Category: Poems

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Readings, writing, reviews & general catchup

'Bikini' athlete mosaics at the Villa Romana del Casale, Siciiy

Finally, here I am putting my head above the parapet. It’s been a lovely full summer. Not so much for the garden, which suffered from a too-early onset of dry weather, then the nail in the coffin of the hosepipe ban. We did get a modest harvest of cucumbers, courgettes and tomatoes, although quite a few plants failed.  But plenty of fun stuff: a big family holiday, long in the planning, an extended visit from stepdaughter over from Australia that really energised me, then most recently a two week holiday a deux in Sicily. I’m a lucky woman in so many ways, I won’t bore you with the detail. Let’s just say I’m back and I have that good feeling that comes with the move into Autumn.

Readings

Eighteen hours after crawling into bed on Tuesday morning, after a day’s driving followed by a flight delay, I was at the Hurstpierpoint Festival taking part in a group poetry reading organised by poet friend Miriam Patrick. Miriam is a very talented poet who gives so much of her time to others. A number of the attendees on Tuesday were members of Miriam’s poetry reading group that she set up in the village. It was a good event – I think the room was full, and we all got a warm reception. Miriam read some engaging poems about work, with themes ranging from artist’s muse Lizzie Siddal to Aquinas’s angels dancing on a pinhead. Wendy Klein was also reading, from her pamphlet ‘Having Her Cake’. The collection tackles the subject of assisted dying, with reference to a close friend who made that choice in California, where the process is not illegal. I found it an intense and moving reading.

Meanwhile, forthcoming readings are just around the corner. Please come along if any of them are near you. (I’m also looking for more reading opps next year, so if there’s a poetry event near you that you think I could ask to read at, please let me know.)

Tuesday 7 October 7.45 – 9.30pm: Ouse Muse, Bedford

Friday 12 December 8pm: Reading Poets Cafe

Writing

I’ve been pondering why I’m so lacking in any impetus to write at the moment. After all, if the sun-drenched historic gorgeousness and energy of Sicily doesn’t inspire me, what the heck will? Actually, those fabulous mosaics at Villa Romana Casale of female bikini-clad athletes are pretty inspirational. But sometimes (usually, for me) it’s a small thing that pops out unexpectedly. Among the pile of publications and catalogues waiting for me to read when I got back was a copy of the new-look Times Literary Supplement, bigger and thicker than before and every two weeks rather than weekly. I had barely got into it when today the latest issue dropped though the letter box. A quick skim for poetry content revealed a poem by Jemma Borg called ‘Before & after the night’. (Apologies if this link takes you to a paywall.) As I read it, I felt little lights going off in my brain accompanied by the kind of ‘wish I’d written that’ feeling that can be inspirational but also saddening. Like Salieri in Amadeus, melting in the face of Mozart’s brilliance and at recognising that he himself will never be more than a reasonably good musician. Thankfully, Jemma’s poem had more of a positive than negative effect on me! So I’ve just ordered a copy of her collection Wilder and a already noodling through a few ideas.

Reviews

I’m not the greatest trumpet-blower as you know, but it would do a disservice to D A Prince and Mat Riches not to link to their wonderful reviews of The Mayday Diaries. Davina’s is on the London Grip website and Mat’s is here on Ink & Sweat & Tears. How lovely to have a book read so closely and with such insight. I’m very thankful for the time and effort both poets made. There’s another fillip for the book coming up later in the year, but more about that, er, later.

Subs windows

One job I have managed to get done this week has been the quarterly spreadsheet update of magazine submissions windows. It seems to be getting more complicated, with more journals stipulating more and more micro-guidelines, the rise of submissions fees (but also, the rise of payment for publication), also more publications making their subs windows even shorter and harder to predict. I’m wondering if the spreadsheet in its current format could be slimmed down and made more relevant. I know, I’ve talked about reviewing it before now. But I think a plan is starting to formulate.

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A finale, a winning poem and some forthcoming readings

Art atop the Lingotto building in Turin

A few hot days of summer are here, yay! We had a dip in the sea this morning at a secret location, keeping well clear of the little seal colony that was basking on the rocks, bellowing to each other now and then, probably annoyed to see humans on their beach!

Then I was just trying to stay cool indoors at my desk, clearing up emails and so on, when I realised I hadn’t blogged here for a while. So what’s been happening? Let me see.

