Year: 2008

The deadline for Ambit reviews is tomorrow. That means I have to stop thinking and start writing.

 

Meanwhile, there’s the box of submissions, the core skill papers, the letters, the accounts and the Sphinxing matters. And two friends not well to be visited. And a niggly tooth-ache telling me something somewhere.

But the sun is shining and this morning I sat listening to the sounds an empty house makes, in between books to be reviewed. Sometimes, when you can do that, time opens around you.

Empty houses, of course, are much more beautiful when they follow full houses. It’s the contrast. Like the silence at the bottom of the poem box. Or waking up after being asleep.

 

 

It always rolls past somehow or other. This time I was dipping in and out of three books I’m reviewing this week, while wondering (this thought continually recurs to me) why somebody would read a collection of poetry. By choice, I mean.

 

As for me, there’s the obsession thing. Anybody can get obsessed with an art form, a genre or sub-genre. But why would an ordinary person read some of what I read? And why — when they’ve read the first 6 lines of most of the poems I read — would they continue?

I don’t mean this cynically at all. I’m never quite sure of the answer. In fact, part of what keeps me reading is simply wondering why I’m supposed to be reading whatever it is.

Sometimes, when you get to the end, you have a feeling that might always be summed up as: ‘So that was why’.

And sometimes it’s more like: ‘Was that all?’

Very occasionally, of course, you end thinking: ‘Yes!’

But Yes-Poetry is rare and sometimes I think it’s my fault. On the back cover, it is perfectly obvious that this is meant to be a whole book of Yes. Not just moderately, but extremely Yes, and several clever people are attesting to that fact. My brain is simply not attuned correctly. Or I’m somehow missing the point. Or it would be different if I’d met them. Or it would be different if I heard them. Or it would be different if festive hats and greenery didn’t get in the way…

But the berries outside are superb. They gleam like lights. And the birds are already up earlier in the morning and a lot of dodgy merriment is going on in the bushes. Between birds, I mean. Today six long-tailed tits arrived in the front garden at once. That was a lovely moment. Five at once, with their tails at various lop-sided angles on the fat ball in the eucalyptus tree. Yes!

Of course, they don’t need my fat balls. Fat balls are just twenty-first century decadence. They should be busy with the jewelled red berries… and whatever else birds ate before humans started stirring up trouble.

 

It was a close call. During this last week of college work, I wasn’t sure I would actually make it to Friday. But it’s amazing how this always somehow happens (or has always somehow happened so far). I’ve just read that Adrian Mitchell has left the world. People are fragile. We don’t continue forever.

I’m glad I met Adrian, had the privilege of working with him both at Snape and in St Andrews (StAnza) and that he told me about working with Stevie Smith and Tove Jansson.

 

We all link together – a chain of odd, word-obsessed human beings. I won’t forget him — at least until I myself am on the opposite shore.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working (in between a small mountain of college marking) with Colin Begg and D A Prince to get the text of Nearly ‘Nearly the Happy Hour’ ready to be downloadable from the HappenStance shop. It is an account of the editorial process behind that book. Colin put this together for his M Litt and we’ve since modified it somewhat to be a little bit more general-reader friendly. All the erudite footnotes have vanished.  It is very nearly done and dusted. It will be freely available and I think it’s an interesting insight, but then I would.

Now it’s back to several unfinished pieces of work. One is called How (not) to get your Poetry Published which I hope will summarise lots of the advice I send back to people sending me manuscript submissions, in a gentle and humorous way. It is very easy to give offence, but there are lots of things people should know and often don’t. I didn’t myself once.

Another job waiting for me is A Conversation with Ruth Pitter, which author/artist Thomas McKean shared with me some considerable time ago and which I simply haven’t had time to page set. Yet.

Then there’s Sphinx 11 which is already moving from grist to mill. And I suppose I’d better wrap some presents.

It is odd what we do, we human beings dominated by the Christmas principle: rush off, acquire sundry objects, wrap them in paper and various kinds of glittery string, unwrap them again, consume turkeys… I don’t know. The older you get, the odder you think it is.

