I recently took advantage of a World of Books Buy 3 Get One Free offer on books under a fiver, and today they arrived – Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, which sounded intriguing, two books by historical fiction writers (research for the blockbuster I’m writing!) and The Beauty, a poetry collection by Jane Hirshfield. Although I’d heard of her, I confess I’d never read anything by her. So when Peter Kenny talked about her work on Planet Poetry it prompted me to find out more. Just looking at the poem titles I’m already sold (eg “A Well Runs Out Of Thirst”).
One book I read recently and enjoyed immensely was Liz Berry’s The Home Child, a ‘novel in verse’, which is actually launched in two days’ time. I got hold of an early copy in order to prepare for interviewing Liz on Planet Poetry. We had a lovely chat about it yesterday, and the episode will go out some time in late March or early April.
I sometimes wonder if listeners think that Peter and I are awash with complimentary copies of poetry books thanks to all the poets we’ve interviewed. Well I’d like to crush that idea once and for all – I think this is the first book I’ve been sent from the publisher. I generally go out and buy a poet’s books, if I can’t get them in the local library.
I love public libraries and support them as much as I can. But the poetry offering is always minimal, and don’t get me started on trying to find novels by subject matter. Everything is lumped together as ‘fiction’, and if you don’t have a name of an author or a particular book in mind, you’re just whistling in the wind. Publishers have a huge array of genres and subcategories for adult fiction such as historical thriller, psychological thriller, domestic noir, procedural, historical crime, cosy mystery (one I learned about recently!), chick lit, contemporary, etc etc. But how to search for a cosy mystery or a ‘domestic noir’ novel when the only shelf categories are ‘fiction’ or ‘crime’? Answers on an index card please. And another thing… when you do find an author of commercial fiction that you like, I don’t know, let’s say Lee Child… you find that although he’s written about 549 books, and the library has at least three copies of each, they are all permanently ‘on loan’ and not only that, when you try reserving one of them you find you’re 11th in the queue, and since people often hang on to library books for months, waiting to hear when your turn has come is rather like waiting for a rejection from one of our august poetry magazines. Anyway, I love the library service, honestly!
I’m just taking a moment to post what will probably be my last of 2018, and I have to be careful not to descend into a sort of ’round robin’ where I refer to myself in the third person, blurt out a list of frightening achievements and try to put a positive spin on any chronic ailments with a sad emoji, etc etc. Actually I have nothing new to declare on the chronic ailments front, so HURRAH for that. Frightening achievements? Hmmm… let me see. I think that’s also a no. BUT this was the year…
… a ‘Black Friday’ deal had me. Then after receiving my first book, Raymond Antrobus’s The Perseverance I was on a train to a friends’ reunion and realised I’d forgotten the ‘wrapped pre-loved paperback’ for the Secret Santa. So I wrapped Ray’s half-read book in a page from the Guardian and sacrificed it. The recipient seemed delighted with the book though – my consolation, and a reminder to give poetry more often to people who don’t buy poetry books.
I went to the Forward Prize readings
…having heard they were ‘different’ to the T S Eliots, plus a poet friend pulled together a few of us to be fangirls and boys for amazingly talented and unbelievably modest Abigail Parry. She didn’t win, but I loved the readings, especially Danez Smith who read this poem as a spellbinding encore.
I didn’t book to go to the T S Eliot Prize Readings in January 2019
This is the first one I’ve missed in (I think) five or six years. But having been to the Forwards, and bearing in mind the difficulties of getting to the South Bank on a Sunday in January, I thought I’d give it a miss. In previous years the experience has been enhanced for me by attending Katy Evans Bush‘s workshop the day before the readings, in which the shortlisted books are discussed. I’m not sure if she’s running it this year, but if she I highly recommend it.
Telltale Press launched its first and last anthology
A huge relief to get this ‘out the door’, and almost as exciting as actual publication was being shortlisted for the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition (oh that was last year, so excuse me for STILL milking it, he he.)
