Author: Robin Houghton

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New: how-to guide to submitting to UK poetry magazines, plus new collaborations

New book!

With the UK poetry magazines submissions windows spreadsheet becoming so popular, I’ve decided to take it step further: a how-to booklet – everything you need to know about submitting to UK poetry mags – well, pretty much everything apart from how to write stunning poems – ha ha! I leave that kind of advice well and truly up to others!

There will be honest advice from magazine editors, tips on how to minimise your admin, dealing with rejections, up-to-date magazine profiles, mistakes to avoid… and more. As much as I can squish into a pocket-book, basically. Expect bullets, calls to action, URLs and minimal padding. This will be a lean, mean fact-packed machine. Magazine submissions is a topic that comes up regularly on this blog and always generates questions and discussion, so let’s get stuck in.

More details to follow soon.

Collaboration for Poetry in Aldeburgh

I love autumn and its sense of re-starting, of new opportunities. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to take part in Maria Isakova Bennett‘s Aldeburgh Collaborative, a project involving poets all over the country sharing a moment at the coast on the last day of August. Maria is the artist-in-residence at the Poetry in Aldeburgh festival in November, alongside Michael Brown, and her collaborative piece will be on display there. It’s sure to include hand-stitching and a strong visual element. Here’s a fascinating interview with Maria on Paul Stevenson’s blog where she talks to him about her projects.

Another potential collaboration

I was recently contacted by a visual artist who liked a poem of mine on the Mary Evans Picture Library ‘Poems and Pictures’ website called ‘Ladies’ Hour’. She has in mind a collaborative project which sounds really exciting. We’re both new to collaborations, but we’re both at the same sort of stage in our careers and looking for new challenges. Of course there’s the usual issue of funding to apply for first. I also need to stay focused on my first collection, although this new project would be spread out through the year. I’ll keep you posted as to how it pans out.

Magazine news

The Rialto has just opened its window for poetry submissions. It’s a fantastic magazine to get work into, with a fine reputation. It’s competitive, but Michael Mackmin and his assistant editors are always open to new voices. Good luck.

Not really news, but I’ve just taken out a subscription to Strix, a new-ish magazine produced in Leeds (thank you to Heidi Beck for the recommendation) and am loving first of all the presentation. OK I know looks aren’t everything, but it’s joyful when you have something of beauty in your hands. I’m also already enjoying the poetry inside, work by Julie Mellor and Helen Burke in particular.

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UK Poetry Magazines Submissions Windows – updated

poetry rejections

It’s ‘back to school’, and back to the submissions, folks … I’ve been updating my list and am just awaiting a couple of responses from magazine editors I’ve queried about their submissions windows.

SO, what’s new?

The list now contains detail of over 70 journals, of which:

NEW journals added this month: 6

Those with updated details: 23

Those with windows open now, some closing quite soon:  22

Those currently closed but opening in either October or November:  11

Those which welcome submissions at any time: 24

As ever, I’m grateful to people for telling me about amends, additions and so forth.

I’ll be sending it out tomorrow latest, as a PDF with clickable links to the submissions pages of each magazine’s website.

If you’re not on the emailing list for this and would like to be, either tell me in the comments below or drop me a line – robin at robinhoughtonpoetry dot co dot uk.

Happy submitting!

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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.

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Recent reading: Hugh Dunkerley & Antony Mair

Poetry book covers for Hare by Hugh Dunkerley and Bestiary by Antony Mair

OK, so July wasn’t a prolific blogging month for me but I did an awful lot of gardening (well, watering), singing (in Westminster Abbey, dontcha know) and (drumroll) reading – oh yeah and bit of writing too, but more about that in another post.

I wanted to post up my thoughts on two books I recently bought at readings and have enjoyed a great deal. Hugh Dunkerley teaches creative writing at Chichester University and our paths have crossed a few times, but it was the first opportunity I had to hear him read when he came to Eastbourne Poetry Cafe earlier this month. I really enjoyed his poems and bought Hare, not a new book, but then again poetry books have a long shelflife. As luck would have it, I’d just been to the London launch of Bestiary, and Other Animals, the first full-length collection by Antony Mair. So it was interesting to read these two animal-themed collections back to back. Antony is a good poetry friend, the founder and mainstay of Hastings Stanza which has been so good for my writing, and a super-nice super-talented person. It’s very exciting to see him doing so well (another collection is in the pipeline I believe) – keep an eye out for his name.

