Month: October 2019

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A birthday post and on magazines

poetry wall

Ooh. Lots of interesting discussion & comment around my last post. Thank you to everyone who engaged! (Feels a bit of a sham/shame to use that 21st century term but you know what I mean: commented, shared, liked/disliked etc).

Meanwhile, on another blog (when I update it that is) I’m telling the story of our new sheds. Yes, plural! I’m talking about the replacement structure for two sheds, a tool shed and and ‘summerhouse’ which we inherited, and loved, but which ultimately wasn’t really doing the job we needed of it. To cut a long story short, the old tool shed and summerhouse have been relocated 150 yards up to the communal garden, and they look perfectly at home up there. Meanwhile to replace them we’ve had built for us a wooden structure which incorporates two ‘rooms’ – a tool shed (yeah OK a ‘mancave’) and a potting shed/half greenhouse/she-shed. It’s exciting, but it’s more for garden stuff than anything else.

I can’t rival anything like Abegail Morley’s iconic Poetry Shed, alas, BUT I couldn’t help but insert a poetry element: a wall of poems! I’ve often wailed about the number of poetry magazines I have and how they take up an inordinate amount of space on the bookshelves. SO how about tearing out a bunch of poems from various mags, and use them to paper a wall in the ‘pottery’ (as we’re calling it – don’t ask!)? First of all I thought I’d look for ‘garden’ or outdoor-related poems. But it expanded to other topics too – basically poems I just liked and wanted to be able to read and enjoy anytime I’m pottering in my pottery! Also, we do have two very small grandchildren, and part of my vision is to welcome them into the pottery as they get older, to do some gardening fun and get them interested in gardening (the older one is already getting into it) – so how about poetry too??

So out came the mags – I started with the earliest and worked from there – so actually ended up with a lot of poems from 2010 – 2017 and maybe not many more recent, but hey. I took out all the Rattles, Agendas, Proles, Frogmore Papers, Poetry Reviews, Poetry, Rialtos, Tears in the Fence, Obsessed with Pipework and so forth, got out a sharp knife and started excising…

And a funny thing happened. (I should use that as the title for this post, in true Clickbait style!) I read. And read, and realised I’d either not  read these magazines properly or it was so long ago I’d forgotten all the great poems. I took several days over it, but really enjoyed the process, because I discovered/rediscovered some wonderful poems. (In the comments on my last post, Claire Booker noted that many poets don’t actually read the magazines in which their poems appear, or even subscribe to... and I had a twinge of guilt when I read that. I thought I had read these magazines but clearly a cursory lookie didn’t really cut it.)

So I ended up with more poems than I needed to paper the wall. Plus a few air bubbles that I tried to ‘mend’, some more successfully than others. I was careful to place poems with ‘swearage’ (a term I’ve learned from a poet friend – although autocorrect wants to change it to ‘sewerage’ – how appropriate!) further up the wall so that four-year-olds don’t read it and do the classic “nana what does X$%!@ mean?” The photo shows it in progress, I’ve since finished but need to varnish the wall to protect it a bit from the vagaries of shed-dom (damp, condensation etc). I may be putting a mirror on the wall, so I tried to place my faves on the outer fringes so they’re not hidden. A confession: I included 3 of my own poems, although more for fun – I like the idea of someone who maybe doesn’t know I write poetry ‘happening’ on them – ha ha.

PS:  Today is my birthday. In the 1980s I would have bought you all a cream cake. Honestly. Today I just say I hope you have a lovely, lovely day, and let’s all go outside, take a deep breath, and thank whoever or whatever you’d like for being alive. XX

Angst/

Let’s talk about failures…

There’s something that happens more and more on Twitter that makes me feel slightly queasy. But I also hesitate to say this, because it might not go down well. It’s the habit of (as soon as the results of a competition are out) dashing off a tweet to the effect of: ‘Congratulations to all the winners [of Comp Name]! Amazed and humbled to see my poem [on the shortlist/among the Commendeds]!’

There’s nothing wrong with saying ‘well done’ to other poets, surely? So by griping about it, does that make me a sore loser/ grumpy person /antisocial member of the poetry community? Possibly all of those, but I hope not. My queasiness comes from observing what looks like an exaggerated pleasure in others’ successes on the part of the tweeter, whilst at the same time sneaking in the fact that he/she was commended/shortlisted or whatever, thereby starting yet another chain of ‘Congratulations!’ tweets etc. I try not to go on about my distaste for ‘humblebragging’, but this new trend of congratulating ‘all the winners’ (presumably including a number of poets completely unknown to the tweeter) seems to be humblebragging by any other name. It appears to be widespread, and it feels like a relatively new phenomenon.

You may be thinking ‘well if she doesn’t like it, she can always unfollow/mute’. True. And sometimes I actually do, but I prefer not to, as the ‘offending’ tweets are frequently made by people whose tweets I generally enjoy and want to hear from. As I said, it’s so widespread it’s become normal everyday behaviour. But the queasiness continues. Why do I feel this way? Am I really the only one?