There’s a week or so to go until the DYCP deadline, and Peter and I are going to try for some funding to help us with the Planet Poetry podcast. We’re not hopeful, but I put together an application six months ago only to miss the deadline by a couple of hours. So I’ve nothing to lose in trying now, I suppose (except for a day or two of my life going over it and changing it all of course.) We have a handful of kind supporters who donate, and we’re very grateful to them, but it’s a drop in the ocean. Without funding, I can’t see us being able to produce Planet Poetry indefinitely, alas, but we’re committed to one more series at least and then let’s see. We finished Season Four a couple of weeks ago with an unusual episode in which we interviewed each other for a change, about our own forthcoming publications. It kind of broke our own rule of not talking about our own work. But hey, after four years I think we deserve to be a bit self-indulgent. Here we were when we recorded Episode 13 of Season 4, over by the sunny Seaford beachhuts.

Peter Kenny and Robin Houghton, your Planet Poetry hosts

Although Planet Poetry is now on its holidays, we’ve already got some exciting poets lined up for October onwards when we start Season Five. One interview in the bag and a couple more on the way.

Meanwhile, a wee sonnet of mine which was published in June by Ink Sweat & Tears was voted its ‘poem of the month’ – possibly down to the fact that I petitioned my entire mailing list of poets to place their votes – although I did not ask them to vote for my poem of course! Anyway, if you’d like to read it and hear me reading it, the poem and a recording is here on the I S & T website. I was very touched indeed by the comments the poem received.

Other poetry-related stuff I’ve been up to: writing a review of a collection by Simon Alderwick for the Frogmore Papers, re-reading Ovid’s Heroides for a project I’m working on, and contacting poetry groups and Stanzas to ask if anyone will have me give a reading in early 2025, when I’m hoping my book will be out with Pindrop Press. So far I’m reading at Seaford next month and at the Poets’ Cafe Reading in March, with dates at Chichester and Eastbourne yet to be fixed. Hopefully more to come, if I’m to sell some books!

Now back to some lovely box-filling and wordcount checking. Wish me luck!

PS I took the ‘bench art’ photo in Turin, on the roof of the old Fiat factory that’s now part- shopping mall part-art gallery and part-rooftop garden where the old test track still circles.

 

 

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New poem up at Ink, Sweat & Tears

I’m very pleased that Helen Ivory chose my poem ‘I’m looking through a lattice of magnolia’ for Ink, Sweat & Tears recently. It’s from my collection which is coming out later in the year from Pindrop Press.

The poem began when Nick and I spent the night of our wedding anniversary at Gravetye Manor in Sussex: wonderful, but very expensive. Our room was named ‘Magnolia’, for the lovely old tree outside the window.

I absolutely love the way magnolia is pretty much the first tree to blossom, at a time of the year when we’re all desperate for some life and colour in nature. But being early February we were just a little too early. The surrounding gardens and landscape had that barren, wintry look.

As it happened, my sister had recently died and her funeral was to be a few days later. I think the poem was a contemplation of this strange moment of extravagance, wishfulness and ‘vanitas’.

You can read the poem here.

 

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Midsummer update: poetry projects, novel stuff, podcast…

It’s been a busy few weeks. Today started very well by my getting the Wordle in one – third time this year! If you don’t know what Wordle is then I apologise. But a ONE is pure luck. I danced around the room – Nick probably thought I’d got a book deal. Speaking of which:

How’s the novel going?

Thanks for asking! I finished the first draft in 9 weeks, and have been editing since, also writing a synopsis, researching agents and trying to come up with a title. I’m also itching to start book two. Which might end up being book one, if you see what I mean. Apparently many first books are rubbish.

I was being polite, I’m really only interested in poetry..

Oh well fair enough! A funny thing did happen the other day, I suddenly wrote four poems – a sort of sequence I suppose – out of nowhere. But I haven’t really given poetry writing a lot of headspace lately. The ‘sudden burst’ actually came after listening to an online book launch by Pindrop Press. I was enjoying poems by Lydia Harris, and was inspired enough to buy her collection, Objects of Private Devotion. I haven’t started it yet though, mainly because I’ve been ploughing though historical novels to try to gauge where mine sits. But also, I have two poetry books to review for the Frogmore Papers, plus Jill Abram‘s debut collection Forgetting My Father (Broken Sleep) waiting to be read. Patience!

Another project I’m involved with at the moment is an anthology that the Hastings Stanza is putting together, to be published in October under the Telltale Press imprint. There are four of us on the editorial “committee” and at the moment I’m busy on the typesetting. I think the standard of poems is pretty high, though I say so myself, so it’s a pleasure to work on.

