Tag: the dark horse

Blog/

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

 

 

 

Blog/

On poetry magazines: Stand, Agenda, The Dark Horse

This is the second in my mini-series on UK & Irish poetry magazines. The three featured today are all long-standing publications.

Stand magazine

Stand started up in 1954, when, according to the website,  “Jon Silkin used his £5 redundancy money, received after trying to organise some of his fellow manual workers, to found a magazine which would ‘stand’ against injustice and oppression, and ‘stand’ for the role that the arts, poetry and fiction in particular, could and should play in that fight.”

What a brilliant story. Jon Silkin died in 1997 and the magazine has had a number of editors over the years, and a long association with the University of Leeds that continues to this day. John Whale is the current managing editor, and each edition seems to include a nice mix of both well-established and newer poets. It runs to around 150 pages and the landscape layout, while interesting, offers I suspect some challenges. The name of every contributor since 1999 appears on the website!

Agenda magazine

Another small magazine with a big reputation is Agenda, founded by William Cookson in 1959, with a big input from Ezra Pound, no less. Cookson’s recollection of how the journal came into being appears on the website, and is a fascinating read. I particularly liked the detail that Pound thought the fifth issue was ‘particularly boring’ and he suggested Cookson should stop, “but he soon relented, sending £5 towards the printer’s bill to help me to continue, writing, ’Oke Hay / Fluctuat. But get some GUTS into the next issue, and something that isn’t watered down E.P.'” Priceless.

The current editor Patricia McCarthy does much to promote young poets in the ‘broadsheet’ section, and the magazine (again more of a book really, at 160 pages) is a blend of poetry, reviews and editorial (and GUTS of course). Most issues are themed, and its ‘retrospectives’ are particularly interesting.

The Dark Horse journal

And finally for now, The Dark Horse. This is a journal I’ve been aware of for a while but only recently sent for a copy. Billing itself as ‘Scotland’s Transatlantic Poetry Magazine’, it clearly has gravitas –  there is work in this recent issue by heavyweights including Michael Longley and Dana Gioia.  I also really enjoyed the essays, including a harrowing tale of ‘cancel culture’ by Jenny Lindsay and an extract from Hamish Whyte’s memoir of his thirty-year friendship with Edwin Morgan.

The Dark Horse was founded in 1995 by Gerry Cambridge, who is still its editor, and clearly also the driving force behind its design and impressive production values. Incidentally he wrote this interesting piece entitled Why we do it – on editing a poetry magazine.