Author: Robin Houghton

Angst/

A sick kitty, Arvon, podcasting and MA latest

Bobby with cone

Help! I’m just emerging from a fraught couple of weeks. Two weeks ago our cat Bobby suddenly developed a life-threatening condition. He’d only been officially ‘ours’ for less than a fortnight. He’s on the mend now, but I think the shock of it all (including not being insured, plus a week or so of cleaning up after an incontinent cat, lack of sleep, worry etc) took its toll on me! While all this was going on I was on an Arvon-at-Home course. At least I was at home, not away for the week leaving my dear husband on his own with poor Bobs. More about that in a mo. So, a bit of a rundown on what I’ve been up to…

Planet Poetry podcast

This week Peter Kenny and I got our 16th episode of Planet Poetry up and out … yesterday in fact… it would have been Thursday but I hadn’t finished editing it plus had a schoolpals meetup that afternoon then a Needlewriters event in the evening to co-host. This week the interviewee is Helen Ivory – a fine poet and a wonderful guest, fascinating, fun and generous. Do have a listen. Peter and I also chat about what we’ve been reading lately: Tomas Transtromer (me) and Robert Hamberger (Peter), then we get a tiny bit grumpy about this and that, as per usual!

Planet Poetry Ep 16 with Helen Ivory

There’s been so much to learn about podcasting and we’re still very much learning. Something we’re planning to have is an actual website sometime. We’ve got the domain, we’ve got the hosting and we’ve got the know-how. Just a bit more time required. Peter and I are a tad busier than when we started it last October! What we both agree on though is how it has opened us up to so much poetry that’s new to us and so many interesting poets and editors. It’s also super to get the occasional nice feedback, because when we’re recording it we do sometimes wonder if anyone’s going to be listening!

tomas transtromer selected

Arvon-at-home

Re the aforementioned course: this was my first Arvon experience, and despite being held via Zoom, I enjoyed the sessions. The tutors (Carrie Etter and Sasha Dugdale) were the main draw for me, and also the fact that it was focused on putting together a collection. Although it finished a week ago I haven’t had a chance to organise & read though my notes. BUT as soon as I’ve finished this post it’s first on my list. I was a bit worried beforehand that we might be given some general writing exercises, and I wasn’t really there for that. As it happened, Carrie and Sasha had prepared some excellent sessions and what writing exercises there were were relevant and interesting. My fellow students were pretty much all at a similar stage to me (verging on a full collection) or beyond, which I also liked. A first for me was an attempt at a translation of a Marina Tsvetaeva poem from the Russian, which Sasha guided us through. I really enjoyed that. Basically, although I was tired most of the time and probably not quite myself, I came away from the week with plenty of great advice, ideas and motivation.

Poetry & Poetics MA latest

My course at York feels like it happened ages ago now, since there was nothing to do in the Summer term. I submitted my Spring term essay and got the equivalent of a B+, pretty much the same as my Autumn 2020 essay mark. I have to admit although I’ve enjoyed the reading, the research and the essay writing very much, getting my head around the literary theory and adapting my writing style to what’s required has been harder than I expected. In the past I’ve always got good grades in academic work so a B+ is disappointing. I’ve also been reassessing my priorities, given how financially punishing the last 15 months have been. So, although I still have another year to go if I want to complete the MA, I’m hoping to take a leave of absence and review it this time next year. In the meantime, I have a ton of books still to read, detailed reading lists and access to the University resources, so I’m well set up for self-directed study.

dante essay file

Are we all Zoomed out yet?

I don’t know about you but the Zoom tolerance is wearing thin now. In the early days I used to think hard about where I was sitting, or what was my hair like, the lighting etc. Now, unless I’m actually reading, I just schlepp up and hope there are no food bits between my teeth.

I’d like to offer my grateful thanks, though, to the organisers of some of the lovely poetry events that I’ve enjoyed via Zoom over the last few months:

Helen Eastman and all at Live Canon for their Friday lunchtime series, still going strong although I haven’t been able to make the last few…

Jeremy Page, The Frogmore Press and the Sussex Festival of Ideas for the Poetry South East readings…

Jo Clement and guest editor Ian Humphreys at Butcher’s Dog for a wonderful afternoon of readings for the launch of Issue 15…

All at South magazine for their launch event featuring my good friend and excellent poet Miriam Patrick…

Until we meet again!