Recent events I’ve attended include the 40th birthday celebration reading for the Frogmore Press, then Rachel Playforth reading at Needlewriters. Rachel has written this lovely sequence about her home town of Lewes, called ‘Twitten’…

As regards submissions I’ve still got a dozen or so poems that have been out for between nine months and a year. Talk about indigestion. I kicked a few others out the door recently. But who knows. My acceptance rate is a shadow of it former self. I think perhaps my poetry is out of fashion. Oh well! Like growing older. What can you do?

At the least the Planet Poetry podcast is on the up, according to download/listener stats. It’s hard work though. I’ve just had an exhausting month recording and editing two back-to-back episodes, both of which had technical challenges. The most recent episode is a ‘Bumper Children’s Poetry Special’ in which I talk to Rachel Piercey and Kate Wakeling. It was great fun to do! Nevertheless Peter and I are looking forward to our summer break…

Forthcoming poem alert: those lovely editors at Atrium, Holly Magill and Claire Walker, have taken a poem of mine, ‘For Sagra, at Port-Gentil on Midsummer’s Day’ to go live this Friday. “It was the closest date we could get to Midsummer’s Day!” they told me. Hurray for the longest day!

Right, now I’m off to buy a lottery ticket…

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Why I missed the TS Eliot readings, plus the good and the bad of January

Eastbourne beach in winter

Hurray! Spring is on its way! Well, the days are lengthening at least….It’s been a busy start to the year although I don’t seem to have got any poetry written. I’ve actually mostly been reading and researching a story which might turn into (whisper it) a novel – I know, I know, and me always saying I couldn’t write fiction. It may just be a nice break from poetry, something different and even energising, at least, that’s what Peter said when I mentioned it on the podcast. Whatever it is, I’m enjoying the process. If you see me please don’t ask ‘how’s the novel coming along?’ I’ll let you know when/if there’s anything to report!

I didn’t watch the TS Eliot prize readings this year, as I’m so out of love with watching readings on Zoom. I’m sad that those evenings of sitting in the auditorium at the Festival Hall, buzzing in anticipation, or milling around in the bar looking to see who’s there, are effectively gone. I know the event was held live this year, but getting in and out of London at night on a Sunday just isn’t feasible any more. If you travel by train from the South coast it’s a mad dash at the end of the night to catch the last reasonable connection. That’s if the trains are running and it’s not a replacement bus. I used to enjoy driving up, with one or two poet friends in the car. But now it would cost £27.50 just to take my car into London, plus car park charges … oh, and the fuel. I wonder if the TS Eliot Foundation would consider holding the event in … (shudder) …. the afternoon? It would mean more of us provincials in the transport-impoverished South East could get there. Pretty please.

Now, has anyone else noticed a lot of blockages lately? I speak of the poetry magazines and their submissions funnels. Sometimes the Christmas break sluices a few things through, but I’m still waiting on all the poems I was waiting on last month. The pamphlet submission I sent to Broken Sleep sank without trace, and with no encouragement to send again it’s now off my radar. Ditto Shearsman. On the other hand I’m grateful to have a poem in the next Finished Creatures, and also one on the After… website as conceived by the indefatigable Mark Antony Owen. The site features poetry inspired by another artwork, and mine is a celebration of Hockney’s wonderful exhibition at the RA a couple of years ago which I visited between lockdowns and was moved to tears. I’m not a big writer of ekphrastic poetry usually, but couldn’t help myself. What’s nice about Mark’s site also is that you get to explain a bit about the artwork and how it inspired you. It’s here if you’re interested… 

Meanwhile on the poddy Peter’s interview with Mimi Khalvati went live last week, and once I’ve finished editing it the next interview is with Mark Fiddes. Do have a listen!

Next week in Lewes, Grace Nicols and Jackie Wills are in conversation at a Lewes Live Lit event which I’m looking forward to going to. Two interesting, long-lived and accomplished poets talking about their craft. Live and in-person, no doubt with many poet friends in the audience. Hurray! I feel my blood pressure lowering just at the thought of it.

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Chaucer

chaucer

One of the highlights of my first year on the York MA in 2020 was being introduced to The House of Fame by Chaucer. I just found it such a revelation – completely original, hilarious in parts, very relevant to current ‘celebrity’ culture, and kind of bizarre. My only previous encounter with Chaucer was at school when we had to look at the General Prologue and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales. So not even the funny bits!