Hare (Cinnamon, 2010) by Hugh Dunkerley

When I first picked up this collection, and seeing the cover especially, it brought to mind Ian Duhig’s The Lamas Hireling, its title poem a strange parable rooted in the myth and superstition surrounding hares. We have to wait until the end of Hare for the title poem, in which the narrator makes love to a woman who seems to be transformed during the act of coitus into the mysterious hare seen earlier ‘bounding […]/across the astonished fields.’ Myth and mystery make their play also in poems such as ‘The Guardians of the Water’ with its three strange night visitors, and ‘Discovery’ in which the shipwrecked ‘murmur dry mouthed prayers of thanks’ despite the forest ‘crowding out all thoughts of passage’.

The book is in three sections. ‘In The Darkroom’ begins with a number of poems dealing with lone characters undergoing extreme or extraordinary trials, including an abducted child, an astronaut about to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and a woman who believed she could exist on air alone, setting out a number of recurrent themes: individuals facing end of life, returning from a near-death experience, or enduring loneliness in many diverse disguises. Actual death surfaces quite often, but many of the deaths are of animals or birds. Dunkerley seems to have an eye for birds in fact – magpies, bantams, geese and swifts all come under his gaze.

The central sequence of sonnets (‘Under Cover’) deals with a doomed love affair, which at its climax resembles a ‘huge ship’ pulling out of dock as ‘wife, husband, children all slide away’. But before long the narrator is ‘wondering who she is’ and the it’s clear where things are going. Although this sequence strains against a hint of bathos, elsewhere in the collection there are poems of convincing sensuality, the most surprising of which are ‘Weasel’ and ‘Mussels’ (‘In the sink they open slyly,/ the occasional shift as one/nudges against another’). Personally I was more repelled than seduced by the image of a woman shaving her legs in the bath (‘Razor’) but it takes a brave man to write about periods (‘Cycle’) and intra-uterine insemination (‘IUI’).

A lot of lovely wordplay in this collection. Some phrases I particularly enjoyed – ‘at night the stars rustled, tugging / at you with their tiny gravities.’ (‘Fast’) ‘It made a hole in the day/ where the bird had been’ (‘Killing Geese’), the baby ‘starting suddenly / at the zoo of her own voice.’ (‘Giant Steps’), the ‘slippery sacks of nothing/that were once squid.’ (‘In a Japanese Supermarket’).

 

Bestiary, and Other Animals (Live Canon, 2018) by Antony Mair

Shortlisted for the Live Canon First Collection prize, this book is a smorgasbord of animalia. It’s not nature poetry as such but more a meditation on human nature as reflected in, sometimes personified by, the creatures within its pages.

In two sections, the first is the Bestiary of the title – an A to Z where each creature is identified solely by its first letter. There is a key at the end, but it’s more fun to try and guess. Some are much more obvious than others!

A medieval concoction designed to both entertain and moralise, a bestiary presents all kinds of opportunities for the contemporary poet, and Mair has a great deal of fun with it. Some poems are heartbreaking reminders of man’s cruelty to animals, such as the elephant ‘hating these people that taught us shame’, or a panicked turtle caught in a fishing net. There are animals-as-human-stereotypes (bulldog, cougar) and reflections on loss, ageing and coping with trauma. ‘W’ surprises with its paean to a creature universally disliked, bouncing out its funny ending.

As befits any animal-themed collection there are witty nods to Ted Hughes (for example ‘F’ and ‘P’) and some enjoyable satire, such as the poem-as-bureaucratic-report forming a sly comment on the destruction of natural habitats (‘Y’, for Yellowhammer). Mair is comfortable with form and subtle rhyme schemes, but just as happy to take risks. ‘H’ evokes a hawk in two simple lists of verbs, distilling the freedom, power and simplicity of its existence to a series of crisp actions.

Section two, ‘Other Animals’ takes the reader further into a contemplative world in which animals as portents appear in dreams, and the boundaries between human and non-human life blur and coalesce. Personal testimony (‘Coming Out’, ‘Tom’, ‘Black Dog’, ‘For Ro, in her last days’) rubs along with (usually black-ish) humour. I particularly enjoyed the moving ‘Everything will be fine’ –

[…] the day
stretched ahead like a field of slate.

