Author: Robin Houghton

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Lewes & Oxford readings this week, plus poet friends’ success

october 2015 poetry readings

Ah, National Poetry Day seems to be the unofficial kickstarter of the poetry season (is that ‘open season’)? Last week saw a flurry of competition results and exciting announcements: Facebook was groaning under the weight of congratulations and almost couldn’t keep up.

First of all the Stanza Poetry Competition, won by Graham Burchell to whom I hand over my tiara (although I think it looks better on me, to be honest) and Runners Up none other than my old Brighton Stanza mates Marion Tracy and Tess Jolly. Yay!

Then lovely poet friend Abegail Morley scooped up the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year award (not exactly from under my nose – I only made the longlist, but I would have put up a fight if I’d been there!) Hurrah!

For my own part, I’ve nothing amazing to announce but I did make the longlist for the Poetry School/Nine Arches ‘Primers’ competition. Longlisting is an interesting idea – I have to remind myself that its purpose is actually to encourage the entrants. Longlistings don’t make it onto CVs (except possibly for the National). But at least you know you came close-ish.

This week sees a lovely bumper crop of readings – on Wednesday 14th October I’ll be back on my old manor in Lewes for the launch of South Magazine 52. I was one of the selectors together with Jeremy Page of The Frogmore Papers so will be be reading a couple of poems alongside a number of the contributors including poet friends Lucy Cotterill and Miriam Patrick. The selection process for South is done anonymously, so I had no idea we’d chosen poems by Miriam and Lucy, but it was a nice surprise.

On Thursday 15th, I’m in … Lewes. Yep – like I never left! It’s the quarterly Needlewriters readings, this time featuring Matthew Stewart, Ros Barber and Caroline Clark. I’m not reading but as I’m on the committee I’m naturally there helping (?) out where possible. It’ll be nice to remind my Lewes poet friends that I haven’t actually stepped off the edge of the planet even though Eastbourne is a foreign country; they do things differently (t)here.

On Friday 16th, that somewhat rakish editor of The Interpreter’s House Martin Malone has kindly invited me to join him for the launch of his new collection Cur (Shoestring Press),  at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford. He’s probably hoping to placate me after rejecting the poems I sent to TIH earlier in the year – ggrrr! The other guest readers are fellow Telltale Siegfried Baber, lovely Swindon poetry impresario Hilda Sheehan and the seemingly ubiquitous Roy Marshall, who pops up in every magazine I look at these days. I last met up with Roy in the summer at a reading in Camberwell organised by Richard Skinner.

I need a good night’s sleep after getting back from Oxford because on Saturday 17th I’ll be giving a talk to the Society of Women Writers and Journalists on the subject of … well, it’s a wide open brief, so hang onto your hats, I may be flying without a parachute. But there will definitely be some tech evangelism, some uplifting female empowerment messages and some major myth busting. Wish me luck!

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The Reading List, Week 8 – McCabe, Hopkins, Skinner, Sawkins

Poetry pamphlets by Chris McCabe, Holly Hopkins, Richard Skinner & Maggie Sawkins

All the National Poetry Day euphoria over with and I’m back into the swing of The Reading List this week, and some wonderful reading to report on. Included here are two pamphlets I picked up at the Poetry Book Fair, by Chris McCabe and Holly Hopkins ( who I also heard read). I’ve had Richard Skinner’s ‘Terrace’ for some time, and thought I’d lost it or lent it out, until I found it down the side of the bed when we moved house – almost as good a tenner – ha ha!

Chris McCabe, The Borrowed Notebook (Landfill 2009)

A sequence of numbered poems exploring a young man’s relationship with his father (I think) who has apparently died young. Rich in musical references and wordplay, steeped in Liverpool, popular culture and snatched details/memories ‘you threw me your most assured & scalding/ marshmallows in Russian vodka look’ (5) ‘your best most cynical / strawberries in gravy look’ (1). Many of the pieces are almost in note-form themselves, referencing the ‘notes’ – both those written by the father and discovered after his death ‘your fictionalised biography in a ringbound jotter’, and the mental notes taken by the son, revisited in the light of this discovery. At least, that’s how I read it – the whole piece has a fragmentary feel, and open to interpretation (like all good poetry, in my book)  – but what excited me most about this sequence was the energy of the language and the layer upon layer of repetition, rhyme, puns, jokes and other verbal richness.
‘I took your notes to fish out the best.
To flesh out the beast.
It was a bastard. Made fresh.’ (13)

