Category: Blog

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Roundup – current reading, events, Poet Laureate etc

I’m not sure where the month has gone – somewhere out the door together with the gardening, the yoga and the Spring days out, all of which have been on hold these last few weeks as I grapple with an inexplicable (literal) pain the bum, recently moved into my back. The joys of ageing! I promise I will never again be unsympathetic when hearing of anyone’s backache!

Anyway, I’m now at my standing desk, so please pass your most positive vibes to my ancient body as I compose a quick round-up of a few things I HAVE been doing.

wildnights-kim-addonizio

Currently reading

Kim Addonizio‘s Wild Nights (New & Selected) (Bloodaxe) which I picked up in Cork where I heard her read. I really enjoy her style: deadpan, ironic, dreamlike, much use of the colloquial, long lines of thought that take off at tangents but take you with them, wonderful variety of form and just enough opacity to intrigue the reader rather than exclude her. There’s something about the worlds she creates and inhabits that feels both foreign and familiar, and I find myself revelling in it.

Last month Mike Bartholomew-Biggs came down to Eastbourne’s Poetry Cafe event and read from his book Poems in the Case (Shoestring), and I’m now about half-way through. It’s a kind of whodunnit, combing traditional storytelling and poetry. I’m wracking my brain to think of the term – metatextual? metafication? – for the ‘story within a story’ form. For example, even some of the blurbs on the book cover refer not to this book, but to the work of the fictional characters within.

It’s a lot of fun and I love this kind of literary mashup. There are plenty of in-jokes and familiar tropes for readers who are themselves poets – the poetry residential, the amateur poet characters, the grand egos, simmering jealousies, publishing rivalries, concerns about authenticity and plagiarism. We read the poems written by the various characters, looking within them for clues. It’s a masterpiece of ventriloquy by Mike, who manages to create poems that could credibly have been written by a variety of different people. I haven’t got to the denouement yet so I’ve no spoilers to offer!

Events

Hastings Stanza got together with the Hastings Philharmonic Chamber Choir to present an evening of poetry and music. Orchestrated (see what I did there) by our own Antony Mair, the event was hugely enjoyable. None of us were quite sure how it would pan out, mainly because it had been instigated by the choir, and it was only a couple of days before when we found out what they would be singing. So we planned our contributions as ‘stand alone’ sets, each of us taking ‘change’ as our theme but interpreting it in our own ways. As it happened, the spoken sets worked really well interspersed with the music, which itself was wide ranging and challenging – from Hildegard of Bingen to Berio. We held it at The Beacon in Hastings, a lovely, intimate venue which is much more like someone’s living room than a concert hall. Afterwards we all agreed it was a great model – I’ve often pondered how to combine poetry with classical music and never come up with anything I was happy with. So this was a revelation.

I also made it to the Brighton launch of Finished Creatures which was one big turqoise social with excellent readings and a lotta lurve for editor Jan Heritage. Keep any eye out for further editions and reading windows.

On the writing front, I haven’t much felt like extended sitting, let alone getting my head around creative writing. But I have sent out a few more sweaty envelopes of ready-I-think-but-not-yet-sent poems (or something like that). I’ve also entered three (gulp) poetry pamphlet comps. I think this is all part of my 2019 resolution to send out more.

