Inspiration – Page 5 – Robin Houghton

audio/ 24/06/2018

Discovering poetry podcasts

I’ve come rather late to the podcast party, although my good friend Lucy has often sung their praises. Before my longish train journey north I decided to finally download a free podcast app (Castbox, which works well on my Samsung Galaxy S6) and then went on the search for some interesting things to take with me and listen to.

It’s been quite a revelation. I’ve never found it easy to read on the train, but putting on headphones and listening, cutting out all the stupid conversations or noises around me, and still able to watch the countryside going by, was perfect. And back home I find it’s a fine companion in the kitchen when cooking. For someone who rarely finds radio output of any interest, it’s amazing how I’ve taken to this.

My all-out favourite is the New Yorker Poetry podcast, in which a guest poet discusses someone else’s poem, then reads it, followed by conversation and a reading of one of their own poems. The host until last October was Paul Muldoon who I find perfectly suited to the medium. His voice is wonderful to listen to and the conversations he has with guests are fascinating. He’s always careful not to either talk down to the listener nor to exclude us. Each monthly edition lasts about half an hour and they go back to 2013 so there’s a rich archive to enjoy. So far I’ve heard Andrew Motion reading Alice Oswald, Eileen Myles reading James Schuyler and Nick Laird reading Elizabeth Bishop. One funny thing is the odd advert – presumably added automatically by the software as they sometimes pop up in the middle of a sentence (but not, so far, a poem!) To be fair I’ve only noticed one or two per episode, and they’re very brief. We’re not talking commericial-radio-time-to-make-a three-course-meal-style ad breaks.

Then there’s the Poetry magazine podcast, co-hosted by Don Share and Lindsay Garbutt or other members of the editorial team. I’ve no idea why I’ve never explored this one before. When Poetry comes through the post I love the fact that you open and and you’re straight into the poems – no editorial or anything else forming a barrier between the cover art and the inside art. But I do sometimes think I’d like some sort of commentary, background or insight into the editors’ choices. The podcast description is ‘The editors go inside the pages of Poetry, talking to poets and critics, debating the issues, and sharing their poem selections with listeners.’ It’s short (under 10 minutes), frequent (weekly) and to the point. And again – great voices and high quality production. All of which makes it a pleasure to listen to, and most importantly allows the content to shine through.

The Poetry Foundation (which publishes Poetry) has a number of related podcasts, including Poetry Off the Shelf which ‘explores the diverse world of contemporary American poetry with readings by poets, interviews with critics and short poetry documentaries.’ Lots to discover here.

There are other podcasts I haven’t yet really assessed yet but have subscribed to, such as the Scottish Poetry Library podcast which appears also to have been going for some years, each episode a conversation with an individual poet, incorporating them reading some of their work. The UK arts charity Poet in the City also puts out a podcast, albeit infrequently (two or three episodes a year) but an interesting mix of ‘performances, reflection and debate’. The Poetry Society podcast features ‘both readings by poets and the fascinating exchanges between editors of The Poetry Review and contributors, past and present, as they explore ideas and themes generated by the issue.’ One podcast I have listened to before occasionally is The Transatlantic Poetry Pondcast (sic) produced by Robert Peake, which brings together UK and US poets for live readings and debate – the live element is exciting.

There are tons more I’m sure, but I don’t want to enter overwhelm too soon. I’ll probably subscribe to loads of channels and end up just going back to a small number. I’m already getting a feel for differing production standards – sound quality for example. Just saying!

Blog/ 21/06/201821/06/2018

Notes on a poetry residential at Garsdale

I’m back from an inspirational week at the Garsdale Retreat, on a poetry residential course that deserved to be full but wasn’t – if you’ve ever done an Arvon week then I recommend you go to Garsdale for a change. Although the selfish part of me doesn’t want anyone else to discover it, I of course want it to be wildly successful. It’s run by partners Hamish and Rebecca, who realised a dream by relocating to the Yorkshire Dales (although strictly speaking they are just into Cumbria) from Hertfordshire. The Retreat has only been open a year but I predict its courses will very soon be oversubscribed. Kim Moore has been a tutor there and has blogged about it too.

On our week, just four of us had Ian Duhig to ourselves, plus a very absorbing evening reading from Hannah Lowe, food to die for, very comfortable accommodation and a gorgeous location. Lambs baaa-ed me to sleep each night and I witnessed the joy of Jackpot the bull being introduced to a field of cows. I saw my first-ever red squirrel. And one day we were even treated to the sight of a steam train passing. We were guests at a cello & piano recital and one evening did a lot of shouting and laughing over a ‘literary game’ that Hamish has clearly got very good at. Plus – oh yes! I wrote, read, thought about, listened to and discussed a lot of poetry.