Holly Hopkins, Soon Every House Will Have One (Smith Doorstop, 2014)

I enjoyed many of the poems in this pamphlet, although for me the strongest were towards the beginning. It opens with a walk through a semi-derelict rural landscape where a barn owl magically appears ‘because you were there and could charm a fish out of its pond’ (‘Offchurch’). It’s the first of a number of strange, sometimes beautiful landscapes throughout the pamphlet that become increasingly dreamlike, where space and place are paramount (‘We left the broken glass of the old city,/ that bowl of smog between chalk hills,/ to live inside high granite walls.’ (‘The City Cut from a Mountain’). A theme we return to many times is the body and body parts – natural, artificial, alive and dead – from mannequins given names and life histories in order to increase their value to collectors (‘Investing in Mannequins’), to a woman with ‘steel hips’ swimming across a lake (‘Margaret and her Cottage, Ontario’). ‘Bicycle Woman’ presents a Frankenstein-esque scenario that takes prosthetics to a poignant extreme. One or two poems didn’t quite work for me and there were times I wanted more, for example the five lines of ‘Country Churches’ seemed too brief.
Favourite poem: ‘Bicycle Woman.’

Richard Skinner, Terrace (Smokestack, 2015)

The cover art is beautiful and reflects the lushness of these poems. The reader enters a world of mysterious landscapes, exotic birds and re-imagined histories. The sky takes centre stage here, whether we’re being blinded by a ‘sunrise blow-torch’ (‘Three Landscapes’), up high looking down (‘Each of these cimitero is like a Chinese character / legible only from the sky’ (‘Isola di San Michele, Venice’) or on a high ridge (‘the sky like bits of blue material, / yet still immaterial.’ (‘Pillar’). There’s an smooth elegance about these poems, but this is no travelogue of gorgeous landscapes. Alongside the oleanders, curaçao and eucalyptus we meet challenging characters and situations. ‘You wait for the men to come, with rouged lips, / brace yourself for the arms and the turn of the lock.’ (‘Indoor Pallor’). A sinister organisation hints at dark activities in a totalitarian-regime-style press release (‘The Monarch Foundation’.) A rich and intriguing collection. Favourite poem: ‘Isola di San Michele, Venice’.

Maggie Sawkins, Zones of Avoidance (Cinnamon, 2015)

This is a work perhaps better known as performance piece – it won the 2013 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and I wrote recently about seeing it performed live in Lewes. As a collection, it’s set out in two parts – in the first we meet the poet’s daughter, seen from her mother’s point of view, and witness her struggle to cope with drug addiction, up to the birth of her child and his subsequent adoption. There is a narrative flow which begins with the eponymous opening sequence, followed by various episodes typically recorded in a flat, factual way, which adds to the horror of it all. ‘Sunday morning. The doorbell rings. I put on my dressing gown and go down. Sitting on the doorstep, with her back to me, is Sunny Girl. She gets up and I let her in. She’s wearing three overcoats, she’s dyed her blonde hair black, she’s spent the whole night walking.’ (‘The Real Thing’)

Part two takes us into the worlds of other recovering addicts and the moving testimony of their stories. ‘…he’d always / considered himself a moral thief – / would only steal from mates, / the old girl’s purse’ (‘Papillon’).

Addiction – the symptoms, the consequences, the reality of it – is ostensibly the subject matter here. But it’s as much about a mother’s metaphysical struggle, her questioning, her need for answers, that accompanies the sheer exhaustion of day-to-day coping. There are some truly heartbreaking moments, but blackish humour also, as in ‘Sub-title: A Visual Exploration of Fetish’. There is lyricism throughout the collection and the language and range of forms are beautifully judged. Sad and fascinating, ultimately offering hope of a sort.
Favourite poem: ‘The Cord’.