A longing for somewhere else sneaked under the door –

‘The Pigeon’ begins with the dilemma of what to do with an injured bird, and ends with a burden of guilt, comparing the bird’s destiny to ‘an abandoned child in a Darfur cellar / or others whose plight I turn my back on’.

Antony Mair isn’t afraid of taking a stance and speaking out against injustice. He’s also happy to put the boot in from time to time where he sees fit. But there’s a tenderness and frankness to his work , a richness of language and reference, and attention to craft.

I felt a sense of gratitude running through the book, and of hope, even in the face of death, sadness and the worst kind of human behaviour. The animal world is cruel, but animal intuition is something we can learn from. The last words are a fitting ending (‘For Ro, in her last days’):

[…] Forget
the lingering metallic taste and look up:

as light fades the stars hang out small flags
signalling welcome in silver and indigo. Let
the horse have its head. He knows the way home.

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“Patience is the master key to every situation”

Another wonderful article from Brain Pickings, this time Rilke on ‘the lonely patience of creative work.’

Solitude and patience are essential to creative work, he says: “Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.”

Since having a garden, and making my first steps towards growing things, I’m understanding this a lot better.

Just look at this – it’s a broccoli seed

A seed of a broccoli plant

I planted some of these last summer. Here are the seedlings, just planted out, in around July:

Broccoli seedlings

Little was I to know there are FAR too many here, because they get big…I had to pull up 5 plants in the end, and the bed still looked like this a month or two later, with plants nearly as tall as me:

The leaves were ravaged by caterpillars as we didn’t know to protect the plants from butterflies. Over the winter I really wondered if any of the plants would produce actual broccoli, or whether we might as well pull them up. They went through snow and cold and looked pretty sad, but by January there was broccoli appearing, much to my excitement:

The fruits of nature’s labour, and my own patience :

As metaphors go, it’s a good one I think. Those yellowing, rotting leaves on the ground in the penultimate photo pretty much represent the poems that died, but they didn’t prevent the good stuff from bearing fruit. And quite a lot of the ‘good stuff’ didn’t look at all good most of the time, so much so that I nearly gave up on the lot, which would have been a shame.

This year’s broccoli seedlings are growing, but I won’t say ‘I can’t wait’ for them to produce, because this time I know I can wait!

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Discovering poetry podcasts

I’ve come rather late to the podcast party, although my good friend Lucy has often sung their praises. Before my longish train journey north I decided to finally download a free podcast app (Castbox, which works well on my Samsung Galaxy S6) and then went on the search for some interesting things to take with me and listen to.

It’s been quite a revelation. I’ve never found it easy to read on the train, but putting on headphones and listening, cutting out all the stupid conversations or noises around me, and still able to watch the countryside going by, was perfect. And back home I find it’s a fine companion in the kitchen when cooking. For someone who rarely finds radio output of any interest, it’s amazing how I’ve taken to this.

My all-out favourite is the New Yorker Poetry podcast, in which a guest poet discusses someone else’s poem, then reads it, followed by conversation and a reading of one of their own poems. The host until last October was Paul Muldoon who I find perfectly suited to the medium. His voice is wonderful to listen to and the conversations he has with guests are fascinating. He’s always careful not to either talk down to the listener nor to exclude us. Each monthly edition lasts about half an hour  and they go back to 2013 so there’s a rich archive to enjoy. So far I’ve heard Andrew Motion reading Alice Oswald, Eileen Myles reading James Schuyler and Nick Laird reading Elizabeth Bishop. One funny thing is the odd advert – presumably added automatically by the software as they sometimes pop up in the middle of a sentence (but not, so far, a poem!) To be fair I’ve only noticed one or two per episode, and they’re very brief. We’re not talking commericial-radio-time-to-make-a three-course-meal-style ad breaks.

Then there’s the Poetry magazine podcast, co-hosted by Don Share and Lindsay Garbutt or other members of the editorial team. I’ve no idea why I’ve never explored this one before. When Poetry comes through the post I love the fact that you open and and you’re straight into the poems – no editorial or anything else forming a barrier between the cover art and the inside art. But I do sometimes think I’d like some sort of commentary, background or insight into the editors’ choices. The podcast description is ‘The editors go inside the pages of Poetry, talking to poets and critics, debating the issues, and sharing their poem selections with listeners.’ It’s short (under 10 minutes), frequent (weekly) and to the point. And again – great voices and high quality production. All of which makes it a pleasure to listen to, and most importantly allows the content to shine through.

