Robin Houghton

Blog/ 16/08/201721/08/2017

Submitting to US poetry journals, part 1

You know how it happens – you start following a link, then you get so engrossed in something you end up forgetting about your current ‘to do’ list. So there I was, reading a poet’s biog, I followed a link to a magazine I didn’t recognise, and got thinking ‘hmm, my XYZ poem could work well here’. It was a US online journal, and I remembered I was once going to write a blog post about submitting to US journals, aimed primarily at UK poets.

First of all, an admission: I don’t have a great track record of subscribing or submitting to US journals, but I enjoy Rattle and used to subscribe to Poetry ~~(until they decided to make it very difficult for non-US residents to subscribe)~~.** In the past I’ve never felt confident that my work would fit. Too British. But I’m starting to feel that may be changing.

** UPDATED 21/8 – after hearing from Don Share on Twitter, I can report that Poetry’s online subscription process now accommodates overseas addresses, so I have re-subscribed. Huge thanks to Don – I’m somewhat amazed that the editor of the most famous poetry mag in what was once known as ‘the free world’ should take the time and care to reach out to a humble subscriber. Truly deserving of a Mexican wave around the poetry community.

As with all journals, it’s a good a idea to sample a publication before submitting. This is of course where online magazines come into their own – you can read current and back issues and check out their aesthetic. Also, you’ll often find very specific information about a US journal’s mission and what they welcome (other than the not terribly helpful ‘send us your best work’ which always strikes me as odd. Why would I even want an editor to read and publish something if I don’t feel it represents my best work?)

So how do you start submitting to these magazines?

The Poetry Society of America has a long list of magazines – this is a great resource but I suspect it hasn’t been updated lately. There are forty-nine journals listed here which have broken links, and some magazines aren’t listed. Still useful though.
Read poet biogs – once you start browsing US poetry magazines you’ll find poems/poets you like, or that you could imagine your work appearing alongside. Read the biogs, see where else they are published, and check out those places.
Start collecting info on a spreadsheet – web address, editor’s name, submission window dates, link to submission guidelines, and so forth. It can then be a monthly task to check what windows are coming up, and decide whether to submit or not.

Deciding where to submit

Not every journal is going to be right for your work, and there may be other reasons why you are attracted to one magazine over another. For example I know I’m influenced by things like the stated response time and whether they use Submittable (which I like). I’m perfectly happy with paying a small reading fee, whereas I know some poets are not.

Getting the information together is a first step. Then I try to narrow it down to a few targets, revisit them and read more, think about what poems I might send them or set a reminder to do this once their window is open.

Personally I like to have a bit of a strategy because I feel it’s the best use of my time. I don’t have that many poems at any one time so a scattergun approach wouldn’t work for me. But I know some poets always have plenty of poems ready to send. If that’s you, and you target magazines who are OK with simultaneous submissions, then you could set aside some time and do a mass send out.

In my next post I’ll be listing some US magazines, with submission details and other info. Depending on how long this turns out to be, it may be more than one post.

Meanwhile, if you have any experiences of US poetry magazines that you’ve submitted to, or considered submitting to, or any stories/advice you’d like to share, do let me know in the comments.

Blog/ 12/08/201713/08/2017

Four magazines, five poets to watch

A slew of poetry magazines have been arriving the last couple of weeks and I’ve enjoyed ‘discovering’ work by new names. Well, new to me anyway – turns out they’re all accomplished poets, but that doesn’t surprise me. I thought I’d share with you a little about each of the magazines, and a contributor or two to each that caught my attention.

Brittle Star has to get the prize for the most interesting covers. They invariably span front and back, with no writing to spoil the image other than on the spine:

The magazine is run by Martin Parker and Jacqueline Gabbitas on the proverbial shoestring – and for a little mag they are remarkably innovative in finding ways to keep going. Their latest fundraising initiative is to invite readers to support the magazine via Patreon. As they say on their website, “If only 5% of people who follow us on social media donated $2 (about £1.60) a month we’d be half way to hitting our first goal of £750!” Brittle Star is always well produced and they even hold launch readings for every edition. It’s all pretty impressive. Got to be worth $1 or two a month.