Meanwhile, the wild and withering wind wuthers outside my window. It’s the shortest day. Magnificent displays of red berries are all over the place. Who needs Christmas decorations?

Somehow, I seem to have missed flagging the fact that Eleanor recently won the Second Light Poetry competition. Yeay!! (http://www.secondlightlive.co.uk/news.shtml#Comp). Please cut and paste that link – WordPress won’t let me add it as live link, because I should have put it in back at the start…

 

She has a Poetry PF page as well www.poetrypf.co.uk/eleanorlivingstonepage.html) and from there you can see a link to a youtube video of her reading ‘In the Morthouse’ outside the Byre at night in St Andrews.

Her HappenStance pamphlet in which that Morthouse poem appeared is out of print, but she is in print in a recent Sampler publication, which is a very nice size and shape to post to your friends. She is one of that special breed of people who spend most of their time supporting, publicising or facilitating other poets. But meanwhile she quietly works away producing some cool, crisp poems herself. In the Sampler I specially like the love poem ‘July Evening’ which gives me a little shiver of pleasure whenever I read it…

There are four Samplers now: Andy Philip, Eleanor Livingstone, Gill McEvoy (all HappenStance pamphlet poets hitherto out of print) and Martin Parker.

Martin is the exception, since I haven’t published him before, so his pamphlet will come later. He is the only light verse poet too: his Sampler is light as a feather. Pure joy. The trouble with it is that I keep giving them away because I want everyone I like to have a copy. But there are a few left. Great Christmas gift…. even for people who don’t like poetry. Oh, if I can find the right photo, you’ll see me reading from Martin (his Eeyore poem) at same recent event where Eleanor was snapped.

Thanks to David Andrew who diligently took photos and thus appears in none of them…

 

 

The launch of four pamphlets and the seasonal merriment last Saturday went beautifully. There was a really lovely atmosphere, especially with Edinburgh bathed in frosty chill outside. The Mai Thai restaurant did us proud – -and I think it was the most packed launch we have ever had. All four poets did masterful readings, and there were poet pop-ups in between.

It was fun and it was varied and it was a great audience. Now I am so tired….

But on Monday it was the launch of Hamish Whyte’s new Shoestring book. Oh bugger, the name of this very nice volume temporarily escapes me, but I will come back and edit it in later. He read from it beautifully.

This time the launch was in the Writer’s Museum in Edinburgh. I confess this is my first visit to that august venue, and the Museum wasn’t even open. It’s at the top of the Mound. As you come out you see the Christmas lights in the trees, and down on Princes Street, the Christmas carousels and the ferris wheel. After the launch, Eleanor Livingstone and I walked with John Lucas (Shoestring Publisher) through the Christmas market and over towards Charlotte Square…. It was very cold and glittery and, in retrospect, slightly magical.

Oh bother! After writing a whole set of paragraphs in the HappenStance Story Chapter 3 about the pain of errors and having to learn to live with it, there was a bebo, I mean booboo, in the first line of my verse Christmas card. How many times have I read that card? How many weeks did the prototype sit in the dining room table? I don’t think I would ever have seen it said ‘Bards of Bards’ instead of ‘Bard of Bards’ if someone hadn’t written and pointed out the ‘clunker’.

 

It reminds me how one day I found a mistake in a poem that had been to and fro to magazines, printed in a couple of places — and nobody, including me, had noticed something dead obvious. You read what you know is supposed to be there, especially when you were the person who wrote it.

There is an error in my poem ‘Falling in Love’ — I carried it through issue one of Unsuitable Poems, through the revised edition two years later as well.

It’s on the postcard of the poem.

The same error was in the same poem in an Aldeburgh Festival poster this autumn.

It persisted into in the recent Scottish Love Poems anthology.

It’s not a bad error, I suppose. It’s a capitalisation thing: following a colon at the end of a line, there’s a capital T at the front of ‘They’ll write on our headstone’. It should, of course, be lower case, because that’s the pattern for the rest of the poem. It causes me a little twinge every time I see it.