I suppose the big poetry news this month is our new Poet Laureate. When the Poetry Society polled their members back in the autumn, I’m pretty sure I made a case for Simon Armitage, who strikes me as someone who is both a literary big gun and also accessible, down to earth and committed to community engagement, the perfect to successor to Carol Ann in other words. But I suspected I was a bit behind the times. There was a lot of talk of how it ought to be a poet of colour, or another woman, or a woman poet of colour. I’ve always found the idea of positive discrimination somewhat problematic, and I know poets of colour who do so too – so much so that I even wonder if a few of those poets whose names were in the running (according to the media) may have discounted themselves (publicly or privately) because they didn’t want to be appointed on the ‘diversity ticket’. And before anyone says ‘but XYZ poet is at least as fine a poet as Simon Armitage’ that’s not really the point – the point is the waters had already been muddied by the suggestion that XYZ ‘ought’ to get the job because there ought to be a Poet Laureate who’s not white. Surely we all welcome any Poet Laureate who is enthusiastic about the role, uses it to connect more people to poetry and bring more poetry to more people, champions and supports poets of all backgrounds and all ages. Someone who carries on the amazing work done by Carol Ann Duffy – and incidentally I looked up the Guardian piece from 2009 when she became the PL and it’s a really interesting read –  apparently she’d been in the running a decade before, but declined. I wonder if in ten years’ time there’ll be less fuss made about how we need a poet of colour as PL. It will just happen.

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New poetry magazine: Finished Creatures

Finished Creatures

I first met Jan Heritage at the house of the late and much missed Jo Grigg. Jo was the coordinator of the Brighton Stanza and to be invited to her writing ‘salons’ was a real privilege. That must have been getting on for ten years ago.

For a quite a while the idea of starting a new poetry magazine had been bubbling under for Jan, so when she put out a call for submissions late last year I was excited to see it happening. I sent her two poems, knowing full well she’s fair but firm in her critiques and wouldn’t be publishing her mates for the sake of it. So it was lovely to find I had a poem accepted, and last night was the first of two launch events. I was planning to go, until I decided this current flare-up of sciatica was only going to be made worse by three hours on a train. So instead, here I am at my standing desk blogging about the mag, and looking forward to reading others’ accounts of the event.

For a first issue, Finished Creatures has an impressive contributors roll-call. Alongside established names such as Philip Gross, Pippa Little and Paul Stevenson are many that are new to me. Poems that jumped out at me on first reading were ‘My American Child’ by Amuja Ghimire, ‘Trigonometry’ by Claire Collison, ‘from the IKEA back catalogue’ by Lisa Kelly and Caroline Hammond’s ‘Deep Water Warning.’

The production quality is high, and I have to applaud Jan’s design and layout skills… there are some very visual poems in this book, and getting the correct spacing isn’t easy. Then there’s the proofing, the ordering, the decisions about typeface, pagination and so on. Yes, there is software, but software is only as good as the human using it, and there’s no software like the human eye with its brain attached. Having laid out the Telltale TRUTHS anthology last year I can personally vouch for the number of woman-hours that went into this magazine. Jan has a background in publishing, and it shows.

The magazine came with a matching bookmark, in a beautiful envelope with old-fashioned string fastening. Classy stuff, 84 pages and well worth the £7 price.

Is it madness to start yet another poetry magazine? Only if you look at it with the eye of a business person. We all know there’s NO money in poetry but I think there’s always room for another beautiful journal. It will be interesting to see how Finished Creatures develops in terms of content, themes and (dare I say it) ongoing funding. I’m so pleased for Jan. What a triumph.

Read all about it here – and you can get a copy of the historic first issue by emailing poetry@finishedcreatures.co.uk – it’s £7 plus £1.50 postage.

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Estuary English

Estuary by Rachel Lichtenstein

It seems as if class and regional differences are very much to the fore at the moment. No surprise there I suppose, nor the increased discussion of accent as a status marker. When I was growing up my mother was at pains to correct her children’s accents so that we didn’t pick up ‘lazy’ habits, such as glottal stops instead of T at the end of a word like ‘hat’, or saying (shudder!) ‘tomorrer’ or ‘sumfingk’. By lazy of course she meant working class, particularly Cockney, and it was all tied up with her aspirations for us. Her reasoning was that Cockney-sounding females didn’t become (or marry!) doctors or teachers. Similarly, she didn’t want me to learn shorthand typing (as she had) because she felt I’d then be ‘stuck’ in secretarial jobs. But whether I learned to type or not (I didn’t), her main concern was that I should be ‘well-spoken’, because such an accent would mark me as middle class, with all the social and economic advantages she believed that would bring.