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The Reading List, week 7 – Jack Underwood ‘Happiness’

Happiness by Jack Underwood

 

Only one book to report on in this episode of The Reading List  – there seem to be endless admin jobs involved in moving house, as well as getting out and about exploring my new town when the weather’s been so glorious. Plus I have a cold. Boo! Anyway, excuses be damned. The upshot is that I’m devoting a whole post to this one.

Happiness, Jack Underwood (Faber, 2015)

A few years ago I was in a Poetry School class about ‘putting a pamphlet together’, taught by Jack Underwood. I’m not sure I got as much out of it as I could have, partly because the classes always seemed to start late and I always had to leave promptly to get my train. Attendance was patchy, so I didn’t get much of a sense of the other attendees. I was probably also not really ready for a pamphlet.

There was lots to enjoy though. I have a fond memory of Harry Man‘s work and his sense of humour. And although Jack’s teaching style seemed chaotic he had a real presence and was generous, sparky and funny. I’ve always enjoyed his poems when I’ve come across them in magazines, so I was really looking forward to Happiness, his first full collection just out from Faber.

First, the title: you can read as much irony into it as you wish. Inside are poems of love, anxiety, death, depression and most of all (it felt to me) wonder. In the opening poem, an onion is cut in half, and despite the ‘hung cloud of acid’ it’s a thing of beauty.

as the knife bisected

like a maker of names passing
between twins, calling one half Perfect
and the other half also Perfect. (‘Certain’)

The idea of twins and speculation about ‘otherness’, the nature of the relationship of the narrator to the living world round him/her: people, nature, animals, things – there are eggs, toads, and questions without question marks. It’s a world of conundrums and riddles, where the traditional answers to the burning questions of life are found wanting (‘…suppose there was no panther.’ ‘Theology’).

There are poems of sheer joy – ‘She loves you like your hair smells proteinous; she loves you like pausing to move a snail somewhere safer in the rain; she loves you like milk is not like water…’ (‘She Loves You Like’). ‘… the goofy ten gallon/ hats of happiness that children plant on us everytime/ they impersonate knowledge.’ (‘Happiness’)

In ‘Inventory of Friends’, with more than a nod to Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, we get a list of ‘grass-topped lives’ (what a wonderful phrase – suggesting not only the icing on a cake, the pretty surface, but also ‘pushing up daisies’, ie dead below) in which the narrator compares himself to them…

… But with a predictability
that would be cuteness if it weren’t honest first,
my thoughts turn to you…
…
what it might be like to be you, coming home
in four hours’ time with no inkling of the way
my insides grown and click like a tired, old
galleon when you take off your coat like that.

More often than not we’re on a knife edge between happiness and sadness – ‘like an anvil dropped from heaven’ (‘Sometimes your sadness is a yacht’). There’s something terrible and poignant about ‘Your horse’, ‘bending himself into the room… we are crunching on polo mints together / and remembering the way your body used to move.’

In ‘Second’, the narrator offers advice –

…I would tell you to let yourself
be sad, if being sad is what happens when a person,
awkward in a universe as a plum on a plate,
drops their day to the inaccessibility of other days,
and loosens their tie on the sofa to let some life out.

It’s beautiful, unexpected, vibrant stuff and I felt I’d been kicked up the backside. This is a book I see myself back to again and again. Do read it.

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‘Zones of Avoidance’ – a live literature performance

Maggie Sawkins - Zones of Avoidance

What would your understanding be of a ‘live literature performance’? Is it the same, or related to ‘performance poetry’? Could any poetry, when read or recited in front of an audience, be performance poetry?

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity of seeing a live performance of Maggie Sawkins’ Zones of Avoidance which won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry last year. It’s billed as ‘multimedia live literature production’, and with Mark C. Hewitt as director I had an inkling of what that meant. I knew it would be staged in some way. I suspected that the performance aspect would have little to do with the use of ‘trained actors’, or slam poetry, or a poet dominating the audience with sheer force of personality.

Mark is a writer, theatre maker, producer, director and all-round talented person who I know from Lewes Live Lit, the umbrella for all kinds of poetry activities in Lewes over the years. It’s he who organises the regular workshopping groups with Mimi Khalvati, and whose one-man show ‘Expiry tbc’ I really enjoyed a year or so back.

