Books – Page 15 – Robin Houghton

Books/ 24/05/2013

Dear poets: publishing is a business

I’ve been emailing with a poet friend today who drew my attention to this piece in the Guardian, about Salt’s decision to stop publishing individual poetry collections and to concentrate on anthologies. I know it’s been a big topic of debate this week. But something about the way it’s been reported makes me see red.

As a fledgling poet as desperate as anyone to be published by a good quality press (if I’m being honest) I may be shooting myself in the proverbial foot here. But in my mind, publishing is a business, like any other – yes, I realise many small presses do it for love, which is perfectly possible if you have the means to do so, if you have a day job, don’t have staff or premises or bills to pay. Don’t get me wrong – I love the small presses and am eternally grateful that poetry attracts so many selfless individuals.

But if you are in the business of publishing, you need to make a profit, or at the very least, cover your costs. And to make a profit, you have to sell books. The time when poets could hand that over to their publisher to worry about has gone. A publisher does not exist to nurture new talent or to give young upcoming poets their big break. A publisher can only do that if people keep buying the books. Which, considering how many people no longer even read books, let alone buy them, and given how easy it is now to self-publish, is not surprisingly an uphill struggle.

Of course the Guardian gave the piece a particular editorial slant (big clue being in the funereal photo of Carol Ann Duffy). Perhaps I’m just not knowledgeable enough to realise the dreadful consequences of all this. But the marketer in me says that for poets to come across in this light – complaining about how poets are being denied an outlet, and what a tragedy it all is – does nothing whatsoever for the reputation of poetry, or poets, in the eyes of the general public. You know, all those people who do still buy books (except poetry books).

Surely given the economic climate we should all be thankful that Salt hasn’t folded, or even that it hasn’t abandoned poetry publishing altogether.

Rather than worrying about who’s going to publish our slim volumes we should be thinking about the real issues – how can we help regenerate interest in poetry? How do we reach out to all those people who love reading but can’t stomach poetry? How do we embrace changes in how the written or spoken word is consumed? How do we help publishers sell more books?

Come on guys, we’re in this together. If we can just be a bit less passive and a bit more proactive we might win more non-poet friends over. And then who knows what might happen.

Books/ 17/05/2013

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.

Books/ 20/01/2013

Lovely example from Ted Hughes’ letters

Letters of Ted Hughes edited by Christopher Reid

It is now 1974. At least, that’s how far I have got with Ted Hughes’ letters, through which I’m getting a stronger impression of him than I think I’ve ever got from another source. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as he valued his privacy. And in the letters, there’s a clear sense of his growing frustration at how journalists, commentators and Plath biographers were representing his life.

Weird to think that in 1974 (or thereabouts) I was slouching my way through Dr Upadhayay’s English lessons, reading ‘View of a Pig’ and not even giving a thought to who the poet was, assuming he was long dead rather than a man of forty-something very much in the land of the living and with a daughter the same age as me.

As you might expect in the book there are letters to friends, publishers, other writers and family, sometimes talking (or not talking) about the same events. From about 1971 these included letters to his children. In a particularly charming one of November 1973 Hughes wrote to his daughter Frieda at boarding school, giving her advice for an English project she’s clearly asked him about. It’s a wonderful letter, bursting with life, full of detailed advice, fun and enthusiasm. He tells her firstly to seek out a copy of PLUTARCH’S LIVES (his capitals, and underlined three times): “While telling about Antony, Plutarch tells all about Cleopatra. You must read that. It’s quite short. In the same book, there’s also a life of Julius Caesar, but in that Plutarch gives only a couple of paragraphs to Cleopatra. But you must read those 2 paragraphs.”

Then there are his tips for writing up her material as a play or screenplay: “break up the story into scenes. As many as you like. You can write the scenes as you like – as you go along – in any order – you can fit them together at the end. If you write it as a film you can add bits all over the place. Describe lilies on the Nile. Caesar shooting a hippopotamus etc.” By the time I’d finished this letter I was ready to go find ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ and write a play myself. It all sounded so brilliant.

Books/ 10/01/2013

T S Eliot shortlisted poetry collections – reviews

I confess haven’t read all the collections shortlisted for this year’s T S Eliot Prize. But I’ve trawled for informative reviews of each, in order to at least have an idea and also in anticipation of hearing all the poets read on Sunday evening at the Festival Hall. So here we go.

Sean Borodale Bee Journal (Jonathan Cape) (Bees seem to be a hot topic at the moment. Does their essential yet potentially doomed role in the ecosystem give them extra poetic power?) Giles Pitts’ review in Varsity makes me think I would enjoy this collection.

