Tag: douglas dunn

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Festive reading and giving

Hazel asks how does poetry work

The concerts are over – Sunday’s Lewes Singers event was a major thrill, and it was lovely and amazing to see Claire Booker there – of all my local poet friends, none has ever been interested in coming to hear beautiful choral singing, so Claire is a real one-off!

As the year closes out I’m reminding myself all the good things – as well as the music, there’s Planet Poetry which has just has just signed off for a wee break, although we’re back in January with Peter interviewing Mimi Khalvati. I’m really looking forward to it, especially as Peter and Mimi knew each other back in the day.

On the reading front, I’m strolling at quite a leisurely pace through a novel (yes I do read them sometimes!) called Drive your plow over the bones of the dead by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. It’s quirky, and although there are a couple of (so far) unsolved murders, it’s hardly a page-turner. But however it turns out, it’s worth reading for the title alone. This book was a ‘secret Santa’ gift from my lovely friend Fiona at a recent get-together. We’ve been friends since nursery school – how precious is that?

In the post yesterday came the long-awaited new edition of The Dark Horse. The front cover somewhat dauntingly announces it’s a ‘Festschrift for Douglas Dunn – Poems, Affections and Close Readings’, teamed with ‘MacDiarmid at 100’. Despite my initial reservations I soon found myself enjoying very much the various recollections and essays about both of these (clearly eminent, but in different ways) poets. I’ve already been persuaded to order a copy of Dunn’s Elegies. And already I’ve spotted some lovely poems by Christopher Reid and Marco Fazzini, the former’s ‘Breaking or Losing’ I read to my (non-poet) husband who found it very moving. I like the way The Dark Horse is both a serious magazine and also warm and real – heavyweight contributions abound, but it’s never overly academic or esoteric.

Now, Live Canon do a huge amount for poetry. I know I’m a tad biased, as they published my pamphlet Why? And other Questions.  But even before then I was always admiring of their outreach work and their use of actors to bring live readings of classic poetry to a wider audience. During the pandemic they staged weekly readings via Zoom which attracted big audiences, with director Helen Eastman always creating such a warm and easy-going atmosphere.

As well as running regular competitions for adults, Live Canon also has an annual poetry competition for children. Considering the state of poetry in British schools (mostly non-existent, or taught to a tin-eared syllabus), opportunities such as these are crucial to help bring younger generations to a love of reading and writing poetry. Outside of the Poetry Society, I don’t know of any other organisation doing this much for children’s poetry on a national scale. You can probably guess where this is going. Live Canon are fundraising for their Children’s Poetry Competition and every little bit they can raise will help towards the costs of promoting the competition in schools, staging winners’ readings, producing the prize-winning anthology, paying judges etc. If you feel moved to give something you can so so here, where there’s more about the competition. I was also impressed with some of the comments of donors, about how it has given children the confidence to write and persevere with poetry.

So dear readers, I wish you a very Happy Christmas to you and yours, and if you can get to listen to (or better still, sing) any live carols this year I can highly recommend it! xx

 

 

 

Angst/

A literary lunch, a rejection and a Robert Frost mystery

Emerging from the fug of the common cold, what should greet me but a ‘no thanks’ notification from Ambit. It seemed like an automated/standard reply this time, so I think I have to give up on it for now. The last rejection I had from them felt more personal and encouraging.  I think three or four rejections in a row (can’t remember how many it’s been with Ambit, actually) from a mag is a fairly strong indicator that my stuff just isn’t their bag. (Unless I’ve had something published by them before, which is quite different.) So Ambit now joins the ‘probably not’ list. (If the list gets too long I may have to revise my strategy but at the moment it works fine!)

On the positive side, I had a very nice time on Tuesday at the Chelsea Arts Club where my lovely agent (for my non-fiction writing) was hosting a Christmas lunch for some of her authors. A great chance to meet other (far more successful) writers and get enthused about everything from space exploration to Norris McWhirter. Imagine my excitement to meet a fellow poet there by the name of Liz Dean. Liz told me she had a fair amount of work published a few years back, but other projects have taken her away from the poetry scene lately. We talked about magazines, submissions, pamphlets, the way forward and so forth. She made a suggestion which I found intriguing and came away thinking “Yes, I will do that in 2014…” We actually shook hands on it, so indeed I must do it! I won’t say any more now, but all will be revealed here in the fullness of time. Ha ha!

The news that Douglas Dunn has won the Queen’s Medal for poetry had me panicking that I’d not read a thing by him. Well, ‘panicking’ is probably too strong a word, but that general feeling of “oh no! here’s another famous poet I haven’t read or even heard of! what the bloody hell do I think I’m doing, noodling about writing poetry or even having the PRESUMPTION to call myself a sortofpoet when my knowledge of The Canon is so completely inadequate” – that kind of thing.

So partly in a knee-jerk reaction and partly because I needed to return Simon Armitage’s Tyrannosaurus Rex versus the Cordoroy Kid (many gems there) I went to the library and spent an hour or so with the one Dunn book they had which was The Year’s Afternoon (brilliant title poem you can read here). I took it away to read properly, and also a copy of Answering Back, an anthology of pairs of poems, one by a contemporary poet in response to one by a more established/dead one. Edited by Carol Ann Duffy. This looks really meaty and I know I’m going to enjoy it, just from looking at who is responding to who, for starters.

Arrived in the post last week was the latest edition of Rattle, from which I get my regular dose of American poetry and Poems With Titles That Are Quite Often Longer Than The Actual Poems Themselves And Every Word In The Title Is Capitalized (sic). Also by my bed is the Winter edition of Poetry Review which I’ve only skimmed through so far but noticed another enjoyable and cheeky nod to Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by woods’ – a poem by Kate Bingham called ‘Midnight’. In the last edition we had ‘Floating on Lake Windermere in a Stolen Boat’ by Sean Hewitt, a similar homage. Maybe it will be a recurring theme? Something to watch for!