… OK, she was definitely in the recording. My little voice might not make the cut at all – but hey! I was there 🙂
Also …I went on a lovely Garsdale Retreat week with Ian Duhig, and blogged (blagged?) my way through the charming Swindon Poetry Festival, managed (just about) a ‘dry’ November, perfected my front crawl in the tiny local swimming pool, discovered the joy of yoga, sang in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral and experienced my first live ballet at the Royal Opera House no less. All this and a fantastic summer in the garden. Life is good.
Although I’ve been writing poetry, I haven’t been sending poems out as much as previous years, which means I’ve only had a handful of poems published. But the first collection is starting to have a shape, and I have a good feeling about it (you have to, don’t you?) AND a good poet friend has got me into freelance features writing again, so there are things coming up on that front in 2019.
Thank you so much for reading, commenting on and supporting this blog. I hope the season of goodwill is good for you, wherever and however you spend it. Here’s to whatever you look forward to.
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.”
Next week I’m off to the Garsdale Retreat for a week tutored by Ian Duhig and guest reader Hannah Lowe. I’m excited by the prospect of a week just focusing on poetry, away from my usual surroundings. The last time I did a residential I was quite traumatised by it, and thought I’d never go on one again, even though some good poems came of it (at least two of which subsequently published). It also gave me the impetus to start Telltale Press, and from there to my first pamphlet and beyond. The negatives were the sheer number of people on the course, the lack of free reading and fresh air time and the kitchen duties. But that was nearly five years ago and the Garsdale Retreat is a very different prospect indeed. There are still places available, so why not come and join me? Once you’ve explored the website and read the course description you might well be tempted.
Swindon Poetry
Another date in my diary is the Swindon Poetry Festival on 4th – 8th October, where I’ve been invited by the lovely Hilda Sheehan to be the festival blogger and may even be doing a cheeky reading. I missed this the last two years for various reasons and am looking forward to the warm, friendly and somewhat alternative atmosphere that Hilda cultivates down Swindon way. For some reason I don’t feel this Festival gets the amount of social media love it deserves, but it goes from strength to strength every year. The full programme will be up soon and I hear there will be a shedload of fine poets and engaging sessions, it’s also great value. Do come!
Writing vs bathroom
At home we’ve been having weeks of new bathroom installation. I never thought a bathroom could be more trouble or more complex than a new kitchen, but after starting the work on May 1st they’re only now (as I type) on the last job, leaving us to finish the painting. I don’t blame the workmen since a key issue was to do with me changing my mind about having a wall-hung loo (since you ask… it just felt …umm… worryingly unstable!) But two weeks having to flush with a bucket and many days of ear-splitting noise wasn’t conducive to creative writing. This may sound like middle-class hand-wringing but let me remind you that toilet matters are right there at the bottom (sic) of Maslow’s pyramid. Plus I was worried we’d never be friends again with the neighbours upstairs.
On entering a big comp
Anyway, enough of all that. I did manage to scrape together a poem to send to the Bridport this year. I’ve talked before about how I decide whether to enter a competition – the various things to consider and so on. Everyone has different reasons I guess, but the first hurdle I usually fall at is ‘do I have anything?’. I don’t really see the point of paying £9 to enter a big comp unless I think my entry has a fighting chance of winning. (Note: this is not the same as saying you expect your poem to win). I know that’s not the received wisdom of seasoned compers, many of whom play the numbers game and have a budget for it. And I know there’s a huge amount of luck involved. But there’s no harm in developing a feel for which poems should be sent to mags and which are worth entering into a comp, especially if you don’t have a ton of good poems coming out of your ears. Discuss!
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.
Well the submissions list was popular… I hope you managed to get some poems out before some of the deadlines. I’ve got a few things out now. Although sorry to report that YET AGAIN I didn’t win the National. Oh well! I’m hoping to be at the award ceremony on Wednesday (if my RSVP wasn’t too late) so at least I’ll experience the vicarious excitement of it all.
Off the back of my pamphlet launch I’ve got a few readings sorted. The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society had a last minute cancellation so they slotted me in to read last week alongside Canadian poet Miranda Pearson. I really enjoyed the evening – good venue, good vibe, good size audience and wonderfully attentive – and I got the biggest laugh I’ve ever had for the pamphlet’s title poem. I know that shouldn’t be the criterion for a successful poetry reading, but it’s always fun when people laugh – maybe I should have set my sights on standup. Er, but then again, probably not!