Blog/

The updated poetry magazines submissions spreadsheet and my 1,000th subscriber

Stats are funny old things. Stats, data, whatever you want to call it. On their own of course, or deprived of context, they can be pretty meaningless, unless it’s a simple, one-dimensional calculation, like ‘this is my 609th post on this blog’. I just had to look that up – shame I missed the 600th, that might have been reason for a party. Percentages, averages and statements like ‘the number of xyz has doubled in the last two weeks’ are open to (mis)interpretation. After all, double or triple-next-to nothing is still next-to-nothing. But hey. What do I know. Only that I learnt the value of this kind of obfuscation many years ago as a marketer.

But here’s another simple statistic: last week, just as I was about to send out my quarterly update of the poetry magazines submission windows spreadsheet, my subscriber mailing list tipped the 1,000 mark. Woop! I decided it would be fun to ‘reward’ the 1,000th subscriber, but I didn’t promote the fact, because those types of tweets tend to attract compers, freebie-fans and lightning-fast unsubbers. In any case it’s not a huge reward, but it’s something – a free copy of my guide to getting published in UK mags. So, after not publicising the forthcoming prize I quietly checked my Mailchimp and identified the winner to be… drumroll etc etc… Jessica Boatright. I was delighted to discover that not only is Lincolnshire-based Jessica a poet, tutor and mentor – but also her Twitter name is @oh_so_boatie – brilliant!

If you’re not on the list to get the updates, it’s free and you can sign up here.

Blog/

Butcher’s Dog launch reading 5th June

One of the (very few) good things to have come from this whole lo****wn is being able to attend launches and readings that would normally be a huge mission to get to. (Although if it’s possible in terms of cost of travel/overnight stays then can be exciting – for example the wonderful trip I had to Liverpool a few years ago for a Coast to Coast to Coast launch).

Coming up at some point will be an online launch party for a forthcoming issue of Lighthouse in which I’m delighted to have a poem, and meanwhile those ever-creative peeps at Butcher’s Dog have done a brilliant poster for their Issue 15 launch event on Saturday 5th June. I’ll be reading in some excellent company – just wish I had a shorter name, then it would have been bigger, tee hee – ! The issue is co-edited by Ian Humphreys, with whom I shared some breakout room angst at a Ty Newydd masterclass week a few years ago. Please do come along, I think it will be a grand afternoon. Tickets available here.

Butchers Dog launch poster
Butchers Dog launch poster including names of readers
Blog/

On poetry magazines: The A3 Review

The A3 Review cover

You know how I’m a bit of a sucker for interesting poetry formats? Well, I’ve often wondered what The A3 Review was all about – a paean to the London to Portsmouth road, perhaps? Or a massive mag that won’t go through your letterbox? I bought a copy of issue #13 to find it’s neither of those. As the website says, it’s ‘a magazine that behaves like a map’ – it comes folded into A6 size, but opens out to reveal its contents.

A3 Review issue 13

In it I found poems by a number of international writers who I wasn’t familiar with, plus a pocket-sized Q & A with Roger Robinson (top tip: ‘read & write more, publish less’) and some quirky graphics. It was really interesting to see the poems spread out, so you get a visual sense of how they sit together as well as how they ‘talk’ to each other. Also in my package (sent from Spain where editor Sean Levin perhaps is based) was ‘Write About The House’, an innovative writing prompts booklet, or rather map, in the same A3 fold-out form. It’s a visual treat, as well as being packed with interesting prompts.

Write About the House by Writing Maps

How cool is this? The A3 Press has over 20 of these themed writing maps and also produces chapbooks (chapmaps?) as well as the A3 Review. Excellent value for money too.

PS: I’ve been asked if I get free copies of stuff that I review or talk about on this blog. The short answer is no, unless it’s a contributor’s copy of a magazine or a book that I’ve blurbed. This includes my quarterly list of magazine submission windows. So any ‘endorsement’ is entirely just my own thoughts.

Angst/

Faith, hope and podcasting

The sun is shining and I’m going to be gardening this afternoon. The weather is becoming less glacial and I may even be able to plant out the tomatoes. Hurray! I feel my mood lifting. The diary for May and June promises much, it looks like Nick will be working again after 15 months of enforced layoff, and musical events are on the calendar again. Not before time. I was starting to find it hard to get out of bed and not succumb to dark thoughts. But at least the pool has reopened!

In fact, the last week or two have brought some brilliant moments – not least of which was Wednesday’s launch of Antony Mair‘s new Live Canon collection A Suitcase Filled with Hope. I was proud to be able to say a few words about Antony, in front of his friends and family and many, many fine poets in the audience. He is a very modest person, but with a big talent and a huge heart. I think this is his best book yet. Highly recommended.