It’s funny how things change. These days communications advisers tell people in the public eye to tone down a public-school accent in order to sound ‘friendlier’ or ‘one of the people’. It’s not just accent of course – it’s also the avoidance of Latin sayings or words like ‘hence’ or ‘thus’.) Hence (oops!) the rise and rise of ‘Estuary English’. Actually it’s generally known to linguists as ‘Southeastern Regional Standard’ or ‘London Regional Standard’, since ‘Estuary English’ has been used too often as a mild slur.

This preamble is by way of introducing a wonderful book by Rachel Lichtenstein, Estuary (Penguin 2017). When I picked this up I realised right away how little I knew about the Thames Estuary, its history, communities, traffic and commerce, even its geography. Considering I grew up not so far from the Thames at Greenwich, I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t have pinpointed on a map any of the place names downriver, even the historic ones – Tilbury, Gravesend, Canvey Island. I didn’t even realise Southend was in the estuary at all, imagining it to be much further around the Essex coast. Now I’m as much of an Estuary girl as I am a Londoner, certainly by my accent (which in its unselfconscious state is a bit rough around the edges whilst still being ‘well spoken’ enough to satisfy my mum. Sometimes it slips though…) And I find the mysteries of the sea compelling, particularly when it’s as well-written as this.  (I remember devouring Adam Nicolson’s Sea Room some years ago… highly recommended.)

Lichtenstein takes us on a number of journeys, both on the water and into the region’s many communities. We learn how difficult it is to navigate the treacherous shifting sandbanks, how the area has changed and is changing still with the decline of old industries like cockling and the building of the gargantuan London Gateway container port. There are ‘more shipwrecks per square foot than anywhere else along the UK coastline […] over six hundred known wrecks in the main shipping channel alone’, and the remains of plenty more, from as far back as the Bronze Age.

The book is entrancing with its vocabulary of boats, fishing and coastal communities. At times it read like a foreign language to a landlubber like me who doesn’t know a mizzen from a Genoa (although there is a glossary to help.) But it doesn’t detract from the drama, quite the opposite. And in places it feels like poetry.

Thames estuary sea forts - credit A London Inheritance

We turned the engine off for a while and circled the fort in silence, listening to the gentle sound of the boat cutting through the water, the creaking of the shrouds, the ensign flapping at the stern, the rattle of the boom and the occasional lonely call of a seagull, and then, in the distance, the great boom of guns being tested on Foulness Island.[…] A coastguard border-control ship came towards us, moving quickly through the water. Seawater splashed up over the bow; the wash made us lurch violently from side to side. There was another big explosion over at Foulness: a great cloud of black smoke rose over the Essex coastline.  (Estuary, Chapter 26, ‘Barrow Deep’)

The above photo is from a fascinating blog about mid to late-twentieth century life in London, A London Inheritance.

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On redrafting old material, and a welcome acceptance

During my mini-retreat in Cork I dug out a number of old as-yet-unfinished or unpublished poems to see what I could breathe new life into. Re-use & recycle! Nothing’s wasted! Or is it?

Sometimes when I get out an old poem I find I’ve put enough distance between it and me, and now I’m able to see its flaws and work on it anew.

Other times I wonder if the whole poem needs to be killed off, like cutting a plant right down to an inch from the ground, letting in light and air, giving energy and space for new growth. When I re-read a poem I started years ago, if it doesn’t excite me enough to want to work on it further, I ask myself do I still want to say this? If yes, then can I go back to the first impetus – whatever it was that started me on this poem – and start again on an entirely new road?

I’ve come back from Cork with two re-worked poems I’m quite pleased with, two that I started to re-work but not yet feeling the love, and one ‘new start’ poem, still early days. Another poem is completely new, but the idea has been mulling for a while.