With Miranda Pearson at the Kent & Sussex in Tunbridge Wells
After Easter I’ll be reading in Lewes at the Needlewriters, alongside Nicholas Royle and Jonathan Totman. I’m a member of the Needlewriters collective so it’s home turf for me – which actually makes it a bit nerve-wracking. Not to mention my worrying about a number of poets in the audience having heard all my stuff before. I just have to remind myself that people are unlikely to remember, so I must treat it all as fresh. Never apologise!
Guess who’s going to Garsdale
Now for the big treat – I’ve booked in to a residential week at the Garsdale Retreat in June, with Ian Duhig and Hannah Lowe as the visiting guest. I’m a big admirer of Ian’s work and just know it’s going to be a fab week. I know after my experience at Ty Newydd a few years ago I wondered if I’d ever do another residential. Although that particular experience was amazing and a real boost for my writing, nonetheless I found it exhausting – there just weren’t enough hours in the day to do all the homework, no time to go out and take a walk, so many participants and quite a combative atmosphere, and the dreaded cooking/washing up duties. I’m someone who needs time and space to think, and lots of sleep. So having to get up at 6 to get work done in time for a morning seminar, after a late night the night before (compulsory activities every evening), was a bit much for me.
So… when I found the Garsdale Retreat (I think it was after I’d done a search on Ian Duhig, who I was hoping to ask for a blurb for the Telltale anthology – more on that in a minute) – two things in particular jumped off the screen at me: NO cooking or washing up (in fact the food all sounds excellent) and HALF the number of participants you get on a typical residential. Not only that, but the schedule looks about right in terms of group activity and tutor contact, with a good balance of free time. And it’s in a beautiful part of the country. So now I’m planning with military precision to get hold of Advance train tickets. It’s all very exciting and I feel very lucky to be able to go.
Coming soon! TRUTHS: A Telltale Press Anthology
Something that’s been taking up a lot of my time lately has been the forthcoming Telltale anthology, Truths – it’s been a labour of love though, so I’m not complaining. And working with Sarah Barnsley on editing has made me realise how mediocre I am at proofing – I can’t believe how many ‘straight vs curly’ quote marks and ‘hyphens vs en-dashes’ she spotted and I missed – ha ha! Seriously, Sarah is the queen of all this, and that’s on top of being an insightful and sensitive editor. My job has mostly been to fiddle around in Affinity Designer and stress about fonts and gutters.
A brief aside here – I’d like to offer an (unpaid) endorsement for this Affinity software. When I bought a new computer I needed to replace my Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, but they’re now only available on subscription (each costs more than £200 a year!) So I did some research and found Affinity, who make alternative software called Photo and Designer, with a third, Publisher, due out soon. Each program costs under £50 to buy outright, there are tons of tutorials on the website and the company is British. I’ve been using both programs very successfully and have even found Designer to be more intuitive than Illustrator. It has been a learning curve with Photo, but I’m SO pleased with the results and certainly for my needs I don’t feel the software is an any way inferior to the Adobe equivalents. End of advert!
So the Telltale Press anthology will be going to print this coming week, and the launch is on April 25 in Lewes. Do come if you’re able – there will be a stellar list of readers. Contributors to the anthology are poets who have read with us at ‘Telltale Press & Friends’ since 2014, as well as a number of others who have supported us in the project. It feels to me like a really strong collection (OK, I would say that, wouldn’t I), and with its theme of ‘truth’, rather timely – it’s been fascinating to see how poets have interpreted the theme.
Katy Evans-Bush‘s TS Eliot shortlist workshop is fast becoming an institution. Now in its sixth year, it’s a fine precursor to the Prize readings which take place the following day, and the prize giving itself the day after that.
The format is straightforward – Katy reads the ten shortlisted books, chooses from them a number of poems to discuss, and invites poets along to the Poetry School in Lambeth for a day to mull them over. I’ve been to one of these workshops once before and had a wonderful time. This time I had to confess I hadn’t read any of the collections, but in a way that’s part of the excitement – to be introduced to them by someone like Katy. Not only does she offer her thoughts and insights into the works, and invite us all into the discussion, but she also brings to the table her formidable background as a writer, reader and and literary critic. Plus the odd bit of insider gossip, of course.