Last week I met up with my Planet Poetry co-producer Peter Kenny and poet friend Charlotte Gann for a few beers in Lewes. A bit of rain didn’t put us off! This is the first time Peter and I have been able to meet properly since last November, and although we thought we might do some recording for the show, we ended up just socialising.

We’re really proud of Planet Poetry;  we’ve learned as we’ve gone along, made mistakes and haven’t quite reached BBC standard yet but hey! This week I attended some sessions of a Podfest Masterclass, and although the things I heard about how to take a podcast ‘up a notch’, promote it to a wider audience, make it easier to subscribe to etc wasn’t anything I didn’t know, it was a fantastic kick up the backside. As a result Peter and I now have a domain name, plans for a website and lots of ideas for the future. We’re currently working on Episode 14, due out next week and it’s all about poetry publishing. Looking at the list of previous episodes I’m reminded how much wonderful new poetry we’ve encountered, and how many fascinating poets and editors we’ve spoken with – most recently the eminent American poet LeAnne Howe. Meanwhile here’s Peter and I in one of our recent recording sessions. Peter is ‘Proud Parsnip’ here…. don’t ask!

Robin Houghton and Peter Kenny on Planet Poetry podcast

 

Blog/

#Blossomwatch poem by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

cherry-blossom

This morning I was looking through the National Trust news and came across the latest Spring initiative, #blossomwatch, in which they are asking people to photograph blossom (I think the official day for it is tomorrow) and flood our social media channels with gorgeous pink and white. I dutifully downloaded the PDF ‘information pack’ and in it found a poem written by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett in response to members of the public who had contributed their thoughts on Spring. I confess I’d not heard of Elizabeth-Jane, and a crowd-sourced poem doesn’t always bode well, but I absolutely loved it and found myself reading it several times and wanting to show people.

I can’t post the whole poem here, and the extracts on the NT site and here on the Guardian website (which tells the whole story of how it was written) don’t do it justice, as the beauty is (for me) how the poem builds and ends. So do download the ‘pack’ and read the full poem.

Meanwhile the blossom round here is a bit behind, with all the cold dry weather we’re having. But the photo here is of the cherry tree opposite our house and was taken last year on 12th April.

Blog/

A sudden rush of sending out & signing up

Earlier this week I found myself pulling out old poems as well as some recent work, and giving them a bit of a pummelling. As a result I’ve had a spree of sending out to magazines and (yes I’m afraid so) the odd competition.

As luck would have it, I’m booked into a half-day Poetry Business workshop on Saturday with Jackie Wills and Michael Laskey, which I enrolled for months ago thinking by this time I’d be back in the poetry-writing saddle. Good timing.

And as if that weren’t enough, this morning I saw a tweet from Carrie Etter about her Arvon at Home week co-hosted by Sasha Dugdale, and I couldn’t resist an impulse-purchase. I’ve kind of sworn off any more residential courses, which I find rather stressful for many reasons, but the idea of doing it all from the comfort and splendid isolation of my home, with two of my favourite poets, is very appealing. The topic to be worked on is how to get a collection together, something I’ve been noodling around for ages, so that sealed the deal.

I’ve also been inspired by the latest issue (the first of my subscription) of PN Review which just arrived, including a page of poems by Shane McCrae which really excited me. They’re now pinned up next to my desk for inspiration.

Blog/

Drum roll please, the essay is submitted (and other news)

End of my first year on the MA Poetry & Poetics

On Tuesday I submitted my Spring term essay (HURRAH!), and well before the deadline, so no stress, except for not being able to find anything on my desk under the various piles of articles, but they are now all filed away. (This is the module I’ve been studying, if you’re interested). I’ve sent back the four library books I still had. I’m catching up with blogging, emailing and various house and garden jobs.

It’s all been rather strange, distance-learning with very little contact with other students or tutors. I’ve never actually set foot in the University library. Bizarre! If I go back for the second year I’m going to enjoy mooching about the library, going for the odd tutorial, having the odd beer with course-mates and doing all the things I remember as being What Students Do. We shall see how things pan out. There’s no teaching in the Summer term, so that’s my academic year over, pretty much, and universities have been told they can’t offer any face to face teaching in Arts subjects anyway. But I’ve been very lucky. I’m already set up to work from home, I don’t have to worry about accommodation or jobs or a career. But it must have been a pretty awful academic year for most students.