Meanwhile I’m very pleased to have had an acceptance from Magma, for their ‘Work’ themed issue coming up in July. I’m always banging on about there not being enough poems written about work, so of course I thought the theme was right up my Strasse – although an older version of the same poem was actually written for the Poetry News theme of ‘Hotel’ (also one of my favourite topics, so I was a bit miffed that the selector didn’t like my poem on that occasion!)

This hotel/work poem is a good example of the ‘re-use/recycle’ thing. Earliest versions from about two years ago bear no resemblance to the one that’s going into Magma. The fifth version was the one that Poetry News rejected. I then workshopped it both at Hastings Stanza and with poet friend Marion Tracy and it became more fractured and a lot darker. The title became weirder. Ian Duhig at the Garsdale Retreat last summer had some positive comments on it. I worked on it a bit more until it felt stronger and stranger, then sent it (by now, version 12) to The Poetry Review, where it was rejected. It was then in the drawer for six months until the Magma theme came up and I gave it one more outing. So persistence paid off, and by heck I was needing a confidence boost.

I hope you have similar stories to tell. Here’s to successful recycling, upcycling or whatever cycling floats your boat, so to speak.

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Back from Ireland

River Lee, Cork

The rest of my week at the Cork Poetry Festival was brilliant – I want to say that right away as a few people were worried about me after my last blog post – thank you so much for the messages of support/understanding!

I think it took me a day or two to tune into what I’ll call the shape or thread of the place I found myself in. It’s a funny thing to try to make sense of. Finding myself walking a route between venues and remembering it from the day before, thinking ‘oh yes, I noticed that shop yesterday’ and ‘ah, that’s an interesting detail I’m discovering today’. Going down to breakfast and knowing what food there is but trying something different. Getting the feel of each venue and whether to arrive 15 minutes before the start or 5. Realising I do find it hard to concentrate after 10pm and not beating myself up for missing an event if I was too tired. Starting not only to understand the cadences of Cork, and the vernacular of the event in general, but enjoying it too. It was wonderful to meet up with Grainne Tobin, down from Northern Ireland, quick to take me under her wing and a mine of knowledge, ideas and energy. And speaking of energy, I was also lucky to spend time in the company of Abigail Parry: frighteningly talented, generous, modest, funny and one of the hardcore crowd still going strong at 3am on Saturday morning.

And the poetry of course! I heard poets reading in Irish (Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Ailbhe Ni Ghearbhuigh), and in Chinese (Jidi Majia) – nothing I’ve experienced before and it felt such a privilege to be there. Both Friday and Saturday nights were corkers: Jonathan Edwards read alongside Abigail Parry, followed by Sasha Dugdale with Theo Dorgan, who stood in for Karen McCarthy Woolf. The third session that night featured Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and David Harsent who read a series of poems with no titles, and he asked people not to look at him ‘so you don’t know when the next poem is going to begin.’ It created a kind of meditative atmosphere. Saturday night was a sell-out, with Kim Addonizio (btw I think this is the coolest poet webpage photo I’ve ever seen) and Kathryn Maris proving to be an inspired pairing, followed by Leanne O’Sullivan introducing Billy Collins, former US poet laureate and such a pro – his timing and deadpan delivery were perfect, here’s an example.

I’m sorry I seem to have reduced so many fine readings to more or less a list of names. I deliberately didn’t take notes, and now almost a week later it feels like a decade ago. It was an inspirational week for me; I did some good writing while I was there, had some eye-opening conversations and felt I’d glimpsed something of the country/culture in a way that rarely happens when you’re simply a tourist.

I also want to say a huge thank you to the Munster Literature Centre, organisers of the festival, particularly Director Patrick Cotter and Administrator James O’Leary, who appeared to work non-stop and always with an air of calm. Despite a number of readers dropping out through illness, everything was so well organised and on a human-friendly scale. Recommended!

