been dormant for over nine months, so I took it off.

I’ll be emailing the updated list to everyone who requested previous versions. If you’re not on the mailing list but would like a copy of this one, please drop me an email (robin at robinhoughtonpoetry.co.uk).

What else is new in this version:

  1. twenty-five journals with updated information (highlighted in red)
  2. thirty-eight journals are OPEN for submissions now (some closing very soon though)
  3. a couple of journals will be opening soon – and some windows only open for as little as a week!

Good luck with those submissions.

CIB: the distraction economy, empty living rooms & a toe-dip into poetry and polemic

I’ve shortened ‘Currently Influenced By…’ to CIB in the titles of these posts, because there are ‘rules’ about optimum length of blog posts titles and only a small percentage of people will read past the first couple of words, etc etc. It’s one of the symptoms of the Age of Attention, and what Aldous Huxley called our ‘almost infinite appetite for distractions.’

Pay attention now

Being distracted by technology used to be something we’d joke about – how poems never quite got written because we spent too long watching cute kitten videos. I still sometimes have to actually say under my breath the things I pick up my phone to do – check weather, check train times to London – otherwise I get sucked into reading and responding to emails, or a ‘quick’ look at the news, or a review of the photos I took yesterday to share with Nick – ‘oh look at this one!’

But reading James Williams‘s piece in the RSA Journal was a sharp reminder of where we’re going with technology, and it’s worse than you think. Williams is design ethicist and a former Google strategist, as well as co-founder of Time Well Spent, a campaigning organisation aiming to ‘realign technology with humanity’s best interests’:

In the sort term, the externalities of the digital attention economical distract us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, they can distract us from living the lives we want to live, […] a primary effect of digital technologies is to undermine the operation and even the development of the human will.

Williams talks persuasively about this – how the ‘petty media environment defined by impulsiveness and zero-sum competition for our attention’ has created fertile ground for the success of Donald Trump, for example, and how technology has ‘crowded out opportunities for reflection and replaced leisure with entertainment.’

(As I read this I thought of a recent ‘Homes for Sale’ supplement in the local paper, and its photos of interiors designed to ease the sale. When I saw a photo of what appeared to be a vast living room containing nothing but a black TV on the wall and a sofa, I felt sad – even though there may be many interpretations of such a scenario – perhaps the person or people living here spend all their time at work or going for long walks or political protest marches or caring for their old mum. Maybe they never lived there. Or maybe they’re in the process of moving out. But the picture still made me feel sad.)

Steer for the deep waters only

A recent poetry mail shot contained a flyer for a new publication called The Analog Sea Review (an offline journal) – you may have seen it. Their manifesto:

Analog Sea is a small community of writers and artists wishing to maintain contemplative life in the digital age. […] We aim to spark conversations between those who find artistic expression, philosophical enquiry, and reverence for nature critical counterweights to the racket and fragmentation of modern life.

They don’t have a website nor an email address.

Technology. Attention. Distraction. What’s it doing to us?

These are big issues for me, having spent many years absorbed in and fascinated by the internet and online behaviour. Online enriched my life, especially in the early days (late twentieth/early twenty-first century) and I believed the good would outbalance the bad, but it’s not looking that way now.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I gave up using Facebook in January 2017, initially for a month, as I was starting to feel an overwhelming sense of anxiety every time I opened it up. I haven’t gone back, and don’t regret the decision. Today on Cheryl Capaldo Traynor’s blog I read about her own trials with Facebook, when people who she believes to be her friends spread inflammatory material. She documents her difficulty in deciding how to deal with this. But leaving Facebook, with everything she enjoys about it, isn’t an option –  ‘I’ve done enough cutting off my nose to spite my face in my lifetime.’

I’ve recently written a piece for Poetry News about social media and the ‘health’ of poetry, canvassing the opinions of a range of poets, which was in itself fascinating. It hasn’t been signed off yet, so I don’t know if or when it will appear, but I can tell you it was hard to cover everything I wanted to in 800 words, so I sense there will be more about it, not least of all on this blog.

I don’t really ‘do’ political poetry. Or do I?

I suppose it’s all got me thinking more about how the politics of technology and online behaviour intersect, and  I can feel it oozing out in the form of poetry. Or at the point of oozing. I’ve been reading Peter Raynard’s new collection Precarious, and have been a bit overcome by its hugeness, it’s a tsunami of a collection where image piles upon image upon image as if all the injustices experienced over many years have been compressed and expressed with an intensity that’s relentless. (I realise that’s not a complete review, and not all the poems in the book fit that description, but more on this in another post.)

With this in mind I’ve recently found my way to some interesting US poetry publishers championing social and political causes, via Twitter. For example, the Rise Up Review and Glass Poetry Press… more on THIS in another post as well.

Which reminds me. My list of poetry magazine submissions windows is due an update, and I may start to add some US journals to the list. I feel my attention being split. Must focus.