Butcher’s Dog magazine

Another nice thing was to have a poem accepted for the next edition of Butcher’s Dog magazine. Editor Jo Clement was recently being praised on Twitter for the quality and sensitivity of her rejections. It almost made me wish I’d had one. Now that’s perverse for you! I’m a new subscriber to the Dog (see more about it on this recent post) and although I’ve submitted there before this is my first acceptance, so I’m very pleased. Poetry magazines do rely on subscribers though, and I think the way it’s described on the Butcher’s Dog website puts the case for subscribing very well:

Why Subscribe?
Pre-ordering helps keep us in press. Subscribers directly contribute toward advance printing costs and press maintenance. Buy today and you’ll support the mix of emerging and established poets we strive to publish annually.
​
How does it work?
Prices reflect the complete checkout cost. This includes postage, packing and transportation costs for the first twelve months of your subscription, which includes two magazines: Spring and Autumn.

The virtual Needlewriters

The Needlewriters, the writers’ collective which I belong to, hasn’t been able to host its quarterly readings in Lewes, but we dipped our toe in the Zoom water last night and presented our four readers online: Julia Webb (poetry), Emily Bell (prose), Karen Smith (poetry) and Jackie Wills (prose). The readings were excellent, and we were thrilled with the turnout. Although it was free, many people very kindly made donations which has enabled us to stay in the black. Even though we haven’t had any live readings in the last year, unfortunately there are fixed costs that never go away, like web hosting. So it was a success all round. Next event in June, and then in the autumn we expect to be back in the pub and able to socialise, which personally I find impossible on Zoom.

Children & poetry/

A question about ‘poechreay’

I’m expecting my granddaughter to be offered a book deal any time now. Last week she gave me a card with a question written on it, somewhat out of the blue, and I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I did what any diligent nana does, I asked the Twittersphere:

How does poechreay work tweet

I was stunned by how much it was shared and liked, to be honest. Within a couple of days it had had over 100,000 impressions and nearly 10,000 ‘engagements’. But most of all I was touched by the replies. People really took time to answer helpfully, creatively and encouragingly. Someone even said they had thought about it all night before replying. Many of the replies were addressed to Hazel by name, which was lovely. Some suggested she had already written a poem right here. And the spelling of ‘poechreay’ went down particularly well (some read it as ‘patriarchy’ which was quite funny, another said she thought it said ‘peach tree’). Some people wrote their replies as poems. If you want to read them you can see the replies here.

Hazel is of course still only five, and both she and her mum are fairly nonplussed by it all. But I’ve been thinking about compiling the replies (there have been 69 so far and they’re still trickling in) in a little book that I can give her, perhaps when she’s a little bit older and can appreciate the wonder of it. I know it’s the sort of thing that I would have been amazed at if it had happened to me, but almost certainly not at the time.

I hope I’ve managed to thank everyone who replied. It’s the sort of thing that reminds me that lovely things do still happen on Twitter, and why I’m still there after fourteen years.

Blog/

On encouraging children’s interest in writing poetry

I recently had a text from one of my stepdaughters who was passing on a question from her five-year-old: “Nana, how are poems made?”

Hmm! I tried to think very hard before responding. How to say something encouraging and likely to engage a five-year old, while still being honest? No doubt there are teachers or ex-teachers reading this who would have plenty of good suggestions. All my teaching experience has been with adults, and having been a Brownie helper for a short time I learned very quickly that I had no idea how to seriously pique the interest of a 9 year old, let alone a 5 year old. The last thing I wanted to do was to say anything that would put my granddaughter off poetry for life.

I wish I could remember what I thought about poetry when I was five. Did I love nonsense poetry, silly stories and loony rhymes? I’d hate children to think that’s all poetry is about. Is it the only way ‘into’ poetry for a five-year old, or is that just setting low expectations?

Anyway I tried to say something funny and interesting and intriguing, about looking very hard at what you see around you and playing with new words to describe things, reading aloud and enjoy words that sound the same, all that kind of well-meaning nonsense. I never got a reply, so even that was probably deemed to be over the girl’s head, who knows!

So now, having volunteered to help Live Canon with its brilliant Children’s Poetry Competition, I find myself with a whole folder of poems by 5, 6 and 7 year olds to mark. Luckily we’ve been given pointers about the kinds of things to look out for and ‘reward’, which helps me greatly in terms of where to set the bar.

It’s great fun to do: very encouraging that so many children that young are writing poems and impressive how some are already capable of tackling serious themes. I’ll try not to agonise about the responsibility, as I’m really only ‘another pair of eyes’ and won’t have to make the final decisions. I’ll be interested to see if any of my favourites make it to the winners’ list though!