The TS Eliot Prize is probably the highest profile UK poetry prize and that’s not just because the winner gets £20,000. The annual prize readings are a popular draw. I was fortunate to be there at the South Bank last night. The result will be announced tonight – I won’t be at the award ceremony this year (no invitation!? Boo! – although that didn’t stop me going last year!)
Anyway, here’s a quick round-up of the books, a note or two from the workshop and what I thought of the readings. It’s in the order that they read last night. I can’t presume to review any of the collections, but I’ve included links to interesting reviews of each of them, should you want to find out more. Oh, and a few pics at the end.
Bernard O’Donoghue, The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber)
In an interesting mix of shortlisted poets, O’Donoghue represents the old guard, if you like – experienced, a Whitbread Prize winner, Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, writing the sort of assured, Heaney-esque lyric poetry one expects to see on the TSE shortlist. In the time-pressured vipers’ nest of the workshop room the few poems we looked at got short shrift, but to be fair it was near the end of the day and we needed cake.
Ruby Robinson, Every Little Sound (Liverpool University Press)
Born in 1985, Ruby Robinson is clearly this year’s newcomer wild card (but not to be dismissed -look what happened last year). It’s a slim collection of little more than 30 poems, in a very small format (pamphlet sized) and even smaller typeface. This book was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, so clearly is a standout. In our workshop, various aspects of the sample poems came under attack (errors in grammar, inexplicable line endings).. could envy have been getting the better of us? Surely not!
At the readings, Ruby stood her ground very successfully and if she was nervous she made a good job of keeping it under control.
A collection of mostly short poems, with a section devoted to the Bach Flower Remedies, in which Towers personifies each flower with the qualities it purports to cure. These were clever and entertaining, but workshoppers identified a tendency to sail dangerously close to whimsy.
Katharine came across as a little nervous in the reading. Much as I admire brevity when it comes to introductions, as a member of the audience I found myself feeling supremely uninvolved. It’s a tricky balance.
In the workshop, none of us knew anything much about J O Morgan, but Katy filled us in on his previous publications and helped us into Interference Pattern, which doesn’t follow any traditional path. There are no titles, and although there are section markers it’s not clear if the sections are meant to be read as individual pieces. There are some recurring threads but it’s not all narrative. ‘Voices jostling… like radio interference’ was how Katy described it. I was intrigued by the idea of it not being ‘one poem’ but then again clearly meant to be taken as a whole.
I travelled up to London with poet friend Charlotte Gann and by the time we arrived I’d been won over by her enthusiasm for J O Morgan. The reading he gave was mesmerising – all without a script, and with an intensity of presence that gripped me utterly. Slightly scary too – which probably helps if you want to keep people’s attention!
At the start of the second half of readings, host Ian McMillan announced that a few people had complained that they couldn’t hear people clearly enough – thank god it wasn’t just me then! And the second half sound was noticeably better.
Vahni Capildeo, Measures of Expatriation (Picador)
One of the big guns – this book has already won the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection, and it’s clearly a big read. It’s in seven sections and is packed with not just poetry but dense passages of prose. It deals with displacement, leaving, distance, language, identity and many of such topics that are absolutely of the moment. ‘Complex and multifaceted but readable’. One of the workshoppers said she was halfway through and although she thought she’d find it heavy going it absolutely wasn’t.
Last night Vahni was first to read after the break, as a few audience members finished their ice creams and beers. It could have been a challenge but she was confident reader, friendly and fun. My brain struggled however to connect to what she was reading, I felt I’d come to it too ‘cold’ to really get a handle on it. I often find that though, and I also felt it when we read sections of the book in the workshop – I’d rather have the space and clarity of reading it on my own off the page, with time to look up references I don’t understand, that kind of thing.