Ian Duhig has an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, history, myth & legend, politics, the environment and much more. (He’s also hilariously down-to-earth.) Tapping into him was rather like releasing a fireman’s hose (nothing lewd intended in this simile!) and many times I found myself giving up trying to write down references or understand everything and just let his talk flow over me. It felt like the way you pick up bits of a foreign language by going to a country and sitting in a cafe where you overhear conversations and the background talk of a TV or radio. The tutorials with him were intense. I was already somewhat in awe. ‘The Lammas Hireling’ made a huge impression on me when I first read it, and, dear God, he’s won the National twice. Now, in one-to-ones I’m aware I can be a bit difficult at times, so I was very grateful for his forbearance & generosity. I came away challenged and felt suitably kicked up the arse.

The fragmentary way of absorbing ideas and sounds ties in pretty well with the key theme of the week, which was how ‘nothing is wasted’ – digging up fragments, interrogating them, piecing things together, enjoying the connections but also the gaps. In this spirit of this, and since so much of what happens on a course stays between those who were there, in this blog post the narrative ends here.

In what follows I share a few of the phrases and ideas that stayed with me, along with some photos I took there which I hope give a feel of the experience.

“We live in descriptions of places not places” – Wallace Stevens – I tracked this down to a letter written to Henry Church in April 1945.

Untranslateable words, eg Dustsceawung (Old English) – meaning ‘viewing or contemplating dust in the spirit of all things turning to dust. Such contemplation may loosen the grip of worldly desires.’ Ha!

Walls, windows, doors. Idea of ‘the wall which is a door’ in Theology.

‘The ear drieth words as the mouth tastes the meat’ – Book of Job

The disappearing East Coast of England.

Does complex form make you think the poem is less sincere?

“A poem is a bridge that leads to itself” – Paul Muldoon

You don’t want the reader to think “this part of your work is based on an assumption that I don’t think you’ve challenged.”

“Taking the line for a walk” – Paul Klee.

Blog/ 14/05/201814/05/2018

From Picasso to Garsdale: news roundup

Taking a leaf out of Peter Kenny’s book, here are seven items from the imaginary newsdesk at ~~Kenny~~ Houghton Towers (sorry Peter – but as Picasso said – possibly – ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’)