‘10th February: Dismantling the Comb’, for example, is a deeply moving account of bereavement, the poet shining light into the comb’s cells in a fruitless search for life: ‘It’s like the grain of a moon, a spoon-back of pale no one, / just the pail of an egg’s dry opal empty of hunger’.

Gillian Clarke Ice (Carcanet) – Stevie Davies in the Independent calls it ‘partly pastoral elegy, partly georgic’ and offers this assessment.

In 1947, news of the ice-girl’s end aroused in the prescient young Gillian a sense of “her china inkwell emptied of its words,/ the groove for her pen like a shallow grave”.

Julia Copus The World’s Two Smallest Humans (Faber & Faber) – reviewed in the Guardian by Kate Kellaway, who calls it a ‘remarkable collection’. She focuses in particular on the poem ‘Ghost’ which is printed in full at the end of the review, noting that the poet “avoids the first person and keeps a tight rein on emotion.”

SImon Armitage The Death of King Arthur (Faber & Faber) – a gallant Kate Kellaway tackles this tome despiteadmitting initial reluctance (“When I studied Anglo-Saxon at university, I remember complaining that whenever I wasn’t sure of a word, it turned out to mean “spear”.”) She concedes, however, that Armitage “has a miraculous ability to make the past fresh, moving and urgent, not allowing legend to create distance.” Personally I’m not sure how much I’d relish all those bloody battles, but perhaps I need to keep an open mind – if I’ve got the stomach for Julia Copus’s IVF poems then I can face anything. (For some reason, poems about pregnancy and childbirth make me queasy.)

Paul Farley The Dark Film (Picador) – despite Nicholas Pierpan’s excoriating review in Tower Poetry (is this the guy who critiqued my work both times I submitted stuff for the Poetry Society’s ‘Prescription’ service? I recognise the style!) I am interested to read this collection, if only to see if there’s more to it than Pierpan fancies. (For example, ‘Saturday Irons’ he dismisses with “Are the final two lines tongue-in-cheek, or just bathetic? I honestly can’t tell; they don’t work either way.”)

Jorie Graham P L A C E (Carcanet) – is this is the front-runner, having already won the Forward Prize? Here’s Sean O’Brien’s review in the Guardian. Funnily enough I only heard of Jorie Graham recently, when I asked poet friend Lynne about American poetry, in which she’s pretty much steeped. Must explore.

Kathleen Jamie – The Overhaul (Picador) – I was googling this to find a review and got sidetracked by a wonderful interview on the Scottish Review of Books. I like the sound of Kathleen Jamie, she comes across a bit like Don Paterson, all dry and matter-of-fact what’s-the-fuss-all-about. Must be a scottish thang. Anyway, here’s Maria Johnston’s review in the Guardian of what sounds like a fine collection.

Sharon Olds Stag’s Leap (Jonathan Cape) – my poet friend Charlotte lent me a copy of this to read a couple of months ago and there was something terrifyingly gripping about it – the story of a marriage break up in painful, masochistic detail. It gave me bad dreams – I suppose it played on my greatest nightmare, which would be to lose the love and fidelity of my husband. But here’s a wonderful video interview / profile on the PBS website where Sharon reads from the book and talks about her writing and her life. There’s a sympathy, acceptance and calmness about her that I nearly missed in the reading of Stag’s Leap.

Jacob Polley The Havocs (Picador) – so I click on the Guardian’s review of this collection and there’s a photo of a beekeeper – wtf! Anyway, Ben Wilkinson finds much to admire:

Tripping through assorted rhythms, sonnets, end-rhymed quatrains and the looping lines of its centrepiece, it is as formally vibrant as the luminous letters that adorn its cover….The Havocs may be an uneven collection that sometimes finds Polley treading water, but a handful of its poems are so moving and memorable you might just forgive him.

Deryn Rees-Jones Burying the Wren (Seren) – Carl Griffin in the Wales Arts Review suggests that this collection on ‘recollections and grief’ has its ‘fair share of poems that should have been buried with the wren’. Nevertheless he finds ‘ingenious images’ as well as ‘snatches of comedy and joy’ in her writing.

Books/ 30/12/2012

Holiday reading part 1: Ted & Sylvia

Christmas. I wish I could play up to the seasonal stereotype of the busy ‘mum’ with a house full of over-excited children and the prospect of hoards of rellies to cook for and entertain. I don’t even have to search the internet for ’10 top things to do with left over turkey’ or whatever – our Christmas Day lunch à deux will be courtesy of Cook. (The shop, I mean. We don’t actually have staff.)

Yes, there’ll be various family meals, a Boxing Day lunch excursion with my mum, an untypically high number of drinks parties to go to (yay!)… but as my husband works on Christmas Day morning, I’ve got into the habit of insisting we keep the rest of the day just to ourselves.