Is there anyone who doesn’t love Ian Duhig? He’s such a great combination – a man of the people who’s absolutely grounded in the real world, local communities and politically engaged, generous and humble, but also fiercely intelligent with a masterful grasp of history, the classics and poetry in all forms. AND FUNNY TOO. Yikes! That’s my impression anyway.
It took me a while to adjust to Duhig’s accent in his reading and I wanted him to take the poems more slowly, so we could savour and enjoy. By this point my neighbour was already suggesting that us Southerners were woefully unrepresented – come on, Sarf London! Don’t leave it to Kate Tempest!
The premise of Void Studies is Rimbaud’s idea of writing series of poems as ‘pure music’ with no discernible message being communicated. He never did it, so here’s Rachael Boast’s version. You have to let the poems ‘wash over you … like listening to Debussy’ was Katy’s explanation. Basically French symbolist poetry, but in English. The poems we looked at struck me as having lovely ethereal language & imagery. Mostly in couplets, short. My kind of poetry, one might think.
Boast has a strong voice, a real pleasure to listen too, although perhaps it was the nature of the poems that they did indeed start to wash over me, without leaving any strong impression.
Here’s John Field’s review of Void Studies, only one of the ten reviews he wrote on the shortlisted books which inexplicably never made it onto the TSE Foundation website, which is a great shame. John is a fine reviewer as evidenced on by his blog Poor Rude Lines, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to have linked to his reviews and help publicise them. Ah well.
Denise Riley, Say Something Back (Picador)
The ‘beating heart of the book’, said Katy, is the central sequence ‘A Part Song’ on the theme of a mother’s grieving for her dead son. We read the whole sequence round the room as part of the workshop and it was certainly moving. ‘A stupendous book’ was Katy’s pronouncement, and Riley was ‘a poet’s poet with a fine reputation.’ Katy pointed out that she’d come a long way, from being last published by Reality Street (‘Reality Street! Not even Shearsman!’) to Picador – a big leap, well deserved though. Indeed at the end of the day most people in the room felt this could be the winner.
The best word I can use to describe Denise Riley’s reading is ‘defiant’ – there was a strength of feeling in her delivery which was compelling, although I struggled with her chosen emphasis at times, and the long pauses between words. We didn’t get to hear ‘A part song’ which I was kind of hoping for.
Surely gets a prize for the most eye-catching cover, and in fact I absolutely LOVED all the Picador covers, and the size/shape of them. Full marks, Picador packaging peeps.
So here’s Jackself – a collection of poems about various Jacks of legend, phrase & fable, of childhood – Jack Sprat, Jack Frost, Jack O’Bedlam… Englishness and a sense of place (Polley’s place – the English/Scottish border country), themes of being trapped, a confrontational, unstable world. Katy says ‘You’re either with him or you’re not’.
In the workshop I was with him, I enjoyed the poems and the handling of the themes. Made me think a bit of Janet Sutherland’s Bone Monkey, or Ted Hughes’s Crow, although less dark than either of those (as far as I could tell from what I read).
Polley’s reading was the penultimate and having to go before Alice Oswald is also a pressure. I remember really enjoying his reading from The Havocs a few years ago. More self-assured now, but a little more mannered in his delivery. I still enjoyed the poems though.
I struggled to find a review of Jackself, but you might be luckier than me!
Alice Oswald, Falling Awake (Cape)
What can I say here? I loved the poems we read in the workshop, including ‘Swan’ which she then read last night. Falling Awake won the Costa prize already and Oswald is a previous winner of the TSE Prize. Her reading was magnificent, all recited from memory which I love but it wasn’t just that. She had such a presence. ‘Commanding presence’ is a cliche but it really was that.
And so to the result – only a few hours to go. My metaphorical money is still on Alice Oswald, although my fellow workshoppers came down in the Denise Riley camp. With Vahni Capildeo the other in the triumvirate of ‘likely to wins’. Or how about J O Morgan as a dark horse?
The books…in no specific orderMe & KEB at the end of the poetry book marathon
And on the way home, what should I pass than Pimlico Plumbers and their amazing Christmas decs – in the middle of January!
Hello!? It’s January 15th, people!