Billy Collins reading at Cork Poetry Festival
Billy Collins

 

A furtive photo taken from the Farmgate Cafe in the English Market…

 

Abigail Parry & Robin Houghton
With Abigail Parry

 

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Day 3 in Cork – turning a corner

Book haul 1 Cork

It’s day 3 and I’m settling into my Cork Poetry Festival experience. Yesterday and today I’ve spent the morning writing and reading. Afternoons I go to hear readings at the library, evenings are in the fine Cork Arts Theatre – a lovely intimate size perfect for poetry.

Highlights for me so far:

Launch event for The Well Review issue 3 on Tuesday at the Music School: a wonderfully thought-out programme that followed the ‘music’ theme of the issue. In between readings by contributors (Sasha Dugdale read Anna Akhmatova both in English and in Russian – I marvelled at the way her voice changes in accommodation) we heard music for cello and piano, by Shostakovich, Britten and Mahler. Editor Sarah Byrne made the introductions and has a manner I want to describe as ‘sweet’ but I don’t mean that in a patronising or sugary way at all. Gentle, thoughtful, informed.

US/Irish poet Thomas Dillon Redshaw reading yesterday at the library, from his collection Mortal (Brighthorse Books) and some new material too – goodness, what moving poems from the experience of losing his mother ‘in her hundredth year’. One of them, ‘Theft’, was published by the Irish Times last Saturday.

Yesterday evening I loved hearing Pat Boran, another name I hadn’t heard of but I bought a copy of his ‘pocket selected’ A Man is Only as Good…(Orange Crate Books) and have already started reading & enjoying it. We also had Jessica Traynor reading from The Quick (Dedalus Press 2018). Great presentation and some wonderful poems. A poet I have heard read before of course is Kim Moore. I’d heard most of her set before and that was a big part of my enjoyment of it. She manages to make each reading (and the links) sound fresh, making me laugh at the funny bits as if hearing them for the first time.

Meanwhile I’ve actually already worked on four ‘archive’ poems (ie one of about 200 I’ve ‘put in the drawer’ over the years) and started a new one. The new one is partly a response to Thomas Dillon Redshaw’s poems about his mother. It’s been six years since my mother died, but just ten lines written this morning and I was crying my eyes out. I would blame it on hormones but I think that’s all done with now.

I won’t deny I’ve struggled a bit since arriving in Cork – people have been so kind on Twitter but by last night I was seriously wondering what sort of dreadful negativity I was giving off in real life! I’m so grateful to Sasha Dugdale for joining me at breakfast yesterday, but then later in the day she endured my moaning on about being a Jonny-no-mates – ugh!  How embarrassing – I owe her a bunch of flowers at least.

I’ve reminded myself of a few truths: that I can’t have it both ways – I like my solitary time, I knew it would be challenge to come here not knowing anyone, I came to hear the work of poets new to me, and to be inspired. I didn’t come here to socialise, or to feel obliged to fit in with others – I am an outsider here so wishing that wasn’t the case is really a bit silly. So I’m over myself. I’m in Ireland for $£@*’s sake! I’m hearing some fantastic poetry! I’m extremely lucky!

Anyway, today’s another day entirely and from my first encounter with the famous Cork friendliness at the health club reception desk this morning (Shane! Thank you! I realise that you probably spell your name Siaorghne or something so please forgive my ignorance) to the brilliantly empty swimming pool, to the wonderful person on reception who offered me a different room, (in which hopefully I won’t be woken three times a night by the bins lorry) I feel encased in a glow of positivity and ready to turn a corner. Off to the library.