The performance I saw was actually a dry-run before its London debut, at The Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone, with the last performance taking place this evening. Certainly more than a rehearsed reading, as the piece had been performed quite a few times, it was nevertheless a ‘be prepared for anything’ kind of show. It was a small, invited audience and we’d been warned that not all aspects of the production would be happening (such as some lighting effects), also that we shouldn’t be alarmed if there were unscheduled moments or re-takes. In fact, there were no interruptions. Much of the material was read confidently from memory, all the technical aspects seemed to work (or work well enough for the impromptu venue). I loved the intimacy of what felt like a private view.

I knew the subject matter was based on the poet’s experience of her daughter’s drug addiction and her own professional work with recovering addicts. So I knew it wasn’t going to be ‘light’ entertainment. But I have to say I found the whole experience mesmerising. The trouble with trying to describe the dramatic elements of something like this (to someone who wasn’t there) – the props, the lighting, the use of projection/audio tracks, how the poet/performer changes position – is that you end up with a list of features which can, out of context, sound a bit periferal or mannered. But it wasn’t like that – the staging was absolutely integral to the piece.

The poet’s delivery was matter-of-fact, deadpan even. There was humour. And pathos. And most of all the frustration, anger and desperation of a mother having to stand by as her daughter self-destructs. It was moving, but not maudlin. Occasionally, between poems we heard recordings of addicts in recovery, speaking about their experiences. Some poems appeared on film. The whole production was carefully paced, giving us the audience time to take in what we were hearing and seeing: a muted, ordered presentation of a sad story of utter disorder.

Do go see Zones of Avoidance if you’re able to. I came away with the book which contains the whole sequence (not all the poems are in the performed version). I’ve added it the The Reading List, so in due course I’ll be talking more about the poems.

Angst/

On not letting the competitive instinct crush creativity | poetry submissions stats

OK here goes.

I know some people will wonder why on earth I admit to all this in public. The reason is this: I’m sure I’m not the only person who gets downhearted about rejections, or who has self-doubts about my abilities as a poet. It’s fine not to show it if you do, and some people genuinely have no self-doubts. But I’ve also lived long enough in the belly of social media to know what a toxic and stressful environment it can be when you’re feeling vulnerable. So I think it can help to know you’re not alone.

It’s also very easy to have a skewed view of how things are going. For example, my feeling is I’ve had a poor year as regards getting stuff published. Every magazine I pick up I see a poem by Poet X or Poet Y, or I read the latest edition of Exceptional Poetry Magazine, and I think WTF – where’s my stuff?? I start to wonder what happened to the optimism and self confidence I had a couple of years ago. Or even the ability.

BUT… it really helps to do the numbers. Here’s what I found out when I looked at the stats from the last 12 months:

  • 50 poems sent out in 74 submissions (some poems went out, got rejected and went out again)
  • 48 rejections by magazines
  • 9 failed competition entries
  • 5 poems no response from magazine
  • 4 poems lost by magazine
  • 1 poem withdrawn because I had changed it a lot in the time I was waiting for a reply
  • 5 poems accepted by magazines
  • 1 poem placed 2nd
  • 1 poem longlisted

plus a pamphlet shortlisted.
I have only included competitive submissions in the above, for example I’ve not included anthologies or anything submitted by invitation. I’ve also not included poems currently out and awaiting reply (16 poems in 4 submissions).

Now what this says is that 10% of poems submitted  to mags were accepted for publication (5/50), 18% of poems sent to competitions achieved some kind of success (2/11), 14% of poems submitted to magazines were either lost, or presumed lost (no response in a year and no reply to enquiries) – 9/63.

I had a very good publication record in my first year of getting material placed (2011-2012), and in a way that’s the problem – I haven’t managed to keep that up. But actually, a 10% success rate seems fair. It doesn’t stop me feeling I’ve had a bad year and Must Do Better. That’s really just the competitive instinct in me.

What I find is that by looking at the numbers I can separate out competitive instinct from the creative instinct, and not let the former crush the latter. 