Poems that jumped out at me were those by Jack Houston and Barbara Cumbers. Jack’s ‘Separate Towers’ had just the right amount of bonkers humour and painful poignancy to float my boat, with the building of a model cathedral in lolly sticks serving as a metaphor for relationship issues :

Worms may well turn in the earth but we’ll be adhered
to this task until this entire tube of UHU’s been used.

Barbara Cumbers paints a mesmerising picture of a young girl’s quest for control (revenge? stubbornness?) by writing smaller and smaller.

[…] Once, a teacher set me lines –

I had to write “I must writer bigger” fifty times.
I wrote them on the back of a postage stamp. (‘Small’)

Next, the mighty Magma, with its ten-strong editorial board, administrator and freelance staff, immaculately produced and also with a distinctive look, in particular its square format. I have a love-hate relationship with Magma, partly because I’ve had too many submissions rejected (!), but also because I’ve never been able to get the feel for what the magazine is looking for, or what it’s about – its heart, if you like. It may be down to the fact that the editors rotate and change from one edition to the next.

Magma 68 is on the theme of ‘Margins’, so it’s not surprising that we get a good number of poems on the heartfelt/hardcore spectrum – from protest and despair to death, slaughter and eco-apocalypse. I really warmed to Ellie Danak‘s ‘Dear Lab-Man’, a mysterious love-letter with ‘Fatal Attraction’ written all over it –

[…]
There’s no excuse for my welling up,
strangling all that tubing to spell out LOVE.
My lips can distil blood. Meet me
in the fume cupboard tonight.

But if it’s strangeness you’re after then Obsessed with Pipework is self-proclaimed ‘poetry with strangeness and charm’. It’s another double spread cover this time featuring artwork by Graham Higgins:

Obsessed with Pipework is edited by Charles Johnson, and although my poems in this issue sadly lost most of their formatting, I can’t hold it against Charles as he’s been a fine supporter of my work and I owe him one. And besides the poems are all the more strange for it.

I particularly enjoyed three poems by Sue Kindon, of whom I know nothing (and her ‘biog’ in the magazine was sketchy, you might say – although it had strangeness and charm). We have a poem about blockages (actual and metaphorical), while another features a woman on a cruise, on the verge of betraying her husband with the moon –

[…]
I sense that rare blue-eyed look
you keep in reserve, to anchor me. (‘Anniversary on Board’)

I liked the subverting of nice middle-class themes (‘I’ve chosen something marble-veined / and a safe brie’) with undertones of something much harder-hitting (‘Sacred places are sawn off […] Old gods wander the desert of dementia’).

And finally Under the Radar, another well-respected and long-running magazine, published by Nine Arches Press and edited by Jane Commane. This edition features a review of The Swell, Jessica Mookherjee’s pamphlet published by Telltale Press last autumn. My eye was also caught by a poem by Julian Dobson, partly because I’d seen his work in Magma and had nearly chosen to mention him then. So, a name I hadn’t met before and then I see it in two magazines. Like me he must have done some serious submitting around six to nine months ago.

In choosing ‘Meet the neighbour’ I’m starting to wonder why I’m drawn to these on-the-face-of-it memoir poems into which you can read as much menace as you like. I once told a poet friend how much I’d enjoyed a poem of hers in ‘The Rialto’ – ‘…it gave me the creeps! Really menacing!’ only to have her reply that it was supposed to be positive and comforting – hmm! So here we have Julian Dobson’s ‘rumple-haired man from the basement flat’ who ‘had a way of vanishing before Dad got home’, while Dad has

No truck with stories, a reddening head
bursting with hellfire and helplessness.
We found crevices and corners
in the echoing house.

Nonetheless, I find myself worrying for him, and enjoying the not-knowing of the poem.

So there we are – another five poets I want to keep an eye out for and read more of.

I should add that these were contributor copies, apart from Under the Radar which was a a publisher copy. I do subscribe to magazines but I limit it to one or two mags per year, on a rotating basis. I know it’s expensive to support all the myriad poetry mags out there, and this is my tactic to do so in an affordable manner. It’s not only interesting to keep an eye on new writing, but it also informs my submissions – where to send, which magazine would a poem suit, that kind of thing.