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Pre-Cork checklist

banshee magazineAlthough I’m going to miss my writer’s group this week it’s for a good reason, as I’ll be in Ireland for the Cork International Poetry Festival, which sounds rather grand, but so far my impression is that it’s going to be a chilled affair, perhaps not as intimate as Swindon but not as scary as Aldeburgh in its Snape Maltings days. Having booked for all the sessions online it was lovely (and unexpected) to receive the slightly ‘alt’ programme in the post. I’ve been googling various poets so that I’m not entirely in the dark when I go hear them read. I’ve also come across at least one ‘fringe’ or rival event on Thursday night, so perhaps there’ll be a bit of poetry gunslinging. All adding to the good energy no doubt. Anyway, you’ll be the first to hear about what goes on as I’ll certainly be writing the odd blog post… but I’ve promised myself some serious writing time each morning. The weather forecast is rain, so what better than to hole up in the warm and dry, reading fine poetry and writing, um, poetry?

Meanwhile I’ve been dipping my toe in the Irish poetry scene with Banshee, three back issues of which arrived in the post, together with a nifty tote which may well come in handy in the next few days. So far so good – and I’ve been enjoying the essays as much as the poems. I do enjoy creative non-fiction and for me it sits well with poetry, whereas I struggle to switch my attention between poetry and short stories. This hasn’t occurred to me before so it’s an interesting discovery.

A couple of things: Martyn Crucefix asked me to mention his current project Works and Days of Division – basically he is posting 29 new, original poems in which he wrestles with Brexit. The form he’s following is an old one. “The so-called vacana poems originate in the bhakti religious protest movements in 10-12th century India. Through plain language, repetition and refrain, they offer praise to the god, Siva, though they also express personal anger, puzzlement, even despair.” A thoughtful alternative to the current political “debate” and one which dwells more on what Martyn terms the “psychological fallout”.  Here’s today’s poem, ‘O Twitterstorm’.

And surfacing on on Twitter, this gem of a poem by Claire Cox was voted the Poem of the Month on Ink, Sweat & Tears: ‘The card given out at his funeral’. Lovely stuff.

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On #100rejections … (and 2 subscriptions)

The other day on Twitter I saw Penny Shutt mention #100rejections. Intrigued, I followed the hashtag and felt I’d stumbled on some sort of masochistic cult…

“Heard the outcome of a GDC scholarship that I applied for…!
Didn’t get it! All good, another ✔️ for #100rejections.”

“Holy EFF I might make #100rejections in the first month at this rate. I’ve got 11 in two days. Go me?”

“This year was the first year I seriously submitted work to literary journals. My goal: #100rejections”

Can this be true? My first thought was along the lines of ‘duh? I’ve easily got a hundred bad poems right now which I could send to a cluster of fine mags and be guaranteed rejections’. But I guess that’s not the point.

I started thinking of the high octane telesales people who talk about how great it is to get knocked back, because every rejection means you’re closer to making a sale. I can’t really see the logic in it – just feels like statistics gone nuts. But then again there’s no logic in my preferring the word ‘declined’ to ‘rejected’ when poems don’t make the cut with an editor. As someone pointed out to me recently d’you mean as in ‘your credit card has been declined’? All-righty.

Louise Tondeur helpfully pointed me in the direction of this blog post from 2016, by Kim Liao. Here’s an extract:

My ego resists mustering up the courage to submit writing to literary magazines, pitch articles, and apply for grants, residencies, and fellowships. Yet these painful processes are necessary evils if we are ever to climb out of our safe but hermetic cocoons of isolation and share our writing with the world.

[…]

Perhaps aiming for rejection, a far more attainable goal, would take some of the sting out of this ego-bruising exercise—which so often feels like an exercise in futility.

I can see how we all have to play whatever mind games it takes in order to submit our work for outside scrutiny and still retain the confidence and/or determination to keep going. But aiming for rejections feels to me like an ‘exercise in futility’ in itself. I wonder if by trying to ‘protect’ the fragile ego in this way you’re just feeding the problem by elevating the status of a rejection – increasing its significance, rather than allowing yourself to move away and on from it.

There was a good recent discussion of #100rejections on Twitter, starting with this comment by Natalie Ann Holborow (@missholborow) which struck a chord with me:

“Not sure about this #100rejections thing. Surely it’s knocking yourself back before you’ve started? For me, it means more to aim high, work hard & use rejection as a valuable way to improve so that I can be my very best next time. Rejection happens, but I don’t need to seek it.”

