Month: August 2018

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Catchup for a rainy day – news, upcoming etc

With a real sense of summer coming to an end, I just wanted to mention a few things before August is up, and that feeling of moving on to the start of a new year. (Still haunted by school terms, decades on…)

Excellent Events

Back in July, I didn’t manage to make it to The Interpreter’s House launch reading in London, although that was fortuitous because it turned out the Southern Rail had a lovely treat planned for that night which left people coming back from London either stranded at Haywards Heath and facing a large taxi bill to get home, or a 3-4 hour journey via who-knows-where. BUT I hear it was a fine and well-attended send-off for outgoing editor Martin Malone. By all accounts it was a tad hot and sweaty in the July heat. But we’re not complaining about the weather, are we? New editor Georgi Gill has already taken charge of the next edition. Which reminds me, it’s just about time for me to update the UK poetry magazines submissions windows list…

Also in early July I had the privilege of being invited to the launch of No Bird on My Bough, an anthology of work by The Writers’ Place Poets in Brighton. This was a group which had been selected by New Writing South for a year of mentoring from Dean Atta, culminating in the anthology and reading. It was a really enjoyable evening of poetry with strong readings. Great to hear Ann Perrin, who’s a stalwart of the Brighton poetry scene, Claire Booker, whose work I’ve spotted in magazines and Sophie Brown, whose ‘The party as a metaphor for death, yeah’ I found very moving. And Judith Shaw, a member of our Hastings Stanza, who’s doing amazing things these days with her poetry which is wonderful to see. She’s also a visual artist; one of her paintings is on the cover of the anthology. Applications are open for the next round of Writers’ Place Poets.

Write Stuff

Since June I’ve been thinking a lot about my first collection. Actually, just saying ‘my first collection’ like that is a step in the right direction. I’ve a lot of related things in the pipeline, including two applications for funding, neither of which I’m particularly optimistic about, but one can but try. I’m writing new material – not a shedload, but some. It’s new and it’s (I think) different. Thanks to a manic sending-out spate last month I have a number of submissions out there looking for homes. Last week I had a very kind  ‘no thank you’ note from Prole – they are so good at turning submissions around promptly. I wonder if the longer one waits the harder the blow is when getting the ‘no’? On the other hand, it was lovely to receive a contributor copy of The North the other week. I’ve yet to sit down to read it properly but already I see many unfamiliar names alongside familiar ones. I’ll Google them as I go along, in the absence of poet biogs – something I value a lot in a poetry magazine. But maybe that’s just me. I do enjoy the articles in The North – a close reading, poets I go back to – and this is one of the things informing my new ‘poetry-related project’ (more to come on this, but still under wraps as I do the planning and risk assessment!)

Currently reading

Summer editions of The Poetry Review, The North, Poetry & Granta…. Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield, and Feel Free, Essays by Zadie Smith. (Also Guiding Magazine and anything to do with the new programme ahead of Brownies restarting in a couple of weeks.)

Coming up soon

This coming Saturday 1st September I’ll be joining fellow Hastings Stanza poets for a Hastings Literary Festival Fringe Reading at Grand Cafe Rue de Pera at 11am. (Actually I think we ARE the Fringe – he he).

Then on September 22nd it’s Free Verse the Poetry Book Fair, this year at the Senate House in London and bigger than ever I hear.  I plan to be there helping (?) out on the Frogmore Press table, and possibly flogging the odd copy of Telltale Press anthology TRUTHS.

I’m currently gearing up for the Poetry Swindon Festival 4th – 8th October where I’ll be blogger-in-residence – what the heck’s that, I hear you say, and you’ll be he first to know once I’ve got my strategy in order!  But basically I’ll be attending workshops and readings and blogging about them in the only way I know how, on the Festival Chronicle blog (and bits and bobs here too). I see I’m also down to do a reading and then blog about it – should be interesting! More about the Poetry Swindon Festival to come on this blog – stand back – meanwhile bookings are open, and there’s a fab range of events lined up, all for a VERY modest price. Do come.