Quality of work is so hard to gauge, and it’s so clearly not the only factor when it comes to publication – yet it’s the first thing we question when work is rejected – ‘maybe my poems are actually rubbish!’ It’s a blow to the confidence. But if you trust a bit more in the stats, it can help put everything in perspective. Focus on writing MORE and writing BETTER – yes – but keep accurate records and once a year or so do a stocktake. I find it’s really worth it.

What do you think? Stupid to get bogged down in numbers? Helpful for painting a clearer picture? Stop crunching numbers and read more Bishop?

Angst/

Poetry Book Fair and other shenanigans

Books purchased at the Poetry Book Fair 2015

Yes, it’s the obligatory ‘look what I bought at the Poetry Book Fair‘ photo – I love looking at other people’s ‘hauls’ to see what I missed. There was so much choice it was overwhelming.

My strategy was to start calmly – on my first sweep I just picked up a couple of things at full price, including Jack Underwood’s Happiness and Holly Hopkins’ pamphlet Soon Every House Will Have One from which I’d heard her reading in the morning. Later in the day I then did a kind of serendipity follow-up, picking interesting-looking publications up at random and enjoying some excellent bargains. Carcanet started selling everything for a fiver, and even Telltale got in on the act by offering a catchy “four for the price of two and a half”.

Each year I’m seeing more and more of my poet friends there, or maybe it’s just that I’m getting to know more poets. There’s a definite buzz about it. Props to Chrissy Williams and Joey Connolly for all their hard work in organising.

I had to leave early to make it back for a Lewes Singers concert and it was a delight to be able to sit and listen for a change. And so ended a crazy weekend that started with Waitrose having no record of the glasses we’d booked for the concert, and finished with us deciding to pull out of the flat we were on the verge of buying. The perfect place is out there. But for now, we’re very happy in our temporary home. I just can’t seem to locate anything and the spare room is one huge mess of boxes (some half-unpacked) and sundry loose items from golf clubs to something that looks like a big heavy-duty sleeping bag. It’s actually a cover for the harpsichord. Oh yes, we found space for that.

Amongst the fog of dealing with solicitors, estate agents, utilities, plumbers etc, finding my way around a strange town and forever looking for the stapler, one thing I’m determined to make time for is the Reading List. Most of our books will have to stay in boxes (rental places don’t seem to have things like fitted bookshelves) but I’ve ‘saved’ a few poetry books. Plus, in the move, I came across a couple of long lost pamphlets that had disappeared down the back of the bed. Hurrah! Add to that my book fair new purchases and that should keep me going for a while.

PS oops I almost forgot – look what I picked up, Elly!

poem by Elly Nobbs

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A short time out

4 days to go

Yes I know I’ve gone a bit quiet lately, and that’s because we are finally moving house. Oh and the small matter of a concert in a week’s time, on the same day as the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair, so my creative juices have been sucked dry on making posters and postcards, a 12 page programme, origami birds, sourcing 8 metres of black cotton fabric on eBay (don’t ask) while dealing with packing, booking parking suspensions for our movers, chasing up contracts and the like. There are lists of instructions to helpers and more lists for myself. And two mattresses still to drag to the dump on Sunday, after an all day rehearsal and a visit to Eastbourne Book Festival. And more packing.

BUT in about 10 days’ time service will resume as normal! And in the meantime I hope to see as many real and virtual poetry friends as possible at the Poetry Book Fair next weekend – please come and say hello at the Telltale table. We’re sharing space with the lovely Frogmore Press.

PS In case you were wondering about the origami birds:

Faire is the Heaven - Lewes Singers - Tourist Info Centre window

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The Reading List, week 6: Duhig, Kenny, Murray, Lehane

The Reading LIst week 6 - Duhig, Kenny, Murray, Lehane

This post is the latest update to my ‘Reading List’ project begun in July 2015.

The Lammas Hireling, Ian Duhig (Picador, 2003)

From the opening poem ‘Blood’, an extended description of a self-styled skinhead-type hardman who turns out to be a fifteen-year-old who faints at the sight of a vaccination needle ‘in front of a whole queue of third years’, you get the feeling this collection is going to be a treat. Ian Duhig has such a range I just can’t find the right box to put him in.