Picasso is as good as any place to start, having just visited the Tate Modern exhibition featuring work from a year in his life (1932). For once, a major London exhibition that wasn’t ruined by too many visitors (at least, on the day we went). There were two major takeaways for me: firstly, Picasso was prolific. Unbelievably so. For example on Christmas Day 1931 we’re told that ‘after the festivities’ he finished a painting he’d been working on for a week (a long time for him) AND THEN knocked off another big canvas. Secondly, he shot from the hip – first drafts for him were usually the finished article. That’s not to say he didn’t make changes – you can clearly see lines painted out (but often still visible). A bit like my maths teacher at school used to say – show your workings out, you can cross stuff out but don’t erase anything because it could actually be correct. I like that idea – it could actually be correct – as if Picasso didn’t mind anyone seeing what he’d originally drawn, because it allows for multiple and even valid readings. Very interesting to think about in terms of writing and workshopping, and it plays to my liking for (and experimentation with) erasures. PS the image featured here is of a Picasso print that I bought at the Tate – ‘Woman with flower writing’ – destined for the bedroom so I hope Nick will like it. The Tate has a very good framed print ordering system, with free delivery if you spend more than £50.
Two more welcome reviews/mentions of All the Relevant Gods – one by eminent lit blogger & Guardian journalist Billy Mills on Elliptical Movements, and another by Martin Malone forthcoming in The Interpreter’s House. (He tells me it was written in a lighthouse, no less).
Telltale Press launched its latest (and final) publication, the TRUTHS anthology, at a warm and well-attended event in Lewes. I know I would say this, but I think it’s a fine collection with contributions from poets both new and established. Blog post and photos here. I haven’t quite got around to putting it with a sales button on the website, but in the meantime copies may be ordered from Peter Kenny. A snip at £8 plus postage.
Needlewriters Lewes are running a special day of events on Thursday 14th June as part of the South Downs Poetry Festival – a ‘poetry surgeries’ session in the afternoon followed by an Open Mic and then our regular quarterly readings. The ‘poetry surgeries’ are actually a brilliant opportunity to pick the brains of not one but two of our finest poetry magazine editors (Jeremy Page of the Frogmore Papers and Kay Syrad of Envoi) plus fine poets Janet Sutherland and Charlotte Gann. And all for just a tenner (or £12 for the whole afternoon and evening). I was hoping to be helping with the organisation on the day but I double-booked myself – bizarrely it took me several weeks to realise this, having been involved in brainstorming the event & preparing the publicity, and THEN realising I was going to be at the Garsdale Retreat that week – DUH.
Two more poetry events on my radar – Abegail Morley is one of the organisers of the Tunbridge Wells Poetry Festival on 15th and 16th June which features various events including workshops and readings – more info here. This is also during my Garsdale week so I won’t be able to check it out but it looks very good. And before that, on May 31st in Brighton, Pighog night features Annie Freud and Pam Thompson, with Michaela Ridgway compering. Definitely looking forward to that.
A lovely thing – a friend asked if I would write a poem for her nephew, for a ‘big’ birthday. Now this friend has bought my pamphlets and knows my style, so I had no hesitation in saying yes, because I knew she wasn’t after something funny and rhyming. (Not that I couldn’t do that but… it didn’t particularly appeal.) I spent a morning with her, listening to her talking about the nephew, how their lives had intersected, looking at photos. And just when I was starting to wonder how I would tackle this she said one thing that stuck in my head. And that’s really it, isn’t it? That one thing that makes a poem, in this case one idea or image that somehow in a moment lets the receiver know what’s in the giver’s heart…. without sounding schmalzy or sentimental. I really enjoyed the project and was very relieved when my friend said she loved it.
And so in four weeks’ time I’ll be off to Garsdale – a residential with Ian Duhig and guest poet Hannah Lowe, on the subject of ‘nothing is useless’. I’m not sure if this means ‘nothing you’ve experienced in your life is useless’ or more ‘all those old drafts and poems you’re really embarrassed about may still be useful’. Either way, I can’t wait.

Angst/ 02/02/2018

Currently influenced by…Whitman, the sea & being unproductive

This is the first of a new series of posts inspired by Anthony Wilson’s fascinating ‘notebook’ posts, in which he shares phrases, thoughts, links to things that have struck him as interesting, that have got him thinking and/or writing. Anthony’s posts are full of brief, throw-em out there lines and ideas, thinking points that jab you, that surprise – very much notebook-like, sometimes almost poems in themselves. This is my version – more verbose, perhaps, but with (I hope) the same sort of flavour – a window into who and what’s currently got me thinking (or feeling) over the last month.

Walt Whitman and the sea

I’m currently learning Vaughan Williams ‘A Sea Symphony’ with one of my choirs, the words for which are taken from Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’. Somehow the combination of the words and the music have really got under my skin. I’ve sung a lot of choral works but have rarely felt the emotion of a piece as I’m singing (as opposed to making sure I come in in the right place on the right note). I think only Britten’s ‘War Requiem’ has ever affected me quite this way.

The Sea Symphony has made me want to seek out more of the poems in ‘Leaves of Grass’ and find out more about Whitman, who I admit has only ever been ‘a famous American poet’ to me. Here are the opening lines of the symphony:

Behold! the sea itself!
And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships:
See! where their white sails, bellying in the wind, speckle the green and blue!
See! thy steamers coming and going, steaming in or out of port!
See! dusky and undulating, their long pennants of smoke!

And look at this recent recording of the piece on YouTube – I challenge you not to be moved by the first three and a half minutes:

Ocean liners at the V & A

Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony was completed in 1909, and it’s funny how so many iconic pieces of music with sea themes were composed around that period (pre-first world war). The second half of the piece isn’t really about the sea at all, but Whitman’s use of it as a metaphor for life, the universe and everything.

When I read in Design Week that the Victoria & Albert Museum is launching (oh ha ha) a new exhibition on the subject of the golden age of ocean liners, it seemed perfectly timed. Ocean liners! I want to see this! Perhaps I need to organise an outing for members of the choir!

Economics for all – animated video

I won’t milk the ‘being all at sea’ metaphors here but on the subject of (AHEM) the British economy and its current prospects, I couldn’t help be drawn to this short vid in which economist Ha-Joon Chang explains why economics is for everyone. The RSA hold regular public-access talks on a wide range of subjects affecting society, civil life, culture and education. They’re all available to view online if you can’t make it to London in person.