The Poetry Foundation (which publishes Poetry) has a number of related podcasts, including Poetry Off the Shelf which ‘explores the diverse world of contemporary American poetry with readings by poets, interviews with critics and short poetry documentaries.’ Lots to discover here.

There are other podcasts I haven’t yet really assessed yet but have subscribed to, such as the Scottish Poetry Library podcast which appears also to have been going for some years, each episode a conversation with an individual poet, incorporating them reading some of their work. The UK arts charity Poet in the City also puts out a podcast, albeit infrequently (two or three episodes a year) but an interesting mix of ‘performances, reflection and debate’. The Poetry Society podcast features ‘both readings by poets and the fascinating exchanges between editors of The Poetry Review and contributors, past and present, as they explore ideas and themes generated by the issue.’ One podcast I have listened to before occasionally is The Transatlantic Poetry Pondcast (sic) produced by Robert Peake, which brings together UK and US poets for live readings and debate – the live element is exciting.

There are tons more I’m sure, but I don’t want to enter overwhelm too soon. I’ll probably subscribe to loads of channels and end up just going back to a small number. I’m already getting a feel for differing production standards – sound quality for example. Just saying!

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Notes on a poetry residential at Garsdale

I’m back from an inspirational week at the Garsdale Retreat, on a poetry residential course that deserved to be full but wasn’t – if you’ve ever done an Arvon week then I recommend you go to Garsdale for a change. Although the selfish part of me doesn’t want anyone else to discover it, I of course want it to be wildly successful. It’s run by partners Hamish and Rebecca, who realised a dream by relocating to the Yorkshire Dales (although strictly speaking they are just into Cumbria) from Hertfordshire. The Retreat has only been open a year but I predict its courses will very soon be oversubscribed. Kim Moore has been a tutor there and has blogged about it too.

On our week, just four of us had Ian Duhig to ourselves, plus a very absorbing  evening reading from Hannah Lowe, food to die for, very comfortable accommodation and a gorgeous location. Lambs baaa-ed me to sleep each night and I witnessed the joy of Jackpot the bull being introduced to a field of cows. I saw my first-ever red squirrel. And one day we were even treated to the sight of a steam train passing. We were guests at a cello & piano recital and one evening did a lot of shouting and laughing over a ‘literary game’ that Hamish has clearly got very good at. Plus – oh yes! I wrote, read, thought about, listened to and discussed a lot of poetry.

Ian Duhig has an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, history, myth & legend, politics, the environment and much more. (He’s also hilariously down-to-earth.) Tapping into him was rather like releasing a fireman’s hose (nothing lewd intended in this simile!) and many times I found myself giving up trying to write down references or understand everything and just let his talk flow over me. It felt like the way you pick up bits of a foreign language by going to a country and sitting in a cafe where you overhear conversations and the background talk of a TV or radio. The tutorials with him were intense. I was already somewhat in awe. ‘The Lammas Hireling’ made a huge impression on me when I first read it, and, dear God, he’s won the National twice. Now, in one-to-ones I’m aware I can be a bit difficult at times, so I was very grateful for his forbearance & generosity. I came away challenged and felt suitably kicked up the arse.

The fragmentary way of absorbing ideas and sounds ties in pretty well with the key theme of the week, which was how ‘nothing is wasted’ – digging up fragments, interrogating them, piecing things together, enjoying the connections but also the gaps. In this spirit of this, and since so much of what happens on a course stays between those who were there, in this blog post the narrative ends here.

In what follows I share a few of the phrases and ideas that stayed with me, along with some photos I took there which I hope give a feel of the experience.

“We live in descriptions of places not places” – Wallace Stevens –  I tracked this down to a letter written to Henry Church in April 1945.

Untranslateable words, eg Dustsceawung (Old English) – meaning ‘viewing or contemplating dust in the spirit of all things turning to dust. Such contemplation may loosen the grip of worldly desires.’ Ha!

Walls, windows, doors. Idea of ‘the wall which is a door’ in Theology.