A rage against a corporation that diverts ‘twenty million tons of river’ is presented as a protest song (‘Water, Light’) – ‘Some people couldn’t run a bath / And these were running mining’. The poet seems to have a scholarly familiarity with the classics, with ancient myth & folk tales, with modern history … yet he’s also a politically-engaged ‘man of the people’ who seems able to combine extraordinary wit and subtlety of language with (how shall I put it?) a certain earthy bluntness. There are punchlines aplenty (eg ‘The Vision of the Virgin’, ‘Chinese Sonnets’) and a hilarious ekphrastic poem – ‘The dancing couple. He’s as smug as buttered parsnips / Despite entertaining scarlatina and an eerie crotch.’ (‘Rustics Dancing Outside an Inn’). A found poem ‘Coble Rig Veda’ celebrates a rich nautical vocabulary probably indecipherable to your average present-day reader. The wonderful title poem won the National Poetry Competition in 2001. It has a weirdly compelling quality – a poem I want to keep going back to, and every time there’s more to be squeezed from it. Here’s a link to Ian reading the poem, and some background to it.

Favourite poem: ‘Ken’s Videos, Seahouses’. (I admit I wrote a little homage poem ‘after’ this, which appeared in The Interpreter’s House. Nowhere near as clever as the original, sadly. I can try though.)

The Boy Who Fell Upwards, Peter Kenny (anthologyofguernsey.com, 2010)

This collection of poems is part of a ‘A Guernsey Double’, together with ‘The Man Who Landed’ by Richard Fleming. It was published with funding from Guernsey Arts Commission, as an ‘explore Guernsey’ project – there’s even a map in the centre pages pointing out the various places referred to in the poems.

I confess I’ve only read Peter’s half of the book this week, saving Richard’s for another time. (You have to turn the book over and start from the other side to do that, so it does feel like a separate piece.)

My ‘Reading List’ strategy  is to read straight through the poems in a collection, not to re-read or overthink individual poems. This isn’t always easy, especially if there are distractions and you get to the end of a piece and have the sensation you weren’t attending properly. But it leaves an impression, a kind of prevailing feeling. After reading ‘The Boy Who Fell Upwards’ the feeling I had was melancholy. That’s not to say sadness exactly, but there are mysteries here – unresolved (hi)stories, both personal and of the place, and it’s sometimes the sense of not knowing that fuels the tension. From the start we learn ‘I’m torn up by currents …/ hollow-boned orphan, I shriek like a gull in the gale.’ (‘The Boy Who Fell Upwards’).

The narrator (as small child, as teenager, as adult) is surrounded by characters unnamed but defined by their family roles – Gran’mere (the first we meet, and the most present through the poems), Father, Grandfather, a dead brother, a ‘thought daughter’. They are all woven into a landscape both hostile and beautiful – ‘Cliff and foam murmur the murmur / of a dreaming widow, reaching / across a cold sheet / to a memory.’ (‘Dusk at Icart Point’) and later,’Raucous in the little lanes / a drunken sea-wind / blew me here / to listen and belong again…’ (‘A return’). But this is no memoir. And it’s certainly not a tourist information brochure. Sure, we get ‘I glimpsed a summer Guernsey / cuddled by the setting sun’ (‘A Glasshouse’) but a Nazi bunker has the narrator imagining a wartime victim ‘…your belly flop / into the concrete slop / of these foundations.’

There’s a deep sense of love for the place, and the sadness of things fragmenting, uprooting, breaking and toppling – ‘all these muddled memories / word by word from broken things.’ (‘The Little Chapel’) which I found complex and moving. Favourite poem: ‘Thought Daughter.’

Of earth, water, air and fire – animal poems – Nicholas Murray  Melos 2013).

This is a fairly jaunty celebration of animals and birds, alive and (about to be) dead, real and mythical. Sometimes the beast itself takes centre stage, but just as often the poet focuses on a particular feature or association, as with ‘Aardvark’ – ‘… unaware of its symbolic life / as tradesman’s Number One’.