Blog/ 23/07/2017

Ty Newydd and the ‘retired hobbyists’ – a few thoughts

Members of the poetry world are aghast at a recently published ‘Independent Review of Support for Publishing and Literature in Wales’. It’s a long document (over 200 pages) but there’s one section in which Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre of Wales, comes under fire for being allegedly out of touch with its market and being in need of better leadership.

I heard about it after John Foggin tweeted a link to Kim Moore’s blog post in which she defends Ty Newydd, both from a personal standpoint and generally. It’s a great post, if you haven’t already seen it. I wanted to just add my own thoughts, but I won’t go into all the details as Kim covers it all and argues her points with passion. There’s also a link to the report in Kim’s post.

The gist of the offending sections is that Ty Newydd, in running creative writing residential courses, is catering to people with no literary ambition and probably no talent, and what’s more nobody ‘in the digital age’ wants these kinds of courses anyway.

I couldn’t help feeling that quite a few things in the report were under-researched and ill-informed. Glossing over details, using loaded phrases such as ‘retired hobbyists’, inserting lazy generalisations…not what one would expect from an ‘independent’ inquiry.

Of course I bristled at the phrase ‘retired hobbyists’ for all the predictable reasons, and the statement that nobody wants these kinds of courses especially ‘in the digital age’ was, for me, at best a non sequitur and at worst a comment that can only be born of ignorance.

There were a lot of other things that struck me as strange. For example, apart from Seren being listed as one of the consultees, I saw no other mentions of Wales-based indy presses or literary magazines. I also got the feeling that it was considered fine to fund individuals (to finish a book, for example, although – oddly, given the report’s emphasis on publishing books as a meaningful outcome – no mention of books having to be published as a result of the funding) but CW courses are somehow beyond the pale.

I’ve only been to one course at Ty Newydd, the Carol Ann Duffy/Gillian Clarke residential, but it had a huge effect on me. Yes, it had its pros and cons, but I benefited enormously from the experience. It was in 2013 (photo above) and funded by the Hamish Canham prize money – I blogged about it here in fact.

And lastly, to answer the accusation in the report that ‘probably no-one goes on to publish a book’, on the course with me that week in 2013 were David Borrott (Porthole, smith | doorstop 2015), Anja Konig (Advice for an Only Child, Flipped Eye 2015), Ruby Turok-Squire (The Phantom Fundamental, Lapwing 2017), Ben Rogers (Mackerel Salad, Emma Press 2016), Jenny Lewis (already a poet with a number of published books at the time of the course and since then Taking Mesopotamia was published by Carcanet in 2014), Ian Humphreys (who went on to win the Hamish Canham prize and was selected for the Complete Works III in 2016, Lizzie Fincham (Green Figs & Blue Jazz, Cinnamon 2016) and, well, myself – in fact the course led me directly to starting Telltale Press, which has published first pamphlets by five poets, which also adds to the book count. So if books are what impress you, dear report-writers, put that in your digital inkwell and smoke it.

Blog/ 08/07/2017

Readings, launches & other poetry news

There’s been a flurry of poetry events lately and lovely things happening.

Hastings Stanza reading

A couple of weeks back the Hastings Poetry Stanza had its second evening of readings as part of the St Leonards Festival. Somehow we all crammed into the bijou bookshop The Bookkeeper, the proprietors of which are extremely supportive of local poetry and generously laid on drinks and nibbles. The heard a wonderful variety of styles and subject matter, from Gavin Martin’s hilarious riff-rant on Liam Fox to some understated and moving work from Andrea Samuelson.

Huge thanks as ever to Antony Mair for managing everything so calmly and efficiently. A most convivial (& warm in every sense of the word) event – and somehow I managed to spill three glasses of wine before a drop had even passed my lips. Serves me right for wearing white trousers.

Clare Best book launch

Last Thursday I was at the newly-opened Depot in Lewes on what felt like the hottest day of the year for the launch of Springlines, the book of Clare Best’s collaboration with artist Mary Ann Aytoun-Ellis. We heard some short readings, enjoyed a rolling slide show of the photos and artwork from the book, shots of Clare’s notebooks (I enjoyed these particularly!) plus photos of previous events around the project. Two years ago I saw the exhibition at Glyndebourne of some of Mary Ann’s paintings and Clare’s poems and it was magnificent. Some of these, together with new work, is currently on show at Tunbridge Wells Museum. Do go see it if you’re anywhere nearby.

