Tag: Mat Riches

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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.

Angst/

And in other writing…

Death comes for the poet

Not much new to report on the poetry writing front, except for a dozen or so poems in submission (“in submission”? Should it be “under submission”? I won’t say ‘Under consideration” because that suggests the darn things are actually being read by someone, and there’s no knowing if that’s the case. Anyway I think I like “in submission”.)

Now you see this is the kind of nit-picking that the writing of poetry demands, is it not? When it may take an hour to decide on whether in or under is best. This is one reason I’m enjoying writing a first draft of My Novel. I’m just motoring through, sitting back and enjoying the action, as if it were Midsummer Murders. I guess at some point I’ll have to go back and refine it a tad, which might mean pondering those kinds of SHOULD IT BE ‘GOWN’ OR KIRTLE’ HERE? questions that few readers in the end would care about, but I can’t put my wee novel in submission with anyone until I’ve polished it up I suppose. I just hope I don’t hate the whole thing and ditch it when it’s done, which is typically my poetry MO.

One thing I can’t imagine is workshopping this thing, the way I would a poem. I had to laugh at this, quoted on Mat Riches blog: ‘Workshops are a waste of time. Trojan horses of mediocrity to quote Adliterate. […] Only workshop when you have no choice.”  Mat goes on to say he’s not entirely sure who the quote is by, and also that ‘they aren’t intended here to be discussing writing workshops’ – aha, but that’s how we read it, given that Mat’s is a writer’s blog!

Workshops of any kind aren’t for everyone, it’s true. I’ve had an on-off relationship with poetry workshopping I have to admit. It’s lovely when you find yourself in a group that gels, and you don’t feel threatened or threatening. Then again, if you all become mates then it can become a bit of an echo-chamber. Sometimes though it’s also nice to have poetry mates, and never mind the feedback.

Right, back to my soon-to-be classic historical novel! I know quite a bit about historical writing, given that most of my poems in submission have been loitering on editors’ desks (or in out-trays) for so long they may as well have been written on parchment. Alack and alas!

Blog/

Ah! The business of poetry blogging

Oh no!

It’s been a few weeks since my last post, and yet Matthew Stewart has still generously kept me on his list of ‘Best UK Poetry Blogs of 2019’. Matthew observes that 2019 was ‘far from being a vintage year’ for blogging, and his suggestions of why this might be are interesting: keeping a blog going can be a chore at times, once you stop it’s hard to get going again, sometimes you can’t help wondering if you’re writing into a vacuum.

I’d rather be bog-snorkelling  bragging  blogging

In some ways, writing this blog is no more of a chore than writing actual poems, in that I prefer not to force either of them, but to let them happen when the inclination hits me. Having said that, I know it’s not good to leave a blog hanging for too long. I do from time to time give myself a goal, such as ‘write a blog post a week’ or ‘start a poem a day for a month’. I haven’t done either of those for a while, but I’ve been gee’d on by others lately. Heather Walker has been blogging every day recently and it’s been fascinating to read. Josephine Corcoran shared recently that she’d written twenty new poems. Lordy! That’s probably my annual output. And Mat Riches has been blogging every week for some time, AND he sent out 161 poems this year – BLIMEY.

Coming soon – the stats of shame

Actually Mat’s post reminded me that my annual roundup of subs/rejections/acceptances is due. I doubt I’ll be offering any natty graphs. Somewhat a visual feels like it might be a detail too far. But hey! Let’s see…

I do know that even if I’m not blogging, I’m reading other people’s blogs. They come at my inbox every Monday morning and I never cease to be amazed at how much thought, energy, creativity and generosity goes into blogs. And with the boot on the other foot, I’m eternally grateful to my readers, aka YOU, for taking the time to read this.