Some of the talks have been turned into animated shorts aimed at encapsulating the main points in a succinct, graphic and often humorous way. As someone who goes bleary-eyed at the combative, points-scoring speeches of our elected ministers, this was both informative and though-provoking.

Celebrating ‘doing nothing’

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Medium, but it’s a kind of open forum for the posting of (mostly) interesting opinion pieces. It’s kind of a blog platform, in that you can open an account, complete a profile, starting posting whatever you want, gather followers and follow other people’s posts. A very clean and simple interface where words are valued at least as much as visuals, it’s mostly a platform for creative tech/future thinking/society/personal development. In my limited experience of it, it feels a little like a safe haven for the Twitter early adopters and the ensuing intelligent discussion.

A couple of pieces caught my imagination recently – ‘I am not a productive person’ by Jon Westenberg, in which he argues that “I don’t want to define myself by my level of constructive output, because the number of things I tick off a to-do list is not a proxy for a personality.” As someone who needs time to mull things over, and which to onlookers can seem like time-wasting or doing nothing (a quality that never sat happily with my corporate employers), this short article really spoke to me.

A bit of personal growth

More in the ‘self-help’ camp but containing a couple of interesting nuggets is this piece by Benjamin P Hardy – with the unpromising title of ‘How to change your life in 30 days’. Hardy talks about what often happens when you achieve success at something: the success may be down to something you’ve done that was different, or more innovative, or it involved pushing yourself, taking risks etc – but instead of carrying on with those behaviours, you start playing safe – which means avoiding taking risks, no longer innovating, staying in your comfort zone. And in effect you slip backwards – even if only in your own mind – it’s like a loss of confidence. You’re trying to maintain your position but it feels a lot harder – like treading water in the sea rather than swimming, you’re letting the sea carry you wherever it wants – hey! see what I did there? A little sea-metaphor popped into my head!

Anyway, it did make me confront a tendency I see in myself – having ‘cracked’ something, for example getting a poem into a magazine I’ve been trying for ages, I then worry about sending anything there again, in case it’s never as good as the ‘magic’ poem. Or let’s say I have some success in a competition. I then convince myself that it would be awful to enter the same competition and get nowhere, or that it would be safer to enter small competitions because then if I’d have a better chance of getting somewhere, or if got nowhere it wouldn’t matter because it was a small competition – you see how stupid the whole thing gets? And the sum total of all this is that if I’m not careful I let the stupidity dictate what I write or prevent me from just thinking about the excitement of trying new things and taking a few risks. So I hereby pledge to do less of this, and thanks Benjamin P for the kick up the backside.

Angst/ 29/12/2017

End of year thoughts, links & thank yous

This is my wrap-up post for 2017 – I’ve enjoyed other people’s posts but have been increasingly wondering whether I’ve anything else to add or anything different to say. But that of course is one of the downsides of blogging/social media and the like – the angst of wondering if is one actually saying anything of any value to anyone, or just adding to the morass of mediocrity that was once quaintly called the ‘information superhighway’.

So while the marketer in me is demanding a ‘top ten’ this or ‘best of’ that, I’d just like to highlight a few things that have caught my attention lately, plus a bit of news and some general thank yous & thoughts.

Some interesting year-end posts & debates

My favourite ‘New Year Resolutions’ post has been this from Nathaniel Tower – 10 writing resolutions actually worth keeping – I love Nathaniel’s straight talking and he’s right on the money here as ever. His ‘Juggling Writer’ is one of my favourite blogs, and his How to Write a Blog Post that Will Generate Millions of Pageviews and Thousands of Shares gave me the best laugh-out-loud moment of the year.

Allison K Williams comes up with this thoughtful piece on the Brevity blog, urging writers to congratulate themselves on the last year’s achievements, and setting realistic goals for 2018.

It was fascinating to read this recent thread on Twitter, begun by poet Phillip B Williams who asks whether social media encourages too much ‘bigging up’ of our poet friends rather than engaging in meaningful critique of the work, a question which unsurprisingly gets a very lively response.

I do like the way that people are using Twitter more often for these kinds of extended debates – proof that plenty of us are actually still willing to engage rather than throw flames.