In the capacity of my ‘day job’ I’ve recently finished a revamp of Clare’s website – also worth a visit, especially for the lovely recordings Clare has made of several of her poems.

A bit about singing

By the way I passed my singing exam – despite a pathetic showing in the sight-reading test I managed to ‘perform’ the songs convincingly. Today I’m singing with Eastbourne Choral Society in their summer concert (summer is traditionally ‘easy listening’ – show medleys, a bit of Gilbert & Sullivan, John Rutter’s folk-song medley ‘Sprig of Thyme’ etc). It sometimes seems as if both choral singing and poetry take a hiatus in the summer on the assumption that no-one is around during the school holidays, so there’s inevitably a big spree of launches/readings/concerts/festivals before the end of June & July.

Speaking of which…

Magma launch

Magma 68 is having a launch event at the London Review Bookshop on Friday 28th July. I’m hoping to combine reading a poem there with a visit to the Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum as it’s just around the corner from the bookshop. It’s the first time I’ve had a poem in Magma so I’m excited about this.

A bit about acceptances & rejections

I’ve had a huge amount of luck this year and it’s a strange feeling to have so many poems in the ‘forthcoming’ pile.

This week I heard that The Rialto are taking two poems for their August issue. This kind of news is always reassuring. Believe me, I get as many rejections as the next poet – I make a point of mentioning all of them here in order to show the real situation, not a sugar-coated one. But I also mention the acceptances, to show that persistence can sometimes pay off. The two poems that The Rialto liked have both been rejected elsewhere, one in particular has been floating around for three years, been rejected by six magazines and got nowhere in two competitions. I have certainly tweaked it from time to time, in between sending out. But not substantially.

I currently have five poems in the ‘recently rejected/review and re-send’ file – three came back from The Poetry Review (I can only try!), one from The Rialto and one from Poetry News. It’s now a question of do I have anything newer that’s ready to go, or do I ‘review and re-send’? Historically I tend not to send something out right away but let it sit and stew for at least a few months. So maybe I’ve answered my own question there.

Blog/ 21/06/2017

A midsummer stock-take

It’s the longest day of the year here, and the hottest. I love these long days and warm evenings and we’ve been making the most of the garden and living by the sea. Somehow blogging seems less appealing!

However, having just been inspired by Marina Sofia’s Fortnightly Round-up, I thought maybe it was time for another quick stock-take.

Submissions

I’ve a few poems I should send out out – somewhere, right now, considering the longer I leave it the slimmer the chance of getting them placed anywhere before 2018. And one of the poems in question will be in my Cinnamon pamphlet, so if I want to see it in a magazine first I need to get a move on before it’s too late.

Currently there are only 5 individual poems out, three to a magazine and two to a competition, or six including the one I sent to Poetry News, but if they’d wanted it I would have heard by now, so I’ll be sending that one out again.

Quite a few poems are forthcoming – Brittle Star recently took a poem for their next issue which launches next week at the Barbican Library in London, I’ve got one in Magma in July, and in August three in Obsessed with Pipework and one in Prole.

I missed the Bridport deadline, not that I ever seem to do much in that, but you just never know. In the recent Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition it was great to see Katy Evans-Bush’s name among the winners. Katy is of course an established poet, but she’s also well-known as a poetry blogger and I wonder if for some people she’s a blogger first, poet second. So it’s good to see her poetry taking centre stage. I assumed my own entry for the comp had sunk without trace but then I had an email from Peter Sansom to say my collection had been shortlisted, which I was genuinely pleased about. I know I tend to dismiss the whole shortlist/longlist thing generally, but when it’s a big prize I can now see why people might put it on their biog. Although I’ve no public evidence for said shortlisting as it’s not published on the website. Oh well! It’ll be our secret!

One good thing about not submitting too much is of course you get fewer rejections. Three poems were returned to me recently by Poetry Review, so no luck there yet. In fact anything with ‘Review’ in the title tends to reject my stuff. Oh well, the challenge continues.

Current projects

I have a project bubbling under at the moment and although my first attempts to tackle it are a little rough around the edges, I’m taking my time. By way of research I’ve been reading The Poetry Cure (Bloodaxe, 2005) an anthology of illness edited by Julia Darling and Cynthia Fuller, as recommended by poet friend Sarah, and Of Mutability (Faber, 2010) by Jo Shapcott, as well as Granta issue 138 on ‘Journeys’.

