Tag: jon stone

Angst/

Poetry & alcohol, contentious essays and more

Ah, December. The month when I may be found stressing over the kerning and leading of some choir’s concert programme, editing singers’ lengthy blogs and updating the Christmas card list. Yes! I am still a Christmas card aficionado, despite every year it becoming yet another soul-search about whether the negative impact on the environment of all that paper, print and roadmiles outweighs the social benefit of sending and receiving something with physical presence handwritten by a human being. I’m sure my parents must have faced similar moral dilemmas but I can’t imagine right now what they were.

Having just emerged from a ‘dry November’ – no, it wasn’t for charity, just for a challenge – I feel just a tad liberated. I mean, to return to alcohol. I wonder if the occasional injection of alcohol actually loosens up my brain in a way that allows me to think poetry – rather like allowing one’s gaze to soften and see those 3D ‘magic eye’ images that had their moment in the 1990s. It feels that way, anyway. I’m sure it’s not a scientific fact, otherwise there would be no teetotal poets. Which I’m sure isn’t the case.

Read this please

I came across this piece by the big-thinking Jon Stone, on how we could be re-thinking the traditional poetry book blurbs and steer clear of the dreaded ‘ceaselessly inventive and original, utilises precise, finely wrought language, deft musicality’ etc etc stuff that we read every day. This appealed to me greatly. I try to suppress the copywriter in me but It’s very hard when yet another claim about ‘clear-eyed poetry that demands to be written’ or whatever makes me want to be sick into a bucket. Although I admit I also fall into this particular bucket from time to time.

Jon’s essay is a fab read on its own, but don’t miss also part 1 in the series, on Prize Culture, sure to quicken a few pulses (“If the Forward or the Eliot mysteriously stopped producing spikes in sales for shortlisted books, a serious reform would be undertaken immediately, as a matter of emergency”). I can’t find parts 3 – 5 of the series, but I’m waiting for them with bated breath. These essays were written in 2014, so why have I only just discovered them? Conspiracy theories on a postcard, please.

Readings, launches

A couple of weeks ago I went over to Chichester to read at Barry Smith’s excellent Chichester Poetry Open Mic. Twas a fairly foul night, but the small audience had a big heart – not only was the open mic element one of the best I’ve experienced, but the lovely people bought a few of my pamphlets as well as my ‘Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines’ (yes! another plug! But if I can’t plug it on my own blog then what kind of a marketer would that make me? No need to answer that one.)

A few nights ago I attended the launch of Antony Mair‘s wonderful new collection, Let the Wounded Speak. Antony had invited two other poets to read from his collection, and the whole event had been impeccably planned. Having others read his poems was a bit of a masterstroke. I love hearing Antony read, but giving the poems to another voice meant we got a different slant on the work. I admit I was surprised to find it so moving, although I’m not sure why I was surprised, because I’d been to the launch of his first collection performed partially by the actors of Live Canon, and enjoyed that immensely.

Antony has a theory that my poetry-related doo-dads such as the quarterly windows updates and the ‘how to’ book are displacement activities designed to stop me getting on with the first collection. There could be something in that. But there’s also the pleasure of dipping in and out of diverse projects.

One thing’s for certain, I need the relative quiet of January to get on with thinking about the collection. Music for now. I’m still enjoying laying out the programme and learning the music for our upcoming concert…

Blog/

To Liverpool, 28 drafts later

Liverpool

It’s wonderful how software like Illustrator allows non-designers like me a chance to play around with layout, typefaces and graphic design. I really value how digital has made good quality print projects possible for amateur creatives. We can all be publishers now. Producing your own zine, poster, wall art or whatever is cheap and easy.

Perhaps this is what gives the handmade or hand finished object extra appeal. I haven’t seen the magazine Coast to Coast to Coast yet – it’s only on its second edition – but when I came across a tweet asking for submissions, and read about it being hand stitched , I knew I wanted it – and to be in it, if possible. The magazine editors are Maria Isakova Bennett and Michael Brown. I knew Maria’s name from her poetry, but she is also a fine artist, and the magazine is designed to be a work of art, a beautiful artefact in itself. (Fuselit, edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone, is another handmade, limited edition magazine which I have a few copies of, and they are small things of great wonder.)

When Maria emailed to say they had accepted my submission I was excited for several reasons – firstly obviously to have a poem in the magazine and alongside the work of many fine poets, secondly because this particular poem has been in development for A Very Long Time, and lastly because the launch event is at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, it means I get a good reason to go visit.

