Month: April 2019

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New poetry magazine: Finished Creatures

Finished Creatures

I first met Jan Heritage at the house of the late and much missed Jo Grigg. Jo was the coordinator of the Brighton Stanza and to be invited to her writing ‘salons’ was a real privilege. That must have been getting on for ten years ago.

For a quite a while the idea of starting a new poetry magazine had been bubbling under for Jan, so when she put out a call for submissions late last year I was excited to see it happening. I sent her two poems, knowing full well she’s fair but firm in her critiques and wouldn’t be publishing her mates for the sake of it. So it was lovely to find I had a poem accepted, and last night was the first of two launch events. I was planning to go, until I decided this current flare-up of sciatica was only going to be made worse by three hours on a train. So instead, here I am at my standing desk blogging about the mag, and looking forward to reading others’ accounts of the event.

For a first issue, Finished Creatures has an impressive contributors roll-call. Alongside established names such as Philip Gross, Pippa Little and Paul Stevenson are many that are new to me. Poems that jumped out at me on first reading were ‘My American Child’ by Amuja Ghimire, ‘Trigonometry’ by Claire Collison, ‘from the IKEA back catalogue’ by Lisa Kelly and Caroline Hammond’s ‘Deep Water Warning.’

The production quality is high, and I have to applaud Jan’s design and layout skills… there are some very visual poems in this book, and getting the correct spacing isn’t easy. Then there’s the proofing, the ordering, the decisions about typeface, pagination and so on. Yes, there is software, but software is only as good as the human using it, and there’s no software like the human eye with its brain attached. Having laid out the Telltale TRUTHS anthology last year I can personally vouch for the number of woman-hours that went into this magazine. Jan has a background in publishing, and it shows.

The magazine came with a matching bookmark, in a beautiful envelope with old-fashioned string fastening. Classy stuff, 84 pages and well worth the £7 price.

Is it madness to start yet another poetry magazine? Only if you look at it with the eye of a business person. We all know there’s NO money in poetry but I think there’s always room for another beautiful journal. It will be interesting to see how Finished Creatures develops in terms of content, themes and (dare I say it) ongoing funding. I’m so pleased for Jan. What a triumph.

Read all about it here – and you can get a copy of the historic first issue by emailing poetry@finishedcreatures.co.uk – it’s £7 plus £1.50 postage.

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Estuary English

Estuary by Rachel Lichtenstein

It seems as if class and regional differences are very much to the fore at the moment. No surprise there I suppose, nor the increased discussion of accent as a status marker. When I was growing up my mother was at pains to correct her children’s accents so that we didn’t pick up ‘lazy’ habits, such as glottal stops instead of T at the end of a word like ‘hat’, or saying (shudder!) ‘tomorrer’ or ‘sumfingk’. By lazy of course she meant working class, particularly Cockney, and it was all tied up with her aspirations for us. Her reasoning was that Cockney-sounding females didn’t become (or marry!) doctors or teachers. Similarly, she didn’t want me to learn shorthand typing (as she had) because she felt I’d then be ‘stuck’ in secretarial jobs. But whether I learned to type or not (I didn’t), her main concern was that I should be ‘well-spoken’, because such an accent would mark me as middle class, with all the social and economic advantages she believed that would bring.

It’s funny how things change. These days communications advisers tell people in the public eye to tone down a public-school accent in order to sound ‘friendlier’ or ‘one of the people’. It’s not just accent of course – it’s also the avoidance of Latin sayings or words like ‘hence’ or ‘thus’.) Hence (oops!) the rise and rise of ‘Estuary English’. Actually it’s generally known to linguists as ‘Southeastern Regional Standard’ or ‘London Regional Standard’, since ‘Estuary English’ has been used too often as a mild slur.

This preamble is by way of introducing a wonderful book by Rachel Lichtenstein, Estuary (Penguin 2017). When I picked this up I realised right away how little I knew about the Thames Estuary, its history, communities, traffic and commerce, even its geography. Considering I grew up not so far from the Thames at Greenwich, I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t have pinpointed on a map any of the place names downriver, even the historic ones – Tilbury, Gravesend, Canvey Island. I didn’t even realise Southend was in the estuary at all, imagining it to be much further around the Essex coast. Now I’m as much of an Estuary girl as I am a Londoner, certainly by my accent (which in its unselfconscious state is a bit rough around the edges whilst still being ‘well spoken’ enough to satisfy my mum. Sometimes it slips though…) And I find the mysteries of the sea compelling, particularly when it’s as well-written as this.  (I remember devouring Adam Nicolson’s Sea Room some years ago… highly recommended.)

Lichtenstein takes us on a number of journeys, both on the water and into the region’s many communities. We learn how difficult it is to navigate the treacherous shifting sandbanks, how the area has changed and is changing still with the decline of old industries like cockling and the building of the gargantuan London Gateway container port. There are ‘more shipwrecks per square foot than anywhere else along the UK coastline […] over six hundred known wrecks in the main shipping channel alone’, and the remains of plenty more, from as far back as the Bronze Age.

The book is entrancing with its vocabulary of boats, fishing and coastal communities. At times it read like a foreign language to a landlubber like me who doesn’t know a mizzen from a Genoa (although there is a glossary to help.) But it doesn’t detract from the drama, quite the opposite. And in places it feels like poetry.

Thames estuary sea forts - credit A London Inheritance

We turned the engine off for a while and circled the fort in silence, listening to the gentle sound of the boat cutting through the water, the creaking of the shrouds, the ensign flapping at the stern, the rattle of the boom and the occasional lonely call of a seagull, and then, in the distance, the great boom of guns being tested on Foulness Island.[…] A coastguard border-control ship came towards us, moving quickly through the water. Seawater splashed up over the bow; the wash made us lurch violently from side to side. There was another big explosion over at Foulness: a great cloud of black smoke rose over the Essex coastline.  (Estuary, Chapter 26, ‘Barrow Deep’)

The above photo is from a fascinating blog about mid to late-twentieth century life in London, A London Inheritance.

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On redrafting old material, and a welcome acceptance

During my mini-retreat in Cork I dug out a number of old as-yet-unfinished or unpublished poems to see what I could breathe new life into. Re-use & recycle! Nothing’s wasted! Or is it?

Sometimes when I get out an old poem I find I’ve put enough distance between it and me, and now I’m able to see its flaws and work on it anew.

Other times I wonder if the whole poem needs to be killed off, like cutting a plant right down to an inch from the ground, letting in light and air, giving energy and space for new growth. When I re-read a poem I started years ago, if it doesn’t excite me enough to want to work on it further, I ask myself do I still want to say this? If yes, then can I go back to the first impetus – whatever it was that started me on this poem – and start again on an entirely new road?

I’ve come back from Cork with two re-worked poems I’m quite pleased with, two that I started to re-work but not yet feeling the love, and one ‘new start’ poem, still early days. Another poem is completely new, but the idea has been mulling for a while.

Meanwhile I’m very pleased to have had an acceptance from Magma, for their ‘Work’ themed issue coming up in July. I’m always banging on about there not being enough poems written about work, so of course I thought the theme was right up my Strasse – although an older version of the same poem was actually written for the Poetry News theme of ‘Hotel’ (also one of my favourite topics, so I was a bit miffed that the selector didn’t like my poem on that occasion!)

This hotel/work poem is a good example of the ‘re-use/recycle’ thing. Earliest versions from about two years ago bear no resemblance to the one that’s going into Magma. The fifth version was the one that Poetry News rejected. I then workshopped it both at Hastings Stanza and with poet friend Marion Tracy and it became more fractured and a lot darker. The title became weirder. Ian Duhig at the Garsdale Retreat last summer had some positive comments on it. I worked on it a bit more until it felt stronger and stranger, then sent it (by now, version 12) to The Poetry Review, where it was rejected. It was then in the drawer for six months until the Magma theme came up and I gave it one more outing. So persistence paid off, and by heck I was needing a confidence boost.

I hope you have similar stories to tell. Here’s to successful recycling, upcycling or whatever cycling floats your boat, so to speak.