On a different note, (ha!) in two days’ time I’m taking a Grade 6 singing exam, something I decided six months ago it would be fun to do, and it’s turned into a huge test for me – both to overcome my nerves, and my attitude, which is to expect to sound like Cecilia Bartoli on just a few lessons and the odd bit of practice. I am a fool! Or a glutton for knockbacks!

Great article

I was browsing Wayne Burrows’ website recently and came across this excellent interview he gave a couple of years ago – there’s so much in it I’d like to quote, instead I’ll just recommend it as a great read. His answers to questions about his influences, his writing habits, his regrets, and things such as ‘do you find it irritating when someone misinterprets your work?’ and ‘is poetry a dying art?’ are fascinating and entirely free of any self-importance or sense of ‘lecturing’ his reader.

Events coming up

I’ve got a busy poetry week ahead. This weekend I’m going to Anne-Marie Fyfe’s workshop at the South Downs Poetry Festival in Lewes, and I’m also looking forward to seeing Anne-Marie again at the Troubadour on Monday evening, where I’ll be one of the massed ranks of poets reading at the season finale on the theme of planets, stars, constellations etc. Do come if you’re in spitting distance.

On Thursday 29th June I’ll be going to a Cinnamon pamphleteers reading in London featuring Neil Elder, Tamsin Hopkins and Sarah Watkinson.

Next Friday 30th June I’ll be one of the Hastings Stanza Poets reading at The Bookkeeper bookshop on Kings Rd, St Leonards on the opening night of the St Leonards Festival. Free! Come along!

OK that’s it, I’m off for a dip (OK, maybe a paddle) in the sea!

Blog/ 07/06/201708/06/2017

Poetry magazine windows & comp deadlines coming up

*UPDATED 8-6-17* to include the Prole Pamphlet Competition, deadline 30th June.

Windows

It’s been a while since I checked submissions windows. I realise a few have just closed (e.g. The North – you have to be sharp-eyed to get in there!), but here are some that are currently open…

Agenda – the website says it’s currently open, and you have submit via email, and there are very specific house style rules. They say they aim for a 12-week turnaround, and after that time it’s OK to submit elsewhere.

The Interpreter’s House – open until the end of June. Submit by email. They ‘prefer not to receive simultaneous submissions’ and previous contributors are asked to wait out three issues before submitting again. I rather like this and wish some other magazines would stipulate it, as it would prevent certain people from flooding every issue of some mags with their stuff. Just saying.

Under the Radar – now open until June 30th – via Submittable.

Tears in the Fence – currently open for submissions by email or post.

Long Poem Magazine – open until June 30th for poems that are at least 75 lines long ‘but not book length’. Submit by email.

For a list of some UK magazines which are open to submissions all year, see my post from last year.

A few competition deadlines coming up

All details are provided in good faith, but I can’t guarantee I’ve got them all correct – please go to the competition page to check and to read the rules, cut off dates etc.

Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition – Judge Sinead Morrissey. Prizes £2,000, £400, £200. Entry fee £7 per poem. Deadline 19th June. Is it just me or does the ‘women only’ rule feel a little anachronistic in this age of greater understanding of gender fluidity, cis vs trans women and so forth? Just saying. Mslexia are also holding their annual Pamphlet competition which has the same deadline.

The McLellan Poetry Prize – Judge Maura Dooley. Prize awarded by the Arran Theatre and Arts Trust as part of the annual McLellan Arts Festival – winners are invited up to the Isle of Arran for the prize giving in September. Prizes: £1000, £300, £100, plus 6 commendations of £25. Entry fee: £5 for the first poem, £4 thereafter. Deadline 21st June.

Prole Pamphlet Competition – Judge Fiona Pitt-Kiethley. This is Prole Magazine’s first pamphlet competition, for collections up to 35 pages. The winner will receive £50 and 15 copies of the pamphlet. Entry fee £12. Deadline 30th June.

Live Canon International Poetry Competition – Judge Clare Pollard. One prize of £1,000, plus £100 for a poet ‘living, studying or working in the London Borough of Greenwich’. Shame it can’t be extended to poets born and bred in the (ahem!) Royal Borough of Greenwich, because that would make me eligible. Oh well. Entry fee £6. Deadline 1st July.