Which brings me to holiday reading … although I’m still a member of a book group, where we read anything from Murakami to Chatwin, I’m wondering if I might give it up. Mainly because I’d rather be reading poetry, or poetry-related stuff. There are two new poetry reading & workshopping groups which I’m going to start attending regularly in 2013, and something’s got to give. We’ll see.

By the side of my bed are various piles of books I’m currently dipping and diving through. There’s also a bookshelf, but the shelf heights are fixed, so quite a lot of things have to be laid flat. And because they stick out they often fall when I squeeze past. So it’s all a bit messy. Here are a couple of items on top of the pile:

Inspired by a post on Josephine Corcoran’s blog, I reserved a copy of The Letters of Ted Hughes (edited by Christopher Reid) from the library, and couldn’t resist also borrowing Sylvia Plath Selected Poems at the same time. I’m reading the Letters from the beginning and am just at the point where he and Sylvia are married. Fascinating to read the advice they give each other. “Don’t be take back by those rejections, but don’t send them straight out. Do as you are doing, sending out your latest. If you keep up your writing you will see, after a few weeks, where you can improve the rejected ones, or whether they are better let lie.”

I’m tempted to skip forward to the juicy bits, but on the other hand I’m enjoying all the little details of these glorious, long letters which even as a teenager are full of fun and energy ( “we now possess a gramophone which you must hear at work, and I must have your opinion on the wreck of my hair”) as well as various schemes and ideas of how he might make money, or at least enough money to allow him to write.

As for the Plath – I wasn’t steeped in Plath as some women of my generation and younger appear to have been. At our school we read Ted. There was no mention of Sylvia. I can still recite ‘Hawk Roosting’ and large chunks of other Hughes poems, but hardly read anything by Plath until a few years ago. Maybe our English teachers were disapproving of the whole Plath-Hughes debacle. Perhaps they sided with Ted. Or maybe they didn’t believe in bringing a poet’s private life into the reading of their work. I don’t know, but I do find Plath’s writing challenging and I’m enjoying the ‘Selected’ (as selected by Ted Hughes) in conjunction with the letters.

More in a later post (still to come: Heaney, Olds, Armitage & A C Grayling – yes really.)

Books/ 04/12/2012

First poetry reading group – Ní Chuilleanáin, Feaver, Wilkinson

There’s nothing quite like reading poetry to stimulate writing – something it took me many years to discover. So I was very pleased when Brighton Stanza member Miriam Patrick proposed a new monthly group devoted to reading poetry. Our first meeting was last night – we were a small but perfectly formed group!

The format is that we each bring multiple copies of a poem we’ve read and enjoyed, and we discuss. The focus is on contemporary work, although it’s fine to bring along something you really like even if was written a while ago.

For this session we looked at 3 poems – Miriam introduced us to ‘The Second Voyage’ by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, from her “Selected Poems’. Ní Chuilleanáin is a well-respected Irish poet who I confess I’d not come across. (For me, that’s the beauty of the these sessions – there’s so much poetry out there I’m completely ignorant of.) There followed much discussion of the Odyssey and whether or not, if you base a poem on myth, it’s reasonable to assume the reader knows the original story. But even for those of us not entirely au fait with Odysseus’s Second Voyage, we agreed there was some stunning language (‘…fountains / Spraying as wide as willows in empty squares, / The sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle,’)

Then we read Ben Wilkinson‘s ‘October (after Paul Verlaine)’ which was one of a pair I’d seen in the current Poetry Review and enjoyed. I’ve got a bit of a sonnet thing going at the moment and I liked the clash of registers in this poem, I know the ‘turn’ is supposed to bring a change, and although in this case it seemed a tad unsubtle, maybe that was the ironic intention, and ‘after Paul Verlaine’ was the clue:

Wouldn’t you wager it the truest season,
free of summer’s delusional passions?

and a few lines later, on the turn:

Of course those nutters and the pushovers
all go for spring and dawn

I admit I’d done a hasty search for Paul Verlaine and I wasn’t sure the info I had scraped from Wikipedia was reliable! We talked about what ‘after XYZ’ meant when we saw it as a subtitle to a poem – in the style of? As a reaction to? An ‘homage’? Anyway, homework on French Symbolist poets to be done I think.

Jo’s chosen poem was ‘Ironing’ by Vicki Feaver. Jo was impressed by the way the poet was able to convey so much about the course of a life within the ironing metaphor, going from a kind of bitterness and anger at a life the narrator clearly wasn’t happy with (‘my iron flying over sheets and towels … the flex twisting and crinking until the sheath frayed, exposing wires like nerves.’), through an intermediate period (of change? of loss? of resignation?) to happiness and love (‘an airy shape with room to push / my arms, breasts, lungs, heart into.’)

