Month: August 2022

Orford Ness

Some years ago now I visited Orford Ness Nature Reserve, a strange and mysterious place on the coast of Suffolk. Strange in the same way as any place with ‘Ness’ in the name, mysterious because of its history as an atomic test site and before that as a place of experimentation in radar and ballistics. Even though wildlife has reclaimed this marginal sweep of land, the area is dotted with derelict structures and unexplained features some of which are still off-limits to the visiting public.

A few months later my poem ‘Searching for the Police Tower, Orford Ness’ won the Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2014, fuelling my (long-gone) belief that I was destined to be the Next Best Thing in poetry. I had no idea at that point that a zillion poets had already ‘discovered’ Orford Ness. Those were heady days – that period many poets go through, in which you imagine yourself being snapped up by Faber and consequently winning the Forward Prize. Although I now see the folly of it, I would never laugh at anyone for having such a dream. Rejoice in each and every early or small success! Live for that moment, as it may never return!

Anyway, my point is that even your oldest, earliest successes can have a longer shelf life than you think  A few weeks ago I got an email from someone at the National Trust who had been looking for poems about Orford Ness to display in the Visitor Centre there next year, as part of some kind of festival. She’d discovered my poem on the Poetry Society website and would I mind if mine was one of the poems to be displayed. Why would I say no? It’s so nice (and unusual) to get such a request. Will anyone waiting for their ferry ride over to the Ness in 2023 bother to read my wee poem, up on the wall with plenty of others? And will it enhance the enjoyment of their visit? Will they remember (or even read) my name? Who knows. But there’s no harm in imagining it.

On feeding The Lake

The spreadsheet of poetry magazines is forever growing, albeit slowly. Even though I’m adding perhaps eight to ten titles each quarter, there are those I have to delete. This is usually because they’ve stopped publishing; quite a few mags were set up hurriedly during the pandemic and never really got off the ground. Others have drifted away on a seemingly permanent hiatus, either for personal reasons of the editor or maybe loss of funding. Others I delete because they never update their website, never respond to my query emails or just generally offer an impoverished service to readers and would-be submitters. Sometimes a publication is resurrected from the dead, or at the eleventh hour, which is always good to see: the Fenland Poetry Journal, for example. Even Strix is planning a comeback after two or three years in the wilderness.

Sometimes I forget the original purpose of the spreadsheet, which was to help me manage my own poetry submissions. So recently I’ve been making an effort to submit to magazines that are less known to me, and online mags in particular. As a consequence I discovered The Lake, a serious-minded online mag that’s been quietly gliding along (sorry) since 2013. On its modest website, edited by poet and tutor John Murphy, The Lake publishes new work every month from around ten poets, together with book reviews and occasional tributes (for example this one on the death of Eavan Boland, written by Rose Atfield. The range of contributors is impressive, many from across the world, making for an interesting read. I find that print magazines tend to present more of a monoculture; much as I may enjoy (say) The Rialto or Rattle, they paint very different pictures of contemporary poetry. I guess it’s as much about editorial taste and cultural preoccupations as it is practical issues that may affect submissions from overseas (availability of the journal in question in the contributor’s own country, for example).

Anyway, The Lake: worth a dive in? (SORRY)