On a thoroughly positive note, writer Annette Gendler each year creates an ‘Artists’ and Writers’ Notebook’ (let’s not get started on where I’ve placed the apostrophes here!) I’ve already printed off a copy and will be using some quiet moments over the weekend to fill it in. I like the way it focuses your thinking by asking you to list your various projects, wishes, how you’re going to prioritise and tackle them, that sort of thing – but in ways that encourage specific, rather than general answers. If like me you feel you always have things on the go but can’t follow through on everything, it’s helpful for understanding what you can do, what needs more research … and that it’s OK to shelve things and come back to them. You can download the 15-page workbook for free if you sign up Annette’s monthly newsletter.

Some thank yous

I was very touched to have been listed once more in Matthew Stewart’s end of year poetry blog round-upon Rogue Strands, together with a good range of blogs both familiar to me and not so much. I commend the list to you. I do think ‘poetry blogging’ now covers a wide spectrum, from the academic and review-led to the practice/writing technique-focused and then the more diaristic or personal like mine. I always find it fascinating how different poets approach blogging.

A recent heart-stopping moment for me was to read Rishi Dastidar’s review of a poem of mine published in The Rialto in the autumn. I’ve never had anyone publicly critique a poem in such detail, and for it to be on the Rialto blog and see it promoted across Twitter was very exciting for someone like me on the lower echelons of the poet-o-sphere. Whenever I find myself envious of ‘big name’ poets I should remember this feeling. Because as long as one is flying well below the radar of the ‘serious’ poetry world, one can bask in friendly reviews (cf Phillip Williams’s point earlier). If you hit the big time the knives are well and truly out – and the reviews get tougher to handle, not to mention the general sense of ‘you can say what you like now she’s public property’. Look at how they went for Sarah Howe when she won the T S Eliot Prize. Being down here amongst the unknowns is definitely a safe place to be!

I was going to start listing all the people who’ve helped and supported me and my writing this year, but it’s a killer of a task because there are so many I want to name and I’d be terrified of missing anyone off the list. I love you all and just hope you know who you are. I’m also as grateful as always to you (yes YOU) for reading, commenting and sharing my blog posts. Happy New Year – here’s to us all, and to a fulfilling, creative and happy 2018.

*I’m away next week, but I’ll be giving away that copy of ‘Coast to Coast to Coast’ the week after…

Blog/ 11/11/201719/11/2017

Readings, diagram poems and towards a new handmade pamphlet…

Oh dear, looks like it’s been a while since my last post – there’s been a lot going on, including a birthday (and all the stock-taking and reassessing that brings),a reading at the swish new Poetry Cafe in London, and the making of a new pamphlet. Plus the clocks have gone back, we’ve put the garden to bed and I’ve even bought my tickets for the T S Eliot prize readings in January. The year must be nearly over!

With Telltale at the new-look Poetry Cafe

The Telltale Press & Friends night at the Poetry Cafe was a real highlight of the last few weeks. I travelled up with Catherine Smith, who has been such a fantastic support both to Telltale and to me personally in my writing. Hearing her read is always a pleasure, and alongside Peter Kenny too – Peter is a creative powerhouse, and I couldn’t have done the whole Telltale thing without him. (He recently won the HappenStance Dream Poem competition – and just look at the marvellous feedback here from judge J O Morgan.) Compering the night with great élan was Sarah Barnsley, another inspirational Telltaler, and our special guest was Abigail Parry – a hugely talented poet whose first collection is coming out with Bloodaxe in the New Year – and long-awaited I think – Abby has won some very impressive prizes. She’s also one of the most modest and humble poets I’ve ever met. All this, plus a full & appreciative audience (the Poetry Cafe always seems to deliver!) made for a fantastic night.

Peter Kenny at Telltale Poets and Friends, the Poetry Cafe — Peter Kenny

Readings coming up

I’ve got some lovely poetry readings to look forward to now – this Monday I’m at Winchester Loose Muse reading alongside the mighty Sasha Dugdale. I’m grateful to organiser Sue Wrinch for inviting me – and in such great company. I’ll be practising my set this weekend!

Then next month a trip to the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool for the Coast to Coast to Coast vol 2 magazine launch, at the invitation of editor Maria Isakova Bennett. I’m not sure who else is reading at the launch but the list of contributors is a pretty exciting. And a night away in Liverpool at Christmas is going to be great fun!

Illustrators making poetry pamphlets

Coast to Coast to Coast is a hand-stitched thing of beauty. I’ve always loved handmade journals. They feel so personal, as if there’s a tactile connection with the person who made it, and I love the thought of having number 14 (or whatever) of only 50 produced.