Oh well. It represents just how blind and intelligent person can be about her own scribblings. So I’m pointing it out for the record. Nobody is to be trusted, but most of all not yourself.

I expect it’s observations like this that win blog competitions..

No doubt about it, this blog has received a resounding ‘not noticed you exist’ reaction.

I have mixed feelings about these things. I was at an SQA event today in my other existence (Scottish Qualifications Authority). I teach what the Scotttish nation calls ‘core skill communication’ (among other things) and recently the documents that define what has to be taught under this remarkable nomenclature were revised. Except they didn’t use the word ‘revised’. Instead, the trendy term is ‘refreshed’ (I know: painful).

Hm. Thing is, in the attempt for educators to be modern, one of the writing genres that increasingly gets a reference is ‘blogs’. As though they are some kind of respectable modern way for the young to communicate. Only I am 55 and actually I don’t know any young bloggers, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t be able to comprehend the version of English they communicate in, if it’s anything like the Bebo messages exchanged by the young people I teach. (Yes, I am on Bebo too, but don’t hold it against me).

This whole internet business, this whole blogging business — I think it might be just another way of clothing the sort of human communication that has always manifested itself here and there. Having said which, it is hard to imagine why somebody writes something like this without a specific reader in mind. Where ARE YOU specific reader?

I’m midway through the maniacal Chapter 3 post-out, picked it up from the printer yesterday. The number of subscribers creeps up all the time, even with one or two dropping out. Last night, I had just started doing the labels for the envelopes when the computer stopped talking to the printer. This happens from time to time. However, usually I can sort it out quickly.

Not so last night. At one point I even phoned the help people, but they went home before they answered. In the end I unplugged all the connections for a few minutes and reconnected the printer cable to a different port. Now it works again. It took about an hour and a half and that meant dinner was at half past nine AGAIN.

Off to put more of them in envelopes now. The various reminder slips and little notes are on beautifully coloured paper because Liz and Robert (www.dophinpress.co.uk) gave me a box of goodies. I love paper.

I can never quite believe how long this takes… Of one thing I am fairly certain: my Christmas card will be the first that most people get. They have to go into this mailshot because otherwise it would be another forty quid’s worth of stamps, and this post-out, at £100.00 is more than enough. The post office makes SO MUCH money out of me…

This year’s chapter is themed: Through the Looking Glass and What You Find There. Back to the envelopes now.

The date on the first post wasn’t the date it was actually written. It’s too complicated for me to explain why — besides it’s Hallowe’en. Anything could happen and anybody could arrive at the door at any minute.

Suffice it to say, the blog has arrived. It will not be very blogg-ish. But it will update what’s going on with HappenStance publications. It may also include some of my moans and groans, but at least they will be poetically expressed.

This weekend, The HappenStance Story Chapter 3 is to be completed somehow. Martin Reed’s forthcoming chapbook has now got a title: The Two-Coat Man. It’s not far from finished.

Gillian is thinking about The Two-Coat Man‘s cover design from some place in the depths of Forres where Jamie is playing a gig…

This is announcing a page, a presence, a mini-blag of bloggery, a little log of loggery, an amateur fog of foggery. But it is not a forgery.

In progress at HappenStance: Chapter 3 of the HappenStance Story and a new chapbook by Martin Reed. There will also be a meta-story (story about the story) about D A Prince’s book Nearly the Happy Hour by Colin Begg. Colin observed and commented on the process behind this publication as part of the work for his M Litt and has agreed to share the results with you. It’s lively, interesting and objective. Also it will quite soon be available as a free download. But not quite yet…

This weekend in the UK the hour changes. That is to say, there is an hour’s extra sleep on Saturday night, which is very welcome since we are approaching peak hibernation instinct. It’s been dark lately anyway, and wild and windy in Scotland. Anybody in their right mind would like an extra hour in bed once a year…