Lambs are ‘teenaged gangs’, a Pheasant is a ‘gaudy racer’. Most of the creatures are addressed directly as ‘you’, permitting the poet to express his own feelings or observations. I enjoyed the originality of ‘Pelican’ – ‘the guy who swaggers, / who Mick Jaggers.’ Less convincing was the ‘Swan’ – ‘Conscious of magnificence, that stately glide / asserts possession of the tree-screened pool.’

Unfortunately I’m unable to read any poem about a Kingfisher without recalling the wonderful Chris McCabe poem of that title which appeared in The Rialto and in the ‘Best of British Poetry 2011’ anthology. (Hear Chris read the poem here.) And ‘Crow’ will always be a tricky one.

The collection was good fun and the quirky juxtapositions of creatures and unexpected touches made me smile. Favourite poem: ‘Pelican.’

Hunters – Dorothy Lehane (Annexe Press 2013)

This is such a slim volume I thought I’d slip it in this week … just seven poems, and on a first read through I did pick up on some references to stars/constellations/space but wasn’t entirely sure if I’d missed something crucial.
‘Keyhole (NGC1999)’ ‘isn’t exactly grown yet / barely sagacious’ made more sense when I had looked it up (apparently it’s a ‘mysterious hole in space’). I don’t really like doing ‘research’ in order to get something from a poem, but in the case of this pamphlet it did help.

In ‘Crab Nebula’ there are references to the Bible, a line from Macbeth and possibly a reference to some incident in Chinese history and/or fable. There are puzzling and/or opaque moments throughout, but nevertheless the poems zing with original ideas and exhilarating language. ‘Deep freeze mother, / primordial grime, / don’t speak now hypoglycaemics.’ (Goldilocks Zone’) ‘sweep this realm, / hypnotised by jewels, regal cat’s eye / puffing out smoke rings like knotted gas,’ (‘Hunters’).
Favourite poem: ‘AE Aurigae’.

Angst/

Poetry Book Fair excitement, plus my poetry gets a leg up

Poetry Book Fair

September so often seems like the shortest month – why is that? At the moment it’s also looking like the craziest this year. We have to move out of our house by 23rd, which is little more than a couple of weeks away. And no, we haven’t started packing yet, because we don’t have any boxes because we haven’t confirmed the movers because we don’t actually know where we’re moving to yet – UGH. There are a lot of ‘ifs’. But ‘if’ they all work out then it’s all going to be fine. I’m very grateful for your thoughts and good wishes. Thank you.

On the poetry front, I’ve been reading (as you know) but haven’t been doing much writing. Nevertheless I’ve been blessed with a number of rejections recently, which has freed up quite a few poems for submitting elsewhere! How’s that for positivism! (Oh no, that’s not the word is it?  but you get my meaning).

Good news: those lovely peeps at New Writing South have offered me a place on their ‘NWS10’ scheme, which means I’m going to benefit from all kinds of fantastic advice and support for my writing over the next year or so. For starters, I’ll be joining John McCullough’s fortnightly ‘Advanced Poetry’ course from next  month, which I’ve heard so many good things about. Then there’s a project I’m planning with a photographer friend which will be based in Eastbourne, my new home town. Having the support of NWS means I’ll be able to tap into their expertise and credibility which gives me much confidence about getting the project off the ground. I’m feeling really enthused about this – and I feel it also gives me ‘permission’ to write more, improve and try to grow as a poet.

Telltale Poets are getting excited about our first appearance at the Poetry Book Fair in London on 26th September, sharing a table with the delightful Frogmore Press and helping to represent the Lewes Massive. Never mind that I am DOUBLE BOOKED that day with my choir as I am planning to hologram myself and nobody will be any the wiser. Plus of course, both Telltale Press and Lewes Singers are Not All About Me! Anyway at the Book Fair we’ll be launching our latest pamphlet, The Fire Station by Sarah Barnsley… I can’t show you the cover yet because it’s top secret but the whole pamphlet is awesome or killin it as I’m told they say.

So if you’re coming to the Book Fair remember to drop by, say hello, pick up some delectable freebie stuff and spend a shedload of money on our pamphlets to help feed the poets. Thanks so much!