‘The ear drieth words as the mouth tastes the meat’ – Book of Job

The disappearing East Coast of England.

Does complex form make you think the poem is less sincere?

“A poem is a bridge that leads to itself” – Paul Muldoon

You don’t want the reader to think “this part of your work is based on an assumption that I don’t think you’ve challenged.”

“Taking the line for a walk” – Paul Klee.

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UPDATED – list of UK poetry magazines submissions windows

view from window

I’ve now done the quarterly update of my PDF list of UK poetry magazines submissions windows, with live links to their submissions guidelines pages.

I’ll be emailing the updated list today 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)*.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice one or two international journals have crept in. I’m only planning to include those that appear to be UK-poet-friendly (in terms of how to submit etc) and/or that have been recommended to me and I like to look of.

Thanks as ever to those who have alerted me to amends or additions.

Highlights of this version:

  1. I’ve now added ‘journal type’ – eg print or online
  2. nine journals added
  3. nineteen journals with updated information (highlighted in red)
  4. forty-two journals are OPEN for submissions now (some closing very soon though)
  5. three journals will be opening their windows in the next month or so

Go forth and be published!

*PS: I’m away to Cumbria tomorrow and pretty much off the grid for the week, so if I don’t respond to your comments or email requests right away then that’s why. I’ll reply when I’m back next weekend.

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A forthcoming retreat | writing vs bathroom | Swindon Festival

Hilda Sheehan and the Swindon Poetry Festival 2016 - Photo:Swindon Advertiser

Retreating

Next week I’m off to the Garsdale Retreat for a week tutored by Ian Duhig and guest reader Hannah Lowe. I’m excited by the prospect of a week just focusing on poetry, away from my usual surroundings. The last time I did a residential I was quite traumatised by it, and thought I’d never go on one again, even though some good poems came of it (at least two of which subsequently published). It also gave me the impetus to start Telltale Press, and from there to my first pamphlet and beyond. The negatives were the sheer number of people on the course, the lack of free reading and fresh air time and the kitchen duties. But that was nearly five years ago and the Garsdale Retreat is a very different prospect indeed. There are still places available, so why not come and join me? Once you’ve explored the website and read the course description you might well be tempted.

Swindon Poetry

Another date in my diary is the Swindon Poetry Festival on 4th – 8th October, where I’ve been invited by the lovely Hilda Sheehan to be the festival blogger and may even be doing a cheeky reading. I missed this the last two years for various reasons and am looking forward to the warm, friendly and somewhat alternative atmosphere that Hilda cultivates down Swindon way. For some reason I don’t feel this Festival gets the amount of social media love it deserves, but it goes from strength to strength every year. The full programme will be up soon and I hear there will be a shedload of fine poets and engaging sessions, it’s also great value. Do come!

Writing vs bathroom

At home we’ve been having weeks of new bathroom installation. I never thought a bathroom could be more trouble or more complex than a new kitchen, but after starting the work on May 1st they’re only now (as I type) on the last job, leaving us to finish the painting. I don’t blame the workmen since a key issue was to do with me changing my mind about having a wall-hung loo (since you ask… it just felt …umm… worryingly unstable!) But two weeks having to flush with a bucket and many days of ear-splitting noise wasn’t conducive to creative writing. This may sound like middle-class hand-wringing but let me remind you that toilet matters are right there at the bottom (sic) of Maslow’s pyramid. Plus I was worried we’d never be friends again with the neighbours upstairs.

On entering a big comp

Anyway, enough of all that. I did manage to scrape together a poem to send to the Bridport this year. I’ve talked before about how I decide whether to enter a competition – the various things to consider and so on. Everyone has different reasons I guess, but the first hurdle I usually fall at is ‘do I have anything?’. I don’t really see the point of paying £9 to enter a big comp unless I think my entry has a fighting chance of winning. (Note: this is not the same as saying you expect your poem to win). I know that’s not the received wisdom of seasoned compers, many of whom play the numbers game and have a budget for it. And I know there’s a huge amount of luck involved. But there’s no harm in developing a feel for which poems should be sent to mags and which are worth entering into a comp, especially if you don’t have a ton of good poems coming out of your ears. Discuss!

Coming up

Before I go to Cumbria I have the Poetry Magazine Submissions list to update, so let me know if you’re not already on the list and would like a copy.