Current reading list

My poetry books-to-read pile currently includes the Winter issues of Rattle and The Moth, Clarissa Aykroyd’s Island of Towers (Broken Sleep Books), Hubert Moore’s The Feeding Station (Shoestring) which I’m reviewing for The Frogmore Papers, Katie Griffiths’ My Shrink Is Pregnant (one of my fellow Live Canon Pamphleteers) and Robert Hamberger’s Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo). Recently I received a copy of Sarah Windebank’s super first collection, Memories of a Swedish Grandmother (Myriad Editions). I was lucky enough to get a review copy, and wrote a short testimonial for the book.

And so this is Christmas…

I only got 6 out of 18 in the Guardian’s Christmas Number Ones quiz – although I think it was a swizz as there were only one or two questions about the seventies! Come on, Christmas was invented in the 70s! Can you do better??

Angst/

Back to school, current reading & looking forward

Back. After twelve days or so away I’m feeling positively autumnal and a bit ‘back to school’ (garden looking blousy, woollies coming out the wardrobe, wondering when Masterchef starts, etc).

I haven’t got back into any new writing but that will come. Sometimes I get the feeling I’m waiting  – for inspiration maybe – for a collection of poems, rather than a poem here, a poem there – and I’m a bit annoyed with myself. I really enjoyed hearing Kei Miller read at Hastings LitFest a few weeks ago, and he surprised some us by saying that he only wrote poems when he had a book in mind, and when there’s no book in mind, there are no poems. This was refreshing in a way – I’ve never been one of those people who are disciplined to write every day (not poetry, anyway). I’ve also never been very good at using exercises or ‘free writing’ as a means of churning out (or up?) ideas into proto-poems. Thinking in ‘book’ terms appeals to me and I do it a lot – trouble is, it seems to be in parallel to writing poems; I haven’t yet tied the two together. And I need to remember that Kei Miller also writes novels, so he’s quite possibly knocking out several books in those poetry dry-times. Ha!

Current reading

The September edition of Poetry, which seems to be breaking the boundaries this month with the inclusion of graphic prose poetry, a computer program, pictures of fans and a couple of essays… intriguing.

Madeleine Wurzburger‘s pamphlet Sleeve Catching Fire at Dawn (Smith/Doorstop), a gift from Marion Tracy. The poems are written in a kind of pseudo-historical style, in that they seem to be (on the face of it) well-researched historic portraits, commentary, testimonies. But they’re witty, funny in places, and certainly interesting.

Stephen Sexton‘s first collection If All the World and Love were Young (Penguin) – what a gem of a title for starters. You’ll be reading plenty of reviews of this, watch as it comes up for various awards. I was at the prize giving ceremony for the National Poetry Competition in 2017 when this poet won it, still in his early twenties. Oh my. This book was a slow burner for me, but I’ve read nothing like it. Very subtle and original and all the more moving for it. If you get a quarter of the way through and you’ve still no idea what’s going on, trust me and stick with it! Nice piece here by Stephen in the Irish Times, on the background to the book.

Coming up, in brief

Next week two lovely poet friends, Clare Best and Robert Hamberger, are launching their new collections in Brighton and I’m hoping to go, but if not then I’ll definitely hear them read at Needlewriters in Lewes next month, for which I’ll be MC-ing which is always fun. Also next month I’ll be running a workshop for some lovely High Weald Stanza writers. Some time in November I’ll have a new pamphlet ready to launch, alongside three fine Live Canon pamphleteers. And I’ll be reading in London in November at a special night being organised by Mat Riches and Matthew Stewart.

Meanwhile I’m still deciding whether to renew my membership of the Poetry Book Society. I tend to buy poetry books at readings, or second-hand. I’m not sure how useful I find the PBS Bulletin which basically includes brief review/blurbs, long poet blogs, huge poet photos and a sample poem for each of the ‘recommendations’. Pamphlets only get a very small amount of space. Buying through the PBS doesn’t save any money (once you factor in the postage cost and cost of membership). Or should I not be looking at it in those terms?  I’d be interested to know people’s thoughts on this.