‘Wake’ by Alfred Lehtinen
Love this poem … by Alfred Lehtinen, a Finnish poet who stopped by my blog and whose blog I’m now following.
Unexpected bonus
In the post today came a copy of Poetry magazine, volume 202 number 1 – yes, it’s been going for over a hundred years – gawds! The reason it was an unexpected bonus is because I cannot remember where or when I ordered it. But here it is, and with such a heritage the first adjective that comes to mind is ‘august’, although that already seems way too stuffy.
I have to say it’s a thing of beauty – first of all, for a magazine to be even called something as simple as ‘Poetry’ is pretty impressive. Then there’s the lovely size – presumably an American shape – narrower than A5 but bigger than the average paperback, perfect-bound with a proper spine. Then the cool, clean fonts and layout – reminiscent of The Rialto, but the paper stock is creamier, slightly more retro. Am I sounding a bit fetishistic?? I haven’t even mentioned the contents yet.
To be fair, it’s only just arrived so I’ve only skimmed it lightly so far – but I can see there’s a section entitled ‘A few more don’ts’ with the subtitle Ezra Pound set forth his now-famous “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” in the March 1913 issue of Poetry. In commemoration we’ve asked a few writers to update Pound’s essay for our time.
Hello?? “In the 1913 issue of Poetry ….” Just how cool is that??? Anyway, can’t wait to read it. And I’ve already spotted and enjoyed poems by Eavan Boland and Jamaal May, so I have the feeling the whole magazine is going to be a bedtime treat for some while.
Social media for writers, ‘Orgasm Management’ etc
This is not the blog post I started writing this morning – but that turned into a cod philosophical/ psychological discourse that I eventually decided wasn’t going anywhere. So I’ve saved it for another day when I might be able to better whip my thoughts into a proper shape.
Instead, more of straightforward diary entry. This week I’ve been a bit restricted by a sore leg – I’ll spare you the details but just to say I managed to strain a calf muscle a couple of weeks ago and as a consequence I’ve been limping about and avoiding walking any sort of distances. It’s definitely getting better though.
On Thursday I made it into Brighton for the last of my ‘Build your social web presence’ sessions for New Writing South (next course starting September). It’s been really interesting to work with a group of writers on this. Clearly, publishers are putting pressure on authors to share the publicity load and demonstrate their social media reach and influence. I’ve wanting for a while to pull together my interests in social media/ communications and writing/publishing and this is one of the strands that seems to be coming to fruition. I’m also talking to a large children’s publisher at the moment about social media training, and am working with a literary agent to help support their authors in building their online presence.
There’s also a strong possibility of a book on this subject, before the end of the year – I’ll keep you posted.
Something else I’m working on is an up to date list of UK poetry magazines, print and online, together with details of their Twitter & Facebook etc. Although there are a number of lists around, including the excellent Poetry LIbrary list, I’ve found that their Twitter or Facebook accounts aren’t listed, or they’re not always kept up to date – magazines tend to come and go, and I’ve often wasted time by seeking out (and sometimes submitting to) magazines that have clearly gone under but not told anyone. Anyway, it’s a bit of a mammoth task – I’ll post the first draft when it’s ready and hope you can help me by telling me of any you know to be ‘dead’ or others that I’ve haven’t heard of that ought to be included. Then if I can keep it up to date it could be a useful reference.
And last but not least, on Friday I went to see my very funny performance post friend Iona Jette perform her new one-woman show The Orgasm Management Monologue in the Brighton Fringe. I filmed it on a DSLR camera, my first attempt at such a thing and great fun to play with all the gadgetry involved. I’ll post a link to it when it’s up!
Frogmore Press 30th birthday readings
It was an intimate affair: in the round at the New Venture Theatre in Brighton yesterday evening, the first Sunday of the Brighton Festival and an unusually sunny (if not balmy) evening, with poet friends and friends of poetry, all to celebrate the 30th birthday of the Frogmore Press.
The evening brought some thrilling reading from Michaela Ridgeway, John McCullough, Maria Jastrzębska and Frogmore founder Jeremy Page. The stage set included a seductive-looking chaise longue although only John and Maria were brave enough to test it out. John, after announcing he was going to read ‘Sleeping Hermaphrodite’ (from his fabulous – and award-winning – collection The Frost Fairs) because it was a favourite of mine, took up a Greek statue pose on the chaise to read it. (BTW This was not the position you see in the photo above – that was the next poem, ‘Small, vertical pleasures”!)