I was at the Towner Gallery recently for the Ink, Paper & Print Fair, and came away totally enthused. I picked up two limited edition pamphlets which caught my eye – Bangheads by illustrator Ceri Amphlett and To Eden, Diagram Poems by Matthew Kay. The concept of diagram poems was new to me, and I love it – where each single word really does come loaded, the collages of old-school diagrams with unexpected labels that you feel compelled to examine. The idea of diagrams – traditionally used to express complexities in ways that are supposed to enlighten, to reveal the wisdom behind the facts – as poems, makes sense, and appropriating the diagrams as a means of exploring a relationship feels both humorous and deadly serious.

Ceri’s pamphlet is, she admitted, illustration-driven, and she doesn’t claim to be a poet, nevertheless I liked the accompanying short poems a lot.

All this got me thinking again about hand-making a pamphlet, just in limited numbers, using some of the poems I’ve had no luck in getting published, or versions of them. I love the design aspect of pamphlets and being involved in every aspect of the visual presentation.

The themed sequence I’ve had knocking around for a few years now is the ‘Business Class’ series of poems based on the years I spent in the sport shoe industry. I always bring a couple of them out at readings, and they’re often the ones people comment on, or seem to remember. Most of the poems have been published individually in various journals, but I’ve given up on finding a publisher for them as a pamphlet. The idea once felt original and unusual but maybe no longer – I recently heard of another poet bringing out a pamphlet based on his workplace experiences called – you guessed it – ‘Business Class’.

But I still think the sequence has legs, so I changed the emphasis slightly and decided to focus on the shoe theme. I then realised I’ve actually had a bit of a life in shoes! In this way a short collection started to take shape. I’ve combined the poems together with some relevant grainy photos, and produced a semi-autobiographical sequence called Foot Wear.

This post is already quite long so I’ll talk more about Foot Wear, and my adventures in book-binding, in another post…

Blog/ 12/08/201713/08/2017

Four magazines, five poets to watch

A slew of poetry magazines have been arriving the last couple of weeks and I’ve enjoyed ‘discovering’ work by new names. Well, new to me anyway – turns out they’re all accomplished poets, but that doesn’t surprise me. I thought I’d share with you a little about each of the magazines, and a contributor or two to each that caught my attention.

Brittle Star has to get the prize for the most interesting covers. They invariably span front and back, with no writing to spoil the image other than on the spine:

The magazine is run by Martin Parker and Jacqueline Gabbitas on the proverbial shoestring – and for a little mag they are remarkably innovative in finding ways to keep going. Their latest fundraising initiative is to invite readers to support the magazine via Patreon. As they say on their website, “If only 5% of people who follow us on social media donated $2 (about £1.60) a month we’d be half way to hitting our first goal of £750!” Brittle Star is always well produced and they even hold launch readings for every edition. It’s all pretty impressive. Got to be worth $1 or two a month.

Poems that jumped out at me were those by Jack Houston and Barbara Cumbers. Jack’s ‘Separate Towers’ had just the right amount of bonkers humour and painful poignancy to float my boat, with the building of a model cathedral in lolly sticks serving as a metaphor for relationship issues :

Worms may well turn in the earth but we’ll be adhered
to this task until this entire tube of UHU’s been used.

Barbara Cumbers paints a mesmerising picture of a young girl’s quest for control (revenge? stubbornness?) by writing smaller and smaller.

[…] Once, a teacher set me lines –

I had to write “I must writer bigger” fifty times.
I wrote them on the back of a postage stamp. (‘Small’)

Next, the mighty Magma, with its ten-strong editorial board, administrator and freelance staff, immaculately produced and also with a distinctive look, in particular its square format. I have a love-hate relationship with Magma, partly because I’ve had too many submissions rejected (!), but also because I’ve never been able to get the feel for what the magazine is looking for, or what it’s about – its heart, if you like. It may be down to the fact that the editors rotate and change from one edition to the next.

Magma 68 is on the theme of ‘Margins’, so it’s not surprising that we get a good number of poems on the heartfelt/hardcore spectrum – from protest and despair to death, slaughter and eco-apocalypse. I really warmed to Ellie Danak‘s ‘Dear Lab-Man’, a mysterious love-letter with ‘Fatal Attraction’ written all over it –

[…]
There’s no excuse for my welling up,
strangling all that tubing to spell out LOVE.
My lips can distil blood. Meet me
in the fume cupboard tonight.