But London was as beautiful as ever at 5pm in January…
From the opening poem ‘Blood’, an extended description of a self-styled skinhead-type hardman who turns out to be a fifteen-year-old who faints at the sight of a vaccination needle ‘in front of a whole queue of third years’, you get the feeling this collection is going to be a treat. Ian Duhig has such a range I just can’t find the right box to put him in.
A rage against a corporation that diverts ‘twenty million tons of river’ is presented as a protest song (‘Water, Light’) – ‘Some people couldn’t run a bath / And these were running mining’. The poet seems to have a scholarly familiarity with the classics, with ancient myth & folk tales, with modern history … yet he’s also a politically-engaged ‘man of the people’ who seems able to combine extraordinary wit and subtlety of language with (how shall I put it?) a certain earthy bluntness. There are punchlines aplenty (eg ‘The Vision of the Virgin’, ‘Chinese Sonnets’) and a hilarious ekphrastic poem – ‘The dancing couple. He’s as smug as buttered parsnips / Despite entertaining scarlatina and an eerie crotch.’ (‘Rustics Dancing Outside an Inn’). A found poem ‘Coble Rig Veda’ celebrates a rich nautical vocabulary probably indecipherable to your average present-day reader. The wonderful title poem won the National Poetry Competition in 2001. It has a weirdly compelling quality – a poem I want to keep going back to, and every time there’s more to be squeezed from it. Here’s a link to Ian reading the poem, and some background to it.
Favourite poem: ‘Ken’s Videos, Seahouses’. (I admit I wrote a little homage poem ‘after’ this, which appeared in The Interpreter’s House. Nowhere near as clever as the original, sadly. I can try though.)
This collection of poems is part of a ‘A Guernsey Double’, together with ‘The Man Who Landed’ by Richard Fleming. It was published with funding from Guernsey Arts Commission, as an ‘explore Guernsey’ project – there’s even a map in the centre pages pointing out the various places referred to in the poems.
I confess I’ve only read Peter’s half of the book this week, saving Richard’s for another time. (You have to turn the book over and start from the other side to do that, so it does feel like a separate piece.)
My ‘Reading List’ strategy is to read straight through the poems in a collection, not to re-read or overthink individual poems. This isn’t always easy, especially if there are distractions and you get to the end of a piece and have the sensation you weren’t attending properly. But it leaves an impression, a kind of prevailing feeling. After reading ‘The Boy Who Fell Upwards’ the feeling I had was melancholy. That’s not to say sadness exactly, but there are mysteries here – unresolved (hi)stories, both personal and of the place, and it’s sometimes the sense of not knowing that fuels the tension. From the start we learn ‘I’m torn up by currents …/ hollow-boned orphan, I shriek like a gull in the gale.’ (‘The Boy Who Fell Upwards’).
The narrator (as small child, as teenager, as adult) is surrounded by characters unnamed but defined by their family roles – Gran’mere (the first we meet, and the most present through the poems), Father, Grandfather, a dead brother, a ‘thought daughter’. They are all woven into a landscape both hostile and beautiful – ‘Cliff and foam murmur the murmur / of a dreaming widow, reaching / across a cold sheet / to a memory.’ (‘Dusk at Icart Point’) and later,’Raucous in the little lanes / a drunken sea-wind / blew me here / to listen and belong again…’ (‘A return’). But this is no memoir. And it’s certainly not a tourist information brochure. Sure, we get ‘I glimpsed a summer Guernsey / cuddled by the setting sun’ (‘A Glasshouse’) but a Nazi bunker has the narrator imagining a wartime victim ‘…your belly flop / into the concrete slop / of these foundations.’
There’s a deep sense of love for the place, and the sadness of things fragmenting, uprooting, breaking and toppling – ‘all these muddled memories / word by word from broken things.’ (‘The Little Chapel’) which I found complex and moving. Favourite poem: ‘Thought Daughter.’
This is a fairly jaunty celebration of animals and birds, alive and (about to be) dead, real and mythical. Sometimes the beast itself takes centre stage, but just as often the poet focuses on a particular feature or association, as with ‘Aardvark’ – ‘… unaware of its symbolic life / as tradesman’s Number One’.