Ambit Summer Poetry Competition – Judge George Szirtes. Prizes £500, £250, £100. Entry fee is £6 per poem. Deadline 15th July.

Winchester Poetry Prize – Judge Sarah Howe. Prizes £1,000, £500, £250. Entry fee is £5 for first poem, £4 for subsequent poems. Deadline 31st July.

And with a little more time to prepare…

The Manchester Poetry Prize – judges Adam O’Riordan, Mona Arshi & Pascale Petit. £10,000 prize for the best portfolio of three to five poems (maximum combined length: 120 lines) Entry fee £17.50. Deadline 29th September.

Troubadour International Poetry Prize – Judges Michael Symmons-Roberts and Imtiaz Darker. Prizes £2,000, £1,000, £500, plus a swathe of other prizes (magazine subscriptions, champagne etc). A reduced first prize this year, but still a prestigious one to win. Entry fee £6 for the first, then £4 for each subsequent poem. Deadline 16th October.

Good sources of info re poetry competitions and reading windows are:

Angela T Carr’s A Dreaming Skin – poetry competitions and opportunities

The South Bank Poetry Library – competitions listings, plus details of UK poetry magazines & publishers.

Cathy’s Comps & Calls – monthly blog post detailing a huge ton of writing comps (not just poetry), many free to enter.

As ever, good luck!

Blog/ 04/06/2017

Recipe for Water

Yes that probably sounds familiar, being the title of the 2009 collection by Gillian Clarke. I’ve been thinking a lot about water lately, and flow – great rivers, the mouths of rivers and the place where they become sea. Just riding the ideas at the moment and not rushing it. As Clarke puts it, ‘The sea turns its pages, speaking in tongues’ (‘First Words’)

I’ve been thumbing through some lovely watery poems. This, from Lynne Hjelmgaard’s A Boat Called Annalise: ‘We are in the Ocean’s mouth, / territory unknown’ (‘Night Watch’). Or this, by Philip Gross:

Scroll up the chattering, brief brilliances
and long abradings, sweeping up of everything

that we let slip, the murk-dynamics
that we might mistake for memory.

(‘Reeling in the River’, from A Fold in the River.)

It’s been just over a year since we moved into our flat which is only a few minutes’ walk from the sea (well, not an ocean but the English Channel), and it’s starting to seep into me. Last week we took a trip to the other end of Great Britain, the northernmost tip of Scotland, and stayed in a room that seemed to teeter over the beach and watch over the North Sea beyond.

On the last day we managed to fit in a trip to Loch Ness. But a highlight for me was crossing the Cromarty Firth on a ferry with only room for one car (ours). Like a sort of river taxi! The river here is full of decommissioned oil rigs which have a sort of bleak beauty.

Events/ 17/05/201718/05/2017

Standing room only at the Troubadour

Anne-Marie Fyfe at the Troubadour Coffee-House poetry

To be fair, I did have a seat for the first half, but with the sciatica playing up I was happy to stand for the second. Plus it meant a quick getaway at the end with poet friend Jan, and the last (viable) train home.

Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour (run by the indefatigable Anne-Marie Fyfe) is always worth the trip to London – I always feel I’m being introduced to interesting and often very fine poets who aren’t necessarily on my radar (for example, who don’t frequent social media and/or are not over-exposed at poetry readings and/or are not UK-based). It’s an intense reminder of the very wide poetry world out there.

On Monday, we heard eight poets, six of whom were new to me, and musical entertainment from Henry Fajemirokun.

Michael Scott (who I know from Swindon Poetry Festival) kicked things off, with a series of poems ostensibly addressed to a ‘little usherette’, but he told us were actually about all the big themes – love, loss, death, family and so forth. I was transfixed for most of the time by his ‘Attack of the 50ft Woman’ T-shirt (which did come into one of the poems). Also in the first half were Alistair Noon, Penny Boxall and Claire Dyer. I knew Penny’s name but don’t think I had heard her read before, and I found her engaging. Claire I met originally at an Interpreter’s House launch, and who I always enjoy hearing read, plus we’re also social media friends. I admire both her poetry and her calm delivery.