But if it’s strangeness you’re after then Obsessed with Pipework is self-proclaimed ‘poetry with strangeness and charm’. It’s another double spread cover this time featuring artwork by Graham Higgins:

Obsessed with Pipework is edited by Charles Johnson, and although my poems in this issue sadly lost most of their formatting, I can’t hold it against Charles as he’s been a fine supporter of my work and I owe him one. And besides the poems are all the more strange for it.

I particularly enjoyed three poems by Sue Kindon, of whom I know nothing (and her ‘biog’ in the magazine was sketchy, you might say – although it had strangeness and charm). We have a poem about blockages (actual and metaphorical), while another features a woman on a cruise, on the verge of betraying her husband with the moon –

[…]
I sense that rare blue-eyed look
you keep in reserve, to anchor me. (‘Anniversary on Board’)

I liked the subverting of nice middle-class themes (‘I’ve chosen something marble-veined / and a safe brie’) with undertones of something much harder-hitting (‘Sacred places are sawn off […] Old gods wander the desert of dementia’).

And finally Under the Radar, another well-respected and long-running magazine, published by Nine Arches Press and edited by Jane Commane. This edition features a review of The Swell, Jessica Mookherjee’s pamphlet published by Telltale Press last autumn. My eye was also caught by a poem by Julian Dobson, partly because I’d seen his work in Magma and had nearly chosen to mention him then. So, a name I hadn’t met before and then I see it in two magazines. Like me he must have done some serious submitting around six to nine months ago.

In choosing ‘Meet the neighbour’ I’m starting to wonder why I’m drawn to these on-the-face-of-it memoir poems into which you can read as much menace as you like. I once told a poet friend how much I’d enjoyed a poem of hers in ‘The Rialto’ – ‘…it gave me the creeps! Really menacing!’ only to have her reply that it was supposed to be positive and comforting – hmm! So here we have Julian Dobson’s ‘rumple-haired man from the basement flat’ who ‘had a way of vanishing before Dad got home’, while Dad has

No truck with stories, a reddening head
bursting with hellfire and helplessness.
We found crevices and corners
in the echoing house.

Nonetheless, I find myself worrying for him, and enjoying the not-knowing of the poem.

So there we are – another five poets I want to keep an eye out for and read more of.

I should add that these were contributor copies, apart from Under the Radar which was a a publisher copy. I do subscribe to magazines but I limit it to one or two mags per year, on a rotating basis. I know it’s expensive to support all the myriad poetry mags out there, and this is my tactic to do so in an affordable manner. It’s not only interesting to keep an eye on new writing, but it also informs my submissions – where to send, which magazine would a poem suit, that kind of thing.

Blog/ 04/06/2017

Recipe for Water

Yes that probably sounds familiar, being the title of the 2009 collection by Gillian Clarke. I’ve been thinking a lot about water lately, and flow – great rivers, the mouths of rivers and the place where they become sea. Just riding the ideas at the moment and not rushing it. As Clarke puts it, ‘The sea turns its pages, speaking in tongues’ (‘First Words’)

I’ve been thumbing through some lovely watery poems. This, from Lynne Hjelmgaard’s A Boat Called Annalise: ‘We are in the Ocean’s mouth, / territory unknown’ (‘Night Watch’). Or this, by Philip Gross:

Scroll up the chattering, brief brilliances
and long abradings, sweeping up of everything

that we let slip, the murk-dynamics
that we might mistake for memory.

(‘Reeling in the River’, from A Fold in the River.)

It’s been just over a year since we moved into our flat which is only a few minutes’ walk from the sea (well, not an ocean but the English Channel), and it’s starting to seep into me. Last week we took a trip to the other end of Great Britain, the northernmost tip of Scotland, and stayed in a room that seemed to teeter over the beach and watch over the North Sea beyond.

On the last day we managed to fit in a trip to Loch Ness. But a highlight for me was crossing the Cromarty Firth on a ferry with only room for one car (ours). Like a sort of river taxi! The river here is full of decommissioned oil rigs which have a sort of bleak beauty.

Blog/ 19/04/2017

What’s inspired me recently, and a writing/submissions update

I’m not spending a great deal of time at the computer at the moment – can only blame the marvellous good weather! I’m in admiration of those taking part in NaPoWriMo this month, such as Jayne Stanton. I do sometimes do the ‘start a poem a day’ thing, although I tend to do it alone and during months when there’s nothing going on to distract me!