On Monday 29th October it’s my birthday – and I’ll be one of several poets reading a new poem at The Troubadour that night. More about this nearer the time.

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A few thoughts on ‘truth’

Rattle poetry magazine

One of the things I like very much about the US poetry magazine Rattle is the ‘Conversation’ at the back. It’s basically editor Timothy Green interviewing a poet, presented as a verbatim conversation, and it feels so immediate, like you’re listening in to a phone call or something, or an unedited podcast. The fact that it’s date-stamped, so you know when the chat took place, adds to its appeal. I can read it and think ‘Oh yeah, on February 18th 2018 I was doing XYZ, and these guys were having this conversation…’

I can’t really explain why I like that. It just seems to ground it in the real world. The interviews are never stilted, you can’t ‘hear’ the interviewer shuffling papers or thinking about the next question he’s going to ask. The conversation feels like a free flow. When there’s a lull or a sticky moment you sense that. But it’s never cosy or time-wasting. It’s juicy stuff. And it seems really real. Would it spoil my enjoyment if I found out it was scripted, or edited, or that it’s an amalgam of several conversations, or other interviews? Or if the interview (or even the interviewee) was fictional?

Since working on our Telltale anthology ‘Truths’ I suppose it’s heightened my awareness of what ‘truth’ in poetry means to me personally. And it’s fascinating to eavesdrop on others’ conversations on the topic.  There’s a section in the most recent Rattle Conversation with poet Stephen Dunn, in which the subject of his degenerative illness comes up. Green suggests that Dunn may not be writing about it because it’s perhaps too personal, and because his poems ‘have a genuine, authentic feel, because it’s a fictional you-but-not-you’:

Dunn:  Partly. I don’t think my life is interesting unless I make it interesting. There’s no reason anyone should care about me. the burden is on me entirely to make whatever I’m doing interesting. To me, first of all, and then to others.

Green:  So how much of a poem is you and how much is fiction?

Dunn:  More and more it’s fiction and more and more it’s about me. I think of [Wallace] Stevens again, who rarely used the personal pronoun. […] I’m always known as an honest poet, but being honest is an achievement, a matter of high technique. I let the reader know only the truths that serve the poem.

Green:  Yet there’s this strange thing where readers want to think everything is true …

Dunn:  And I want them to believe everything I write. That’s the art.

I loved this whole exchange. So many things jumped out at me with a big ‘yeeessss!’ – ‘the burden is on me to make [what I’m doing] interesting’, ‘let the reader know only the truths that serve the poem‘.

Personally I like to think the starting point for writing any poem is the thought ‘this is interesting.’ If I find it interesting, there’s a chance others might too – but not necessarily. There are subjects I find fascinating but am not yet convinced I can make interesting enough via a poem. They remain challenges to which I hope one day to rise.

There are poems I’ve written that may start off as ‘the truth’ as in ‘this really happened’. I’m sure that’s a starting point for many people’s poems. And yet what we’re really saying is ‘this is how I remember it happening’ which is often a different thing altogether.  For someone else who experienced the same thing, my memory may be a fiction. Even in the process of writing, I find myself editing the truth for reasons that ‘serve the poem’, and as a consequence I sometimes start believing my fiction to be the truth. More than once I’ve been asked something like ‘did that really happen?’ and I answer ‘yes’ instinctively. If I then think about it, I realise that’s not the truth. But I didn’t feel I was lying when I said ‘yes’. Is this normal? The re-writing of truth into fiction and the fiction becoming, in some way, the truth? In the realms of poetry it’s all pretty inconsequential. But superimposed onto the bigger world it’s a slightly worrying thought.

 

*There’s a Rattle anthology of fourteen selected ‘Conversations’ for sale here, and a sample of a conversation between Alan Fox and Jane Hirschfield from 2006.