Other highlights for me: Michaela’s valediction for Hugo Chavez, all the more poignant for its plentiful Spanish expletives and the imagining of his fighting talk to the very end, Maria’s many moving poems from her recently-launched collection At The Library of Memories including ‘Grandfather Clock’, and Jeremy’s reading of ‘Nuns’ by Bob Mitchell from the Frogmore Papers’ archive, which possibly got the biggest laugh of the night.
This was one of a series of events to celebrate the Frogmore Press’s birthday – others are happening at the Poetry Cafe in London and in Folkestone, where the press was founded. Details on the Frogmore blog.
Launches, celebrations, lovely poets
Three days into May and I think it’s been sunny all week – that’s about 5 or 6 days on the trot, something we haven’t had in over a year, if not two. It’s not yet warm enough to take off my ‘winter’ boots (which I now wear nine months of the year.) What on earth has happened to the weather in this country? I am starting to feel seriously SAD.
However, a few joyful happenings: I had a lovely outing to Tonbridge on Wednesday with poet friend Jo to hear Abegail Morley read at the launch of her new collection, Eva and George, from Pindrop Press. It was presented alongside a series of evocative slides featuring the artwork of George Grosz and photos from between-the-wars Berlin, and a contextual commentary between poems. There followed the longest signing queue I’ve ever seen (except perhaps at Charleston), so kudos to Abegail. I have her first collection ‘How to pour madness into a teacup’ on order and look forward to reading it. (PS Abe very kindly featured one of my poems on her blog recently The Poetry Shed …)
On Sunday the Brighton Festival will have begun and I’m mooching over to Brighton to a Frogmore Papers anniversary reading where John McCullough and Maria Jastrzębska are two of the readers, really looking forward to that…
Tonight there’s another launch in Brighton, which I can’t get to, sadly – but the super Jess Richards is at Waterstones reading from her new book Cooking with Bones – it sounds like the event’s going to be big party.
Then next Friday 10th, my VERY funny performance poet friend Iona Jette is performing her new piece, ‘The Orgasm Management Monologue‘ at the Friends Meeting House (aren’t the Quakers wonderfully liberal?) and I think I’ll be filming it for her (if the bits of equipment I need arrive in time) so I can’t laugh too hard because of risk of camera shake, or even falling over and knocking down the tripod.
On the poetry writing front, I’ve started a new ‘poem a day’ challenge which I began on May 1st, having written off my attempts in April. So let’s see where that leads – I feel like I haven’t written anything decent in weeks. But at least the sun is shining!
Mimi Khalvati on form, and a few ‘banned’ words
Saturday was our penultimate workshop with Mimi Khalvati before the summer-autumn break. (By the way I realise the title of this post could be read as a pun -‘ on form’, geddit?? Um, sorry…)
This month, several of us got pulled up for the chosen form of our poems. Classic Mimi comments often sound like rhetorical questions. “What am I supposed to do with a short line on its own like that?” “Why would you write something that’s a classic ballad in free verse?” “Couldn’t you make this more interesting?” She looks at you with an expression of such disappointment you can’t really think of an answer, other than “I don’t know! I’ve let you down again and I’m really sorry!”
Anyway, either we’re all class A masochists or we do need this kind of talking-to in order to improve. So here are a few of Mimi’s comments that I jotted down. As always, please excuse the brevity. Hope they make sense, divorced as they are from the poems under discussion.
- Be careful of words or images that work too hard and break the fabric of the poem. The reader wants her attention drawn to the poem, not the poet.
- Many lyric poems (for example about a bird, or about digging or fishing) act as metaphors for something else, so be careful of referencing that thing explicitly if it’s already implied.
- When writing in free verse you still need a rationale for your chosen stanza breaks or line length, otherwise the effect can just be ‘paragraphy’. And be open to the possibility of form – it may be that free verse isn’t doing the poem justice.
- If you have one line of a different length to the others then it will attract attention. You need a good reason to throw in a odd-length line. It needs to stand up to close inspection.
- Beware potentially archaic words – Mimi has a bee in her bonnet about beneath – apparently we never say or write it except in poetry. (Is this true, do you think?) Ditto within and for (when used to mean ‘because’.) And being IAMBs naturally both beneath and within are even more likely to lead us into temptation. O woe, thrice woe for our disappearing tongue!
Two poems by Rebecca Varley-Winter
Ah, nature. We’re very lucky in Lewes to be nestled into the South Downs, with beautiful views of rolling hills round every corner. With that in mind here’s something nice for the weekend. A lovely poem in Obsessed with Pipework called ‘Clouds’ caught my attention and I tracked down the poet, Rebecca Varley-Winter, who kindly agreed to let me reproduce ‘Clouds’ and ‘Hill’ on this blog, for your delectation. Don’t say I don’t spoil you.