“The greatest team in Europe…”

When I was a teenager I worshipped Liverpool FC. My girlfriends and I were happy talking about Kevin Keegan all day. I never saw my team play at home, because a journey to Liverpool was inconceivable – at that time I lived in London and I’d never been north of Derby. But I recorded each season’s match results religiously in my diary, an early version of which also bizarrely contained a ‘Club News’ section, written up in my best fourteen-year-old’s sports journalist style, even though no-one read it but me!

diary extract

Although I’ve only been twice to Liverpool, the thought of going up there in December to hear some lovely poetry, in an art gallery, to stay the night in the city and to take away a handmade piece of art fills me with a ridiculous amount of joy. Ironically I don’t follow football any more.

So what about the 28 drafts?

The poem features a fur, or an alleged fur – depending on how you read it (perhaps it was always destined to appear in a tactile/textile magazine?) Anyway, the first draft was in 2011, and looking at the computer folder I see it has had 28 drafts and six different titles over the last seven years. This has to be a record for me. I know I workshopped it at least three times, each time resulting in my thinking it rubbish and putting it away. I submitted it several times in the early days, but stopped over the years as I lost confidence in it. But I couldn’t give up on it entirely. This year I got it out again for more redrafting. It felt much better – as if I’d had to grow into the poem. And now it’s finally found a home, and I’m absurdly grateful.

Hurrah for the handmade and the labours of love!

Events/

Standing room only at the Troubadour

Anne-Marie Fyfe at the Troubadour Coffee-House poetry

To be fair, I did have a seat for the first half, but with the sciatica playing up I was happy to stand for the second. Plus it meant a quick getaway at the end with poet friend Jan, and the last (viable) train home.

Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour (run by the indefatigable Anne-Marie Fyfe) is always worth the trip to London – I always feel I’m being introduced to interesting and often very fine poets who aren’t necessarily on my radar (for example, who don’t frequent social media and/or are not over-exposed at poetry readings and/or are not UK-based). It’s an intense reminder of the very wide poetry world out there.

On Monday, we heard eight poets, six of whom were new to me, and musical entertainment from Henry Fajemirokun.

Michael Scott (who I know from Swindon Poetry Festival) kicked things off, with a series of poems ostensibly addressed to a ‘little usherette’, but he told us were actually about all the big themes – love, loss, death, family and so forth. I was transfixed for most of the time by his ‘Attack of the 50ft Woman’ T-shirt (which did come into one of the poems). Also in the first half were Alistair Noon, Penny Boxall and Claire Dyer. I knew Penny’s name but don’t think I had heard her read before, and I found her engaging. Claire I met originally at an Interpreter’s House launch, and who I always enjoy hearing read, plus we’re also social media friends. I admire both her poetry and her calm delivery.

Boxall-Dyer-Noon- Troubadour poetry readings
Penny Boxall, Claire Dyer, Alistair Noon

Poetry readings always seem to offer up a myriad ways in which I might put my foot it in. This time the only seat I could find happened to be at close quarters to a table with a plate of half-finished food. It appeared to have been pushed to the edge. I assumed the people at the table had finished with it. It smelt. This was a hot, crowded room, after all. So I picked up the plate and started to take it away to the bar, when someone at the table said ‘excuse me’ and asked for it back. Fair enough. But it never did get finished, or cleared away. But by the time the interval came, the air was ripe with the combined respiration of 70 or 80 people in a basement room, so maybe this is a moot point.

Second half, as seen from a different viewpoint – Ruth Sharman read poems about the slow and desperately sad demise of her father. She is incredibly well-spoken (a slightly old-fashioned phrase, I know) and delivered her work with great style. We also heard from Jon Stone (who I remember as co-editor of Fuselit with Kirsten Irving) who looks far younger than he could POSSIBLY be (now that’s the kind of compliment I would relish), Elaine Gaston (whose work I enjoyed so much I forgot to take a photo – and who had the confidence to finish when we were expecting and wanting more) and Nick Makoha to end, whose introductions were excellent but I liked so much of his poetry, although he suffered from one or two stumbles during the poems.

Sharman, Stone, Mahoka - Troubadour poetry readings
Henry Fajemirokun, Ruth Sharman, Jon Stone and Nick Mahoka

I came away with a distinct impression of which of the poets I would like to read more of, and also quite a few takeaway thoughts – on what to wear for a reading, on engaging with the audience, on improving my diction and vocal tone (I couldn’t help cringing again thinking about my recent performance at the Eyewear launch), on practising, practising, practising…

Jan kindly took the same train as me until we parted at Haywards Heath, and I continued in the company of a zillion Chelsea fans as far as Lewes, then onto a replacement bus to Eastbourne, and to my bed by 1am.

It had been an excellent day in many ways – before even the Troubadour night earlier the day I’d had a poem accepted by the excellent Prole magazine, been to the hospital for the dreaded tests and finally (after a week of worry) pronounced ALL CLEAR. For now, of course. Everything is for now. But no less the sweeter for it.