When I recently came across a review of a biography by Marion Turner, Chaucer, A European Life (Princeton University Press, 2019) I bought it, and found I couldn’t put it down. Rather than tell the story of his life chronologically, Turner goes for thematic chapter headings (“Great Household”, “Milky Way”, “Inn”) that are intriguing, and that explain the historical and cultural contexts vividly. I loved it.

My current project is reading The Canterbury Tales (albeit in modern English, I admit – Nevill Coghill’s translation for Penguin Classics) So far I’ve only skipped the Monk’s Tale, which looked particularly heavy going, and in fact the ‘Host’ tells us afterwards that it practically sent him to sleep with boredom, so maybe that was a good call.

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Orford Ness

Orford Ness

Some years ago now I visited Orford Ness Nature Reserve, a strange and mysterious place on the coast of Suffolk. Strange in the same way as any place with ‘Ness’ in the name, mysterious because of its history as an atomic test site and before that as a place of experimentation in radar and ballistics. Even though wildlife has reclaimed this marginal sweep of land, the area is dotted with derelict structures and unexplained features some of which are still off-limits to the visiting public.

A few months later my poem ‘Searching for the Police Tower, Orford Ness’ won the Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2014, fuelling my (long-gone) belief that I was destined to be the Next Best Thing in poetry. I had no idea at that point that a zillion poets had already ‘discovered’ Orford Ness. Those were heady days – that period many poets go through, in which you imagine yourself being snapped up by Faber and consequently winning the Forward Prize. Although I now see the folly of it, I would never laugh at anyone for having such a dream. Rejoice in each and every early or small success! Live for that moment, as it may never return!

Anyway, my point is that even your oldest, earliest successes can have a longer shelf life than you think  A few weeks ago I got an email from someone at the National Trust who had been looking for poems about Orford Ness to display in the Visitor Centre there next year, as part of some kind of festival. She’d discovered my poem on the Poetry Society website and would I mind if mine was one of the poems to be displayed. Why would I say no? It’s so nice (and unusual) to get such a request. Will anyone waiting for their ferry ride over to the Ness in 2023 bother to read my wee poem, up on the wall with plenty of others? And will it enhance the enjoyment of their visit? Will they remember (or even read) my name? Who knows. But there’s no harm in imagining it.

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Thinking about poem and book titles

daisies

How easily do poem titles come to you? How about book/pamphlet titles?

I’ve always found titles quite hard to come up with. I’ve been through all kind of exercises to try to break the back of it. I look at other people’s titles to see which ones jump out at me (or not). And I remember Carol-Ann Duffy once reading the title of a poem and exclaiming ‘Now that’s a title that gives me confidence in the poet!’

I know there have been various trends over the years: the Very Long Intriguing And/or Witty Title is still popular, (especially when it comes to competition entries) although I wonder if it’s waning. I’ve done a few of those myself but can’t help wondering if the title can end up being more interesting than the poem.

The good old basic single-word title is surely a classic. But the first line had better be AMAZING if the title is ‘Daisies’ or ‘Evening’ or whatever.

How about the first-line-as-title? I confess I quite like this arrangement and have used it a fair bit – in the sense of the title being the actual first line, so that the poem runs on from the title (rather than repeating the first line, although this is also possible of course).  But it doesn’t suit every poem.

And what about collection titles? I know we’re commonly advised to use the title of one of the poems, or use a phrase or a line from one of the poems. Sometimes Very Long Intriguing And/or Witty Titles are more memorable. When it’s come to pamphlets, I’ve always gone with the title of one of the poems, with the exception of ‘Why?’ which I wanted to call ‘Was it the Diet Coke?’ but that didn’t work out, for fear of a certain mega-company based in Atlanta coming down on us like a pantechnicon of canned drinks.

But now I’m working on a full collection, I’m coming up against two issues. The first is not having a collection title. None of the individual poem titles feel substantial enough to carry the whole book. And yet without at least a decent working title, it’s hard to refer to it and even think of it as an (almost) fully-fledged collection.

My second issue is that I have the urge to change quite a few of the poem titles, mostly because I think that will help them to ‘speak’ to each other in the context of the book. I suppose that illustrates how unwedded I am to my first choices of titles. Perhaps I will change them temporarily, to help with the ordering and also to help me have an idea of the book’s themes firmly in my mind (which will help with selling it/talking about it). And maybe the new titles will stick, maybe not.

Either way, it all feels a little seat-of-pants. I’ll let you know how I get on. And as ever, I’d love to hear how you’ve approached this, if you’ve had similar dilemmas.