Boxall-Dyer-Noon- Troubadour poetry readings — Penny Boxall, Claire Dyer, Alistair Noon

Poetry readings always seem to offer up a myriad ways in which I might put my foot it in. This time the only seat I could find happened to be at close quarters to a table with a plate of half-finished food. It appeared to have been pushed to the edge. I assumed the people at the table had finished with it. It smelt. This was a hot, crowded room, after all. So I picked up the plate and started to take it away to the bar, when someone at the table said ‘excuse me’ and asked for it back. Fair enough. But it never did get finished, or cleared away. But by the time the interval came, the air was ripe with the combined respiration of 70 or 80 people in a basement room, so maybe this is a moot point.

Second half, as seen from a different viewpoint – Ruth Sharman read poems about the slow and desperately sad demise of her father. She is incredibly well-spoken (a slightly old-fashioned phrase, I know) and delivered her work with great style. We also heard from Jon Stone (who I remember as co-editor of Fuselit with Kirsten Irving) who looks far younger than he could POSSIBLY be (now that’s the kind of compliment I would relish), Elaine Gaston (whose work I enjoyed so much I forgot to take a photo – and who had the confidence to finish when we were expecting and wanting more) and Nick Makoha to end, whose introductions were excellent but I liked so much of his poetry, although he suffered from one or two stumbles during the poems.

Sharman, Stone, Mahoka - Troubadour poetry readings — Henry Fajemirokun, Ruth Sharman, Jon Stone and Nick Mahoka

I came away with a distinct impression of which of the poets I would like to read more of, and also quite a few takeaway thoughts – on what to wear for a reading, on engaging with the audience, on improving my diction and vocal tone (I couldn’t help cringing again thinking about my recent performance at the Eyewear launch), on practising, practising, practising…

Jan kindly took the same train as me until we parted at Haywards Heath, and I continued in the company of a zillion Chelsea fans as far as Lewes, then onto a replacement bus to Eastbourne, and to my bed by 1am.

It had been an excellent day in many ways – before even the Troubadour night earlier the day I’d had a poem accepted by the excellent Prole magazine, been to the hospital for the dreaded tests and finally (after a week of worry) pronounced ALL CLEAR. For now, of course. Everything is for now. But no less the sweeter for it.

Blog/ 12/05/201712/05/2017

Currently reading (part 1)

Through the letterbox fell two parcels yesterday, one from Germany and one from Wales, although both in English, luckily.
A Bee’s Breakfast is the latest anthology from Beautiful Dragons, a Facebook-based collaboration and the brainchild of Rebecca Bilkau. This is the third ‘Dragons’ anthology I’ve contributed to and I think it has the most beautiful cover art of the series. Previous themes have included the table of elements (my element was Osmium, and I learnt a lot about it in my research!) and constellations. This time it’s all about the counties of the UK, so there are 126 contributors. I’ve only skimmed through so far but already I sense an underlying disquiet – it’s fascinating to see the country through the eyes of others, and particularly now when the burden of Brexit weighs heavy on the nation.

My county was the Isle of Wight, which I have at least visited a few times – I confess if the choice had been between Clackmannanshire and the The Copeland Islands (google it!) I’d have been a tad stumped. I took a traditional tack and thought of Tennyson, but I had a bit of fun by taking his long poem ‘Enoch Arden’, doing a little ‘erasure’ on it and re-creating a new, short poem which I hope is suggestive of both the island itself and Tennyson’s own life. All the words are actually his – hopefully that counts as ‘found’ rather than ‘plagiarism’.

From Wales has come the latest issue of Envoi, from Cinnamon (my publisher!!) – and the excitement at seeing ‘First Salsa in Cusco’ on page 46 was almost eclipsed by getting my name on the cover! Yes! What writer doesn’t love a byline?? ‘First Salsa’ has been a loooong time in the fermentation – the first drafts were written in December 2012. Anyway, it’s out there now, and I actually still like it, so it will probably be the oldest poem in the new pamphlet.

And finally, Granta, which I usually start by reading the photo journalism and poems, although this issue is the latest special featuring the ‘Best of Young American Novelists’. So fiction all the way. I like the fact that Granta is always introducing me to new work often by people whose names are new to me. It feels exotic, feels mind-opening. It also tends to stay by my bedside until the next issue arrives, as a short story is the most I can manage before falling asleep.

