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The Delve Tways of Crassless
sorry cakeless
The Delve Tways of Crassless
sorry cakeless
sherry useless
blurry glassles
cherry missmas
slurry gespiss
hurry upness
lost addresses—
Holy Moses—
marry postess
mistletoeness
very stressmas
merry kisslas
It’s here! Treasure Ground, the last publication of the year, finally done — and it looks gorgeous. I get very parental about all these productions but I am particularly pleased with this one. The collection is a sequence of connected pieces, all arising from day to day life on Woodlands Organic Farm, and it threads its way across the seasons. You need to read it from beginning to end (not, as I often do, backwards).
It’s here! Treasure Ground, the last publication of the year, finally done — and it looks gorgeous. I get very parental about all these productions but I am particularly pleased with this one. The collection is a sequence of connected pieces, all arising from day to day life on Woodlands Organic Farm, and it threads its way across the seasons. You need to read it from beginning to end (not, as I often do, backwards).
But Clare (happily for a typesetter) tends to write shortish texts which fit neatly inside one page. They don’t crowd their way down to the bottom line, and there’s space to start them well under the header. I mean, I know poetry is about sound and form and sense — not just how it meets the eye — but some people’s poems are so much easier to present well than others! And Robert, at Dolphin Press, found some lovely dark brown (nearly black) paper for the flyleaves: not a bad representation of the colour of Lincolnshire soil. . . .
Many things are a bit different this time. Lots of these poems originally went out inside vegetable boxes to Woodlands customers, and now 1800 flyers, flagging the appearance of the pamphlet, will go out the same way. It will be the most promoted of any of the pamphlets I’ve ever done — fascinating to see what the result will be. I do hope people who eat organic broccoli and cauliflower and parsnips and carrots will also want to send for (and read) the poems. I’m optimistic.
For some VERY annoying reason best known to technology, WordPress is resistant to my uploading a picture of Treasure Ground this morning. HTTP error, huh? It’s something to do with Mac not talking to WordPress, I think. Instead of scanning, I’ve just photographed it. That seems to work. Sigh.
This is the thing. When this web world works it’s wonderful. When it stops, what kind of ontological panic grips the world of the addict? I must have become an addict without knowing it. My server is Orange and on Friday night, orange not only didn’t rhyme with any other word, it didn’t work at all.
I reconnected every single connection, tested everything. Four account connection faults. Stupid me. The server was down. It’s happened before, but not for ages. Now it was good for me to have a whole night without checking emails, shop orders and that stupid Twitter feed. But did I feel good about it? No. I felt terrible. Like I had just been shut out of my mental home or something.
Yes, I ought to change my ISP. Like I should have changed my gas and electricity but didn’t. I did, however, change my car insurance this year, and the building and contents. Maybe . . .
It’s been cold this week. Not deep snow like in part of the States, but serious frost so you slip all over the place on your way out to the car.
It’s been cold this week. Not deep snow like in part of the States, but serious frost so you slip all over the place on your way out to the car.
I’ve been filling post boxes with packets again – issues of STORY 3 going hither and thither, as well as fresh orders to send out, and at this time of the year, the boxes are often already full of Christmas stuff. Friday night and much of Saturday was spent finishing and printing flyers and review slips and updating mailing lists and publications lists. How long it all takes! The subscriber Christmas mailshot is started but it’ll take a good number of hours yet to complete, and I haven’t begun on family and friends.
The last publication of the year, Clare Best’s Treasure Ground, is at the printer’s. Once that is away and the Christmas cards and presents are posted, I might have a day without working. Yeay! I forget how much time the brass tacks take up.
Anne Stevenson sent me a copy of the latest publication from Candlestick Press, The Twelve Poems of Christmas. What a lovely little pamphlet — a gorgeous cover. In some ways I associate anthologies with Christmas. Twice, as a child, I got lovely glossy backed anthologies then. How I loved them! That’s how I first met Charles Causley and Edwin Morgan — even Dylan Thomas and Charles Dickens, in extract. It was like getting treasure.
Which brings me back to Treasure Ground. . . . It really is.
Rob Mackenzie has posted a wonderful review of Mark Halliday’s pamphlet. What a delight.
Rob Mackenzie has posted a wonderful review of Mark Halliday’s pamphlet. What a delight.
It’s mega parcel time again – sending stuff all over the place, little packets of this that and the other. Another hundred quid to the local post office this morning. Stamp, stamp, stamp!
Laurna Robertson’s Sampler is done, and very nice it looks too. And Deborah Trayhurn’s Embracing Water, a sequence quite unlike anything I’ve ever published before. Little packets of them are fleeing hither and thither, to copyright libraries, authors, friends, family and early orderers.
It’s mega parcel time again – sending stuff all over the place, little packets of this that and the other. Another hundred