Having said that, I’ve been writing and submitting. Some new work is emerging that feels fresh, and I’m enjoying the process. I think I’d been hitting my head against so many old poems for too long, and making a conscious decision to set them aside feels liberating. So, I’ve got six poems forthcoming in the summer across four publications, plus there are currently 14 more out to magazines and a couple of comps, and 4 pamphlet submissions. If nothing comes of the latter then I think I have enough new material & project ideas coming through to abandon this particular ‘pamphlet.’ I’m using quote marks because it’s possibly not one pamphlet, but the seeds of several. Or just the start of a collection. We shall see.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting inspiration from a number of sources. I’m not a huge reader of novels, even though I used to belong to a book group and would do so again. But I can’t resist a good recommendation from a trusted source, and two I followed up recently were The Warden by Anthony Trollope and The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. Poet friend Antony had suggested The Warden as an introduction to Trollope, and I wondered why I’d never read any before. Surprisingly modern themes, sly humour, and copious use of the much-in-vogue present tense. Loved it. And Doris Lessing – a real revelation. I raced through this book, a story and characters that really puts you through the wringer. So agonising it would feel trite to call it ‘tragic’. At times I thought I was reading Steinbeck. Where the heck have I been?

Then there are the websites that regularly get my mind jumping up and down. In a recent Brain Pickings, Maria Popova introduced me to Anne Lamott’s Hallelujah Anyway – “on reclaiming mercy and forgiveness as the root of self-respect in a vengeful world”. It’s the kind of fascinating read that I stumble on first thing and then can’t get out of bed till I’ve finished it.

And then there’s Dan Blank, a big thinker whose weekly email newsletter is probably the only one I actual read right through and have done so for ten years or more. His new book Be the Gateway is currently on my Kindle reader and giving me plenty to think about as regards writing ‘goals’ and refocusing on connecting with readers rather than ticking off ‘achievements’. A lesson I need to learn, but will I?

Other sources of ideas this month came from the Antiques Roadshow on TV, some NHS information booklets and the Wikipedia entry for Eddie Van Halen. Betcha can’t wait!

spring montage — Let’s go out and enjoy Spring!

Blog/ 13/02/201713/02/2017

Both sides now

A smooth drive to London yesterday for Anne-Marie Fyfe’s newest workshop, on the theme of clouds. As in ‘I wandered lonely as…’, or ‘from both sides now..’ And yes, Joni Mitchell did make an appearance, as did Debussy, Django Reinhardt, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, John Lennon, The Wizard of Oz and a range of Surrealist art, amongst others.

I’ve said this before, but I really do think these workshops are the best I’ve experienced. With so much stimulation – verbal, visual, musical – the sheer pace of it (although it never feels hurried), and the continuous nature of the exercises, you have no time to lose focus. It doesn’t matter if something doesn’t ‘click’ because there’s another question or exercise coming right up. Nothing seems to distract, not even the relentless traffic and sirens of the Old Brompton Road. You are immersed, coming up for air after two hours and wondering where the time went. Anne-Marie plans these workshops well in advance. Not only are there plenty of materials and handouts but it’s obvious that a huge amount of work and thought has gone into the workshop design.

In the late 1990s I visited the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe and became a fan – I couldn’t afford actual prints but came away with frameable posters of three of her paintings, my favourite of which is one of a series called ‘Sky above Clouds’ (pictured above). Last year the Tate Modern in London ran a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition (the first in the UK, I think) – I was excited to see on display another Sky above Clouds, and realised I’d forgotten how BIG the canvases are.

I thought of this painting during the workshop, and was also prompted to remember how, as a child, I thought of clouds as 2D objects, decorating the sky, just as O’Keeffe depicts them, which perhaps explains why her painting appeals so much to me. I think I was well into adulthood before I had any appreciation of the scale of clouds, of their 3D shapes, of the distances involved. Seeing them from planes was a shock – how clouds can gather in huge towering columns unseen from below, and how the highest clouds are still way above you even when you’re above the cumulus.

Most of the participants came up with new poems or the beginnings of new writing. I was more moved to get out an old poem which has been on the back burner since 2013 – something in the workshop triggered new ideas about how to revive it. That’s not to say I didn’t also come away with fresh ideas, I certainly did – and twelve pages of notes.

Coffee-House Poetry Classes at the Troubadour on Sunday afternoons – great value for money and highly recommended.

Category: Inspiration