Lambs are ‘teenaged gangs’, a Pheasant is a ‘gaudy racer’. Most of the creatures are addressed directly as ‘you’, permitting the poet to express his own feelings or observations. I enjoyed the originality of ‘Pelican’ – ‘the guy who swaggers, / who Mick Jaggers.’ Less convincing was the ‘Swan’ – ‘Conscious of magnificence, that stately glide / asserts possession of the tree-screened pool.’
Unfortunately I’m unable to read any poem about a Kingfisher without recalling the wonderful Chris McCabe poem of that title which appeared in The Rialto and in the ‘Best of British Poetry 2011’ anthology. (Hear Chris read the poem here.) And ‘Crow’ will always be a tricky one.
The collection was good fun and the quirky juxtapositions of creatures and unexpected touches made me smile. Favourite poem: ‘Pelican.’
This is such a slim volume I thought I’d slip it in this week … just seven poems, and on a first read through I did pick up on some references to stars/constellations/space but wasn’t entirely sure if I’d missed something crucial.
‘Keyhole (NGC1999)’ ‘isn’t exactly grown yet / barely sagacious’ made more sense when I had looked it up (apparently it’s a ‘mysterious hole in space’). I don’t really like doing ‘research’ in order to get something from a poem, but in the case of this pamphlet it did help.
In ‘Crab Nebula’ there are references to the Bible, a line from Macbeth and possibly a reference to some incident in Chinese history and/or fable. There are puzzling and/or opaque moments throughout, but nevertheless the poems zing with original ideas and exhilarating language. ‘Deep freeze mother, / primordial grime, / don’t speak now hypoglycaemics.’ (Goldilocks Zone’) ‘sweep this realm, / hypnotised by jewels, regal cat’s eye / puffing out smoke rings like knotted gas,’ (‘Hunters’).
Favourite poem: ‘AE Aurigae’.
Quick update first of all to my October ‘working on, waiting on’ post: Poetry London – standard rejection slip. Shearsman – standard rejection email. The North – a very nice personal reply, but no. Envoi – yes (yay!).
I’ve also just heard that The Interpreter’s House (now edited by Martin Malone and with a shiny new website amongst other things) is taking one of the poems I wrote at Ty Newydd, which I’m very pleased about. It’s a bit of an homage to Ian Duhig. Martin also leaps right to the top of the ‘speed of response’ chart, having replied within a few days. Douze points!
After a sending spree I’ve currently got 6 poems out to Ambit, 3 to Antiphon, 3 to Lighthouse and 3 to Poetry Review. Plus a number of pamphlet submissions. Will post updates to all this as and when.
The weather’s terrible, I am a ‘music widow’ today and I feel the urge to reconnect with what makes poetry good, and conversely what’s BAD about the stuff I’ve had rejected lately. Yes, it’s time for some serious reading and some BIG edits!
I recently came across Tim Love’s excellent LitRefs Articles blog – and read again his piece about getting poetry published in the UK, a very useful resource, and it got me looking out a few other pieces I had bookmarked about getting published or entering poetry competitions.
Happenstance has a free download The Dos and Don’ts of Poetry Submission – to access it you have to go through a registration process and possibly input your credit card details (I think, although I didn’t get that far), although you’re not charged anything. I mention this article because I’m fairly sure I’ve read it on a blog at some point and found it useful even though it’s now behind a registration wall.
On the subject of entering competitions – on her blog, Abegail Morley recently interviewed Bill Greenwell about what judges look for in poetry competitions, and here’s George Szirtes’s interview with Ian Duhig on the thorny question of what poetry competitions are actually for… (George S is himself of course a veteran of the poetry competition judging scene, and there are plenty of his wise words on the subject elsewhere on the web)
And finally, a feast of tasty information (huh?) on Abegail Morley’s The Poetry Shed which includes an interview with Helen Ivory on judging competitions, ‘recipes for success’ from various magazine editors, and a bonus piece at the end about drafting a poem, by Kim Moore.
These are just a few articles I’m aware of – do you have more to add to the list – pieces on getting published or winning competitions, that you’ve found helpful/entertaining/informative? Do share – thanks!