Perhaps aiming for 100 submissions a year (on the basis that you may get some acceptances in among the rejections) is one thing, although personally I know my creative brain goes to sleep if I turn the business of writing poetry into a numbers game. I do berate myself for not sending work out, it’s true, but I’d rather not send at all than send for the sake of achieving some numerical goal.

It’s obvious I’ve come late to the #100rejections party – Kim has written about again here, three years later, on ‘What collecting 100 rejections taught me about creative failure‘, during which time various writers and artists have run with it.

I can see how the #100rejections meme works for some people – movements create camaraderie if not community, and Kim Liao’s assertion that ‘since I’ve started aiming for rejections, not acceptances, I no longer dread submitting’ clearly holds good for many. But it’s not really my bag.

 

In other news, as a couple of magazine subscriptions come to an end I’ve just subscribed to The Moth and Stand to take their places. Neither are journals I’m familiar with, but I know them by reputation and am looking forward to seeing what they hold.

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Delighted and amazed to announce that…( just kidding)

I bet you were dead excited for me there for a second or two, weren’t you? No? Oh well…it’s that time of year again, when thousands of us come to accept that we’ve got nowhere (yet again) in the National Poetry Comp, never mind the other comps who promised to inform winners ‘by the end of February’… Whatever. I’ve revised all those poems since entering them, and now they’re far stronger and ready to find a decent home in a lovely magazine somewhere. Onwards!

Meanwhile I’ve been working up various poems for a new pamphlet which I’m actually pleased with (for now anyway – ask me again in 2 years’ time if it hasn’t found a publisher and I may feel differently…)

I’ve also updated my quarterly list of UK poetry magazine submissions windows… if you’re on the list, you should have got your copy by now. If not (or if you’re not on the list but would like to be) please drop me an email – robin at robinhoughtonpoetry dot co dot uk.

If you’ve got something ready to go there’s still time to catch these open windows –

The Stockholm Review closes tomorrow Sunday 3rd March – https://thestockholmreview.org/submissions/

Synaesthesia closes tomorrow Sunday 3rd March –http://www.synaesthesiamagazine.com/submit/

Popshot closes Monday 4th March – https://www.popshotpopshot.com/submit/

Have a grand weekend, folks!

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‘Work’ poems, getting readings (or not), Spring is coming HURRAY

Last weekend I was reading at Buzzwords Cheltenham, which happens to take place not five minutes from my brother & sister-in-law’s home, so I stayed with them and they seemed very happy to come to the reading. (My long-suffering family!) What a warm and responsive audience there was, and an impressive open mic.

My goodness, Buzzwords live up to its name – we started with a robust discussion about getting work published in magazines, and it was clear very early on that there were some very accomplished poets in the group, published, self-published and ambitious. I chatted to some very interesting people in the breaks. I find it fascinating how diverse people’s background are – coming to poetry after careers in engineering or law, or (as in the case of one lady I spoke to) running huge organisations such as NHS Trusts. It makes me wonder why there isn’t more poetry written about workplace culture, career-path politics, surviving in competitive organisations or making difficult, heartbreaking or extremely stressful decisions on a daily basis.

I’ll be hoping for some of that in the forthcoming issue of Magma which has ‘Work’ as its theme. (I’ve got a poem ‘long listed’ for it, so who knows, it may make the cut.)

Meanwhile, at readings I continue to plug my little handmade pamphlet Foot Wear. I need to make the last 10 copies, then that will be it. Until the next ‘hand made’ project!

I’ve no more readings planned now, so will have to start begging soon. If you don’t ask, you don’t get is my experience. Unless of course you’ve made it to the A or B list, usually by winning something prominent, having friends in high places, or both! BUT I  do have Cork Poetry Festival to look forward to – AND today the weather feels positively Springlike. Bring it on.