We’re going to have to spend less time on each poem if the numbers go up, but that’s OK. I think the group will evolve naturally in whatever way we want it to, and like the workshopping group it will have a different dynamic from month to month depending on who comes along.

(PS: I do feel I lack the analytical skills to take a poem apart with any real insight – possibly due to my lack of poetry training! But that’s sort of what I’m hoping to try harder at over the course of time, and learn from listening to others and indeed by reading others’ reviews.)

Books/ 06/11/2012

Where were the ‘Best of British’ poems first published?

Poet friend of mine and soon-to-be-blogger Jo Grigg mentioned she had been reading The Best British Poetry 2012 so I invited her to write about it here. It is Jo’s first guest blog post on Poetgal.

The second volume of this British version of a longstanding US anthology has now thundered through my letterbox. Hurrah! Its 70 poems are selected from the year’s UK poetry magazines.

As with any anthology, how much you enjoy them depends on how much you have in common with the editor. This year’s is Sasha Dugdale and I’m enjoying many of them so far. Along with the poems come each poet’s remarks given in the second section of the book following a brief biog. Some of these remarks are enlightening about the writing process. Others are odd, which is (oddly) reassuring. In the US version you sometimes read ‘the poem should stand on its own without me having to explain it’.

One of the reasons behind the anthology is to draw attention to poets who are not yet published in pamphlet or collection form, because the big prizes select mostly from published collections. There’s also a good showing of established poets. It demonstrates the variety within the poetry mag business, and draws attention to individual magazines.

I looked at which magazines the poems in Best British are taken from – would this represent a ‘best magazines’ list, and if so, might I investigate and then subscribe to one or two of them? Though does having a poem in here mean they are ‘better’ than the many magazines not represented? It is at least a starting point for those unable to get to the Poetry Library at London’s South Bank to spend time submerged in magazines, pamphlets and collections. Here’s my listing:

Magazine / Number of entries

10th Muse 1

13 Pages 2

Agenda 1

Ambit 2

Blackbox Manifold 1

Brand 1

Brittle Star 1

Cambridge Literary Review 2

Clinic 2

Dark Horse, The 1

Delinquent, The 2

Edinburgh Review 1

Fuselit 1

Halfcircle 1

Horizon Review 1

London Review of Books 2

Magma 4

Modern Poetry in Translation 4

New Linear Perspectives 1

New Welsh Review 2

North, The 2

PN Review 7

Poet’s Calendar, The 1

Poetry and Audience 1

Poetry London 9

Poetry Review 5

Poetry Wales 2

Rialto, The 4

Stand 2

Warwick Review, The 2

White Review, The 1

Wolf, The 1

The Best British Poetry 2012, edited by Sasha Dugdale, series edited by Roddy Lumsden, published by Salt, 2012. Cover price £9.99.

Books/ 09/10/2012

Readings, launches, and the Carmen Rollers

Readers at the Frogmore anthology launch in Lewes — As we were reading: Jeremy Page, Julia O’Brien, Robin Houghton

Lots of excitement in the past week. First of all, National Poetry Day and the launch of the Frogmore Press anthology Poems from the Old Hill on Thursday evening. It was standing room only as we’d all brought family and friends to cheer us on. It was fab to see some of my non-poet friends there, just hoping they enjoyed it and went away to tell everyone how great poetry readings are.

Big thank you to Charlotte for capturing some pics of some of us reading. We did look up occasionally, promise! Actually there’s some video footage too, which I may just post here if I can get my nerve up.

One non-poet friend got in a muddle about the date and venue and turned up a day late – but at least she went to Ieko on the High Street so in instead of us she got the lovely Catherine Smith reading from her new collection Otherwhere. Not so bad, eh? I just hope she didn’t accost Catherine and say “but I thought Robin Houghton was reading?” Tee hee.

And THEN on Sunday evening I was persuaded along to the monthly open mic event at the Baltica cafe by my stand-up performance poet friend Louise Taylor, neither of us quite knowing what to expect. But Louise being such a pro she had her material at the ready and performed two VERY funny classics of hers (the second by popular request, poor L being a tad hungover from her birthday party the night before.)

Halfway through the evening (not just poetry but also various acoustic musical acts) about a hundred people piled in, and it turned out to be none other than singing friend Polly with her entire family (including her 90-year old mother) fresh from a four-hour operatic marathon at the Duke of York’s in Brighton. A number of them formed themselves up as members of two close-harmony groups, the Carmen Rollers and the Old Spice Boys, and sang a couple of numbers. Grand entertainment. And what a nice evening – all those people turning out to perform for each other, rather than staying in and watching Downton Abbey. Love it!

Robin Houghton

Poetry

Category: Books