Angst/ 26/04/201727/04/2017

A new pamphlet & all the angst of getting there

It’s taken a while coming but I’ve found a home for my second pamphlet, ‘All the Relevant Gods’. Those lovely, hardworking folks at Cinnamon Press (Jan Fortune and team) have offered to publish it, due out early next year.

What I’m feeling right now is a mix of gratitude and relief, and a wonderful sense of calm – now I can move on and focus properly on new writing and maybe even work up some of those projects I’ve started in my mind but not progressed.

I also think the process of getting to this point has made me grow up a bit.

I had no idea it would take so long to herd a bunch of poems into a pamphlet, at least, one that a publisher would take a punt on. I’ve always angsted about what my problem could possibly be. I’ve driven friends mad over a pint, moaning about this and that. Despite the odd shortlisting (which regular readers of this blog know, I – rightly or wrongly – tend not to set much store by), my efforts in pamphlet competitions have always been unsuccessful. But then again I suppose I’ve never believed 100% in my submissions (‘I don’t have a theme!’ ‘I have some themed poems but not enough!’ ‘I don’t have a voice!’).

But three things happened in the last year.

First of all I emailed a publisher I really respect to ask if they would consider reading my pamphlet (apologetically, as I know unsolicited submissions can be a pain) and they agreed to consider it. Although they didn’t take it, the response was kind and included a little feedback. Crucially, I was invited to re-submit once I had worked it up a bit more. This was encouraging – a chink of light at the end of the tunnel. I realised I’d never tried my pamphlet on anyone other than in competitions, and maybe sending it on spec was a gentler, less stressful way in.

Then I sent the same group of poems to a poet/editor and paid for a detailed critique. (I say I paid, but I really want to thank New Writing South here – they have supported me in many ways, not least of all with a modest but crucial grant for mentoring. Huge kudos to them.) The feedback was certainly detailed, and full of suggestions of poets to read and how I might improve the individual poems and the manuscript generally. This was useful – I tried hard to take both good and bad comments on board and forced myself to be grown-up about it, but the report was topped and tailed with phrases like ‘disappointing’ and ‘not the standard required for publication as a pamphlet.’ I couldn’t help feeling knocked-back, and it was several months before I was able to look at the poems again and see what could be improved. It didn’t help that most of them had been published in magazines, which I took to mean they are ‘good’ in some way. But beware – if you also get that feeling when you get a poem published, or it wins something, – ‘it must be good!’ – that feeling is a false friend! I won’t even go into the whole ‘it’s all subjective’ thing here because poets tell ourselves that all the time and it doesn’t always help 🙂

Eventually, after redrafts, and with several pamphlet competition deadlines and reading windows approaching, I asked another poet who I really admire to help me work the manuscript up (paid for with the rest of my NWS grant) . She read the poems. We then spent a long afternoon going through the poems themselves, the ordering, themes, which were weaker, which would work better first or last, and so on. There were criticisms I’d heard before and hadn’t liked (but when you hear the same thing from different sources – hmm!), there were poems I was determined to keep in but ended up removing, there were a few unpublished/new poems that I hadn’t tested on magazines but followed my instinct and included. Being familiar with this poet’s work and meeting face to face made a huge difference.

So something I’ve taken from all this is that I don’t always respond well to the written word alone. This is quite an admission, given my championing of online communication for the last twenty years. And I know that asking for a critique is not asking for praise. You need to know what’s not working. And yet we hear the written word in our heads, and (for me anyway) anything negative -especially if we don’t like the tone of it! – can jump out and take on a far greater significance than anything positive. When the same comments are delivered face to face, with space for all that entails – tone of voice, empathic feedback, the possibility of discussion and clarification, for me this is a marvellous thing.

The reworked pamphlet felt good. I sent it out. It’s going to be published. When I think of all the workshopping groups, magazine editors and poet friends who have encouraged and helped me, and of course you, for reading this blog with its warts and all, I’m truly grateful. There was a huge dollop of luck involved (there always is!) but if any of this sounds familiar, if you’re in the position I was, I would say it is as much to do with perseverance and finding a way to negotiate criticism – in such a way that you make it work for you, without chipping away at your confidence.

Author: Robin Houghton