PS one of my New Year’s Resolutions was to have a break from Twitter. After nearly 15 years, I find it changed beyond recognition. I haven’t cancelled my account yet, but I’m not active there at the moment.

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Not drowning but waving

Did I mention I’d signed up for some swimming lessons? I saw a poster for a six-week long (school holidays) once a week group course, at the place where I swim, and jumped in at it. It’s not that I can’t swim, but I want to swim with style. And I want to learn how to do flip turns. At the first session we split into beginners and improvers. We’re almost all of a certain age, while our young, bemused instructors tell us things like ‘children find it really easy to do this with their shoulders.’ Hmmm. Three of us have an instructor who sends us up and down lengths doing various drills while the others, with their own coach, tentatively launch themselves across widths. It feels quite hazardous – two shipping lanes with great potential for collision. I’ve only had two minor smashes, no-one hurt, although part of me always thinks rather uncharitably that the slower swimmers should look before setting off, as they have a shorter distance to cover! Anyway I’ve now invested in some prescription goggles, which should make it easier to see any impending obstacles, not to mention the instructor waving at me to GO, rather than having to yell R-O-O-O-B-I-I-N! from 25 metres away.

Before becoming self-conscious of all the things I’m doing wrong, I didn’t used to think about swimming when swimming, but I did sometimes think about poems. Some poets like to go walking. Personally I rarely get inspired when I’m out and about. And I have to say I don’t really write anything in my head while swimming, but being in the water is fraught with metaphorical energy, as are (for me and many others I suspect) swimming pools generally. I’ve had a ‘lido’ poem on the go for at least a decade, I think it’s currently out somewhere but I won’t be surprised if it comes back rejected again. Unlike ‘Lido’ by Alison McVety from her fine collection Lighthouses (Smith Doorstop) that sticks in my mind, the swimmer ‘left to plough on’ in the rain, ‘ten years gone and I’m still turning and swimming, turning and swimming’.

I’m now trying to remember various ‘not waving but drowning’ type poems, particularly one by a (currently living) poet whose brother downed… perhaps you can help me out? I think I read it in a magazine some time in the last ten years. I just did a search for ‘poem about a brother who drowned’ and it threw up an extraordinary list of results, all of the ’25+ Heartening Poems for a Deceased Brother’s Funeral’ variety. Funerals are probably the only time 99% of the population ever wants to encounter a poem, to be fair. Anyway, if I ever get to do a flip turn I’ll let you know.

Props

I’d like to give a big shout-out to Dave Bonta, poet, author and indefatigable blogger, whose longstanding blog Via Negativa I can whole heartedly recommend. I’m personally indebted to him for mentioning several of my blog posts in his weekly roundup, but more importantly for his careful curation skills – every week, he re-posts a few paragraphs from a dozen or so blogs. I’ve encountered many a new blogger/poet I’d never heard of, and many really interesting blogs thanks to Dave.

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Lighthouse launch: reading a new poem and its prequel

Tomorrow evening is the online launch of Lighthouse Journal #22 in which I have a poem called ‘Let’s pretend to go shopping together’. This poem revisits an older one entitled ‘Closure’ which first appeared in (the late lamented) Envoi in 2014 and then again in my Cinnamon pamphlet All the Relevant Gods (only £2.09 at Abe Books!)

So I was delighted when Lighthouse editor Julia Webb got in touch to say there would be a launch event, and that contributors were invited to read two poems. I hadn’t actually placed ‘Closure’ and ‘Let’s Pretend…’ side by side until just now, and it has been interesting to compare them. The earlier poem refers to the end of a brief affair between two work colleagues, one of whom had had a quadruple heart bypass. At the time of writing I didn’t consider ‘Closure’ to be nostalgic, but placed next to this new poem the wistfulness is unmistakeable. Plus, something weird happens. Actually several things.

First of all I can see much more clearly now that both poems are concerned with the superficiality of not just this relationship but possibly many of the relationships that at some point in time feel real and substantial. I’m thinking of work friendships as much as romantic ones. Another thing is how the memory massages events of the past to the point that misremembered details get re-invented. For example in this case, the name of the hotel changes from one poem to the next. ‘Closure’ ends with reference to a ‘false heart’, ‘Let’s Pretend…’ is a wholly imagined scenario in which even the existence of the first poem is questioned. What exactly was ever true or false? Does the second poem change the first one? Which version of the narrator is the more reliable?

Tune in tomorrow for all the answers (or not!) and of course, plenty of fine poems from this issue’s contributors.