Clouds
I am not godly
but when they move like this
on a hill I’ve seen daily
and walked over antlike
and, wreathing, make of its reaches
a land never travelled,
deep in mist, so softly distant
that in the apple gold light
it condenses to a myth
or figment of the ground,
shifting, departing already –
by water and earth
I bow down, I bow down.
Hill
Home being this hill,
lover’s hip,
day lengthening on it,
stretching a shape
where thought drapes,
the shade of this place –
without this hip bone
shoulderblade twist,
a grass wisp
tuned to the gold shift
on a known shape, heavy,
what would I be? Swift
the wind could pass
straight through my heart
without shelter, at last
Both ‘Clouds’ and ‘Hill’ first published in Obsessed with Pipework 62.
About Rebecca Varley-Winter:
I’ve been writing poems for ten years. ‘Clouds’ and ‘Hill’ were both inspired by a shapely hill near where I grew up on the Isle of Wight, and a lot of my poetry is rooted in that landscape. Lately I divide my time between London and Cambridge, where I’m working on a PhD on modernist poetry; I also make enthusiastic noises about music at www.forfolkssake.com. It’s good to share, so here are the names of some young poets I admire: Ollie Evans, Amy De’Ath, Helen Mort, Sarah Howe, Scott Annett, Justin Katko, Mendoza, Laura Kilbride, Holly Pester, Jessica Pujol, Nat Raha, Matthew Gregory, Kate Tempest.
George Szirtes workshop in Swindon
The sun was shining, it was a great day for a drive and even the M25 was a breeze. So my trip yesterday to Swindon was relaxing from the start. Actually I say ‘Swindon’ but the workshop was at the Richard Jefferies Museum which turned out to be a short hop from the M4, so I didn’t see anything of Swindon itself. But by the end of the day I had a clear picture of how the literary scene and poetry in particular is evidently thriving here.
There were sixteen of us in a cosy low-celiinged room, George in the comfy armchair and the rest of us fanning outwards in a kind of how-well-you-know-George pecking order, with copious amounts of tea and biscuits generously supplied by the lovely Hilda Sheehan of BlueGate Poets, our host for the day.
An interesting array of poets – I had probably come the furthest in terms of miles but many had travelled an hour or so, so clearly George Szirtes was a big draw. It was fun to get off of my usual patch, and always intriguing to ‘infiltrate’ a different poetry scene. Most exciting of course was finally meeting Josephine Corcoran, who gamely allowed me to take a snap of us on my phone (I think she came off better than me!)
The theme for the day was ‘form’ – we explored some of the elements that make up a formal poem – not specific forms (although we were asked to write a sonnet in the afternoon) but rather rhythm & metre, rhyme, length and so forth. George made the point early on that form isn’t just to do with the shape of a poem, it’s also voice – voice changes according the context, (which I guess is true of all kinds of formal writing, for example the language, the voice of a legal document versus a love letter versus a school report. In fact I started thinking about the word invoice and wondering about it.)
George talked about the frailty of language and likened the making of a formal poem to the patterns created by a skater on thin ice over a deep pond. There is something below, beneath the language, to be discovered. “Patterns can be difficult but there’s an exhilaration in executing them.” Language itself is purely a signifier, it’s not the thing itself. Rhyme, he said, is arbitrary – “language is not to be bullied into what you want – you have to listen to it…. there’s a couple dancing here but you’re not the leading partner.”
I particularly liked “most good poems are not the execution of intention but the discovery of possibilities…. with practice you develop an instinct about how you ‘fall’ into something, or how the poem moves along.” By being open to rhyme, but not forcing it, you are opening yourself up to new meanings, unexpected or surprising directions. George’s complaint about many competition entries is simply that he knows too soon where a poem is going – the poet hasn’t surprised herself – “If there’s no surprise in the poet, there’s no surprise in the poem.”
Another tip about rhyme: if you have two rhyming words you wish to use but it’s not working, try swapping the rhymes – one may be more ‘difficult’ than the other – try using the difficult one first. The simple act of a swap can achieve a different or more interesting effect.
Much of this for me felt relevant for all poetry writing, not just form or aspects of form. I think the idea of ‘being surprised’ is one of my biggest takeaways from the day. I know in myself if I decide to write in a specific form I can get bogged down with metre and rhyming words, without paying attention to the possibilities that may be opening up.