Recently, as a response to someone announcing that to be on a shortlist they felt like ‘a winner’, I asked them if it wouldn’t feel even better to actually be the winner. The reply was that ‘I find it easier to be happy for other people’s successes’ – now I may be reading this wrongly but the implication was ‘…than my own’. This was from someone who’s had plenty of successes.

Is the world really so full of altruistic people who truly, genuinely, find more pleasure in the success of others than in their own? Or are they reluctant to admit it on social media, for whatever reason – fear of looking big-headed, or of people not liking them, or just a preference to go along with the cheerleading norms, or even a worry that to celebrate ones own success means to put others down…I do hope the last one isn’t the case, because I think it’s mistaken.

Look at this way: if we stopped congratulating ourselves at making a longest/shortlist/commended, and only invited or offered congratulations to those placed 1st, 2nd or 3rd, then the vast majority of us would not be winners. At the moment it looks like literally everyone is winning something, and that’s very disheartening to those poets who never get anywhere in competitions. (I find it disheartening myself, and I do sometimes get somewhere. And however pleased I may be with a shortlisting, I am always disappointed not to have won.) It can also look like a coterie of winning poets continuously congratulating each other.

I read another comment recently, in which someone apparently was so upset not to get ‘on a list’ that they felt they may give up and stop writing. The responses to this were concerned and supportive, with someone else pointing out that ‘you have to remember that no-one talks about their failures on social media, only their successes.’ But can we reasonably expect people to remember this? Was this person feeling that way due to his/her tweetstream giving the impression that the whole world was on the bloody list except them?

It’s been said plenty of times before. Social media (and the internet long before social media) is a goldfish bowl of performative behaviour. I think those of us who spend a lot of time on it have a responsibility to remember that. There was a time when out-and-out self-promotion seemed to take over Facebook and Twitter (which was a big reason why I left Facebook some years ago). The rule of ‘Twitizenship’ now seems to be: only promote one’s own successes if at the same time you shout about everyone/anyone else’s.

And failures? Someone once said they hated the way some people filled up Facebook with their bad news, which no-one wants to be dragged down by. And yet, whenever I talk about my many poetry rejections on this blog, it gets the most positive comments. It would certainly be refreshing to see the odd ‘for the tenth year running I came nowhere in the Bridport’ on Twitter. But who wants to be accused of sour grapes?

I just wish we could a) talk more realistically (and more often) about the fact that the vast majority of poems don’t win prizes, as this may help us all to put things in perspective, b) worry a little less about keeping up a saintly/sanitised appearance on social media, and c) put the brakes on the ‘congratulations’ circulars: by all means send a DM, but no-one needs to be congratulated publicly/anonymously on Twitter for being on a shortlist, in my humble opinion. Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Am I just being grumpy?

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Competition season! Be afraid. Plus the odd launch

Those Darn Comps

Love ’em or loath ’em, but some of us just can’t stop ourselves entering. “Is there a competition season?” someone once asked me and I feel as if there is, and it’s now – not sure why except that the National always closes on October 31st, this year a particularly loaded date, sadly. Plus the results of the Bridport out soon.

If you keep up with Angela T Carr’s comps and submissions blog posts then you’ll already know this, but just a reminder:

National Poetry Competition (a misnomer actually – it’s International, as the list of prize winners generally confirms) – closing date 31st October, judges Mona Arshi, Helen Mort and Maurice Riordan. First prize £5,000 but tons of kudos and visibility to anyone making the ‘commendeds’. Even reaching the ‘long list’ is pretty good. First entry £7, Poetry Society members get a FREE second poem. Enter here and lashings of good luck to you.

Also don’t forget the Troubadour Poetry Prize, closing on 21st October. £5 to enter and £2000 first prize, with the very interesting combo of Kathryn Maris and Pat Boran judging this year. I predict there’ll be one grandaddy of a pile of paper in the Maris-Riordan household come November.

Launches, readings

This evening it’s the Needlewriters in Lewes with readings by poets Clare Best, Robert Hamberger and Anna Reckin, alongside prose writer Martin Nathan. I’ll be the host, which is always fun. Do come if you’re able.

This Sunday I’m off up to Greenwich, my old manor, for the Live Canon readings & competition results (for which we’re all being kept cruelly on tenterhooks, having made the ‘long list’ – I’m assuming I haven’t won since I haven’t had the call to say ‘you are coming, aren’t you…?’ But it will be a fun-filled afternoon I’m certain, and every one’s a winner baby (NOT! – whoever thought up that stupid phrase!) Anyway, I’m looking forward to hearing the Live Canon ensemble perform the winning poems, it’s an amazing experience.

November is shaping up well – my new pamphlet launch is scheduled for 25th and (same week) I’m reading for Rogue Strands in London on 28th – more to come on both. I’m also hoping to get to Lynne Hjelmgaard’s launch of A Second Whisper (Seren) on Monday 11th.

Meanwhile I’m getting close to the end of Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary – I’ve been slowing down as we approach the second World War, I almost can’t bear to read her thoughts on it all – and am also in the ‘Rotten Pockets’ of Hell c/o Signor Dante Alighieri. No wonder I’ve been having such weird dreams lately.