In the afternoon we had a go at writing a 14 line poem to a form introduced by George – not exactly a sonnet, but a 3-part poem: the first part featuring a room or a location where something happens. Then in part two, a shift of perspective – a turn away from the action in part one, to something happening elsewhere. We were encouraged to think in terms of camera stills. Then the final part not exactly a resolution or consequence, but a new direction suggested as a result of the first two parts. Try to improvise, said George, “listen… don’t plan it! Poetry is all hunches!”
We also discussed the reordering of lines, the cutting of early material when you might have been just ‘warming up’ (I find often this is true of blog posts… and to be honest, workshops also!) and the fact that different poets have used the same forms in very different ways – compare the iambic pentameter of Yeats, Tennyson and Gray, for example.
“Nothing is an entrapping as you think … forms are just instruments to play/use.” A day workshop like this is only ever going to be a quick skate over thin ice, but I did feel I took away some useful gems of wisdom and new insights. Can’t ask for more than that really.
The day ended with a sadly all-too-short reading by George from his latest book Bad Machine (l have serious title-envy about that one) which he admits contains much that was experimental for him. He’s a poet who has produced a vast amount of work and is still looking for new challenges and directions. Inspirational stuff.
Ty Newydd excitement & friends’ news
What’s been your experience of writers’ residential courses? I’ve heard many good things from friends who’ve done an Arvon course or similar. The idea of a few days holed up in seclusion with time and space to focus on writing does seem like a wonderful luxury.
I created my own ‘retreat’ a couple of years ago and rented a tiny beach house at Camber Sands for a few days in March. I was lucky with the weather – cold but bright and breezy days – but the place lacked a comfortable chair in which to write. I got a fair bit done, writing, reading and walking/thinking about writing. But I was a tad lonely, and it’s hard to stay motivated on your own.
Anyway I’ve finally booked onto a course and I’m feeling quite excited about it. It’s billed as a poetry ‘masterclass’ with Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke and it’s at Ty Newydd in October. (Photo above from their website). What attracted me was the fact that we had to send some poems before we got definitely accepted. I’ve no idea if that was a token gesture – maybe there were only 16 applicants anyway – but it feels like some sort of quality control, and that really appeals to me. Hopefully we won’t have the kinds of problems described by Isabel Rogers on her blog recently. If you’re going to shell out 500 quid you kind of want to know that everyone else is at least as serious and willing to participate as you are (maybe that sounds a bit pompous but hey.)
PLUS… news of poet friends – Brighton Stanza organiser Jo Grigg has tried to keep quiet about the fact that she had two poems on the National Poetry Competition long list this year (come on Jo, could you try bragging a bit more, you’re making me look bad!) and Tess Jolly hit the jackpot in a US competition – there’s gold in them thar hills! Not only that, but Hastings roving writer Antony Mair is now sending out his poems and has had work accepted by Ink, Sweat & Tears and Acumen – nice one.
PS can anyone tell me how on earth to pronounce ‘Ty Newydd’? – thanks
Submissions: this week’s yays and nays
Oh OK I might as well admit it – there are no new YAYs to report. But issue 62 of ‘Obsessed with Pipework’ arrived, including my poem ‘Calamity’ which just crept in at the back. It’s a bit of a weird one (the poem that is) and I’m grateful that Charles Johnson at ‘Obsessed’ has a keen eye for the quirky. In the magazine I spotted some nice work from a couple of people unknown to me but who I’m now tempted to seek out – more of that in another post.
Elsewhere in the mail, a nice note ‘I was interested to read your poems but not enough to offer publication’ from Poetry Wales. As usual, I look at the sorry poems squished into the SAE and wonder what milligram of merit I once imagined they contained. I’m hoping I may not be quite so ashamed of them once they are refiled and separated from the negative vibe of the no-thank-you note. Once dusted off, I may just send them out again. Or they may be destined for the ‘revisit one day’ folder.
Thank you to everyone for your lovely notes of sympathy by the way. I was really touched by messages of support from people I’ve not even met. Testimony to the power of social media – if I didn’t already believe that it’s all about people and NOT technology, I certainly would now. My mum’s funeral is planned for next week.
Meanwhile I’ve a couple of things to look forward to at least – on Thursday morning I’m leading my first workshop for New Writing South, on the subject of ‘Feel the social media fear (and do it anyway)’ – for writers who are reluctant to use social media for whatever reasons. I’m expecting some tough opposition – wish me luck!
Then on Saturday I’m attending a workshop with George Szirtes in Swindon on Saturday courtesy of BlueGate Poets. And I’m excited to be finally meeting Josephine Corcoran IRL after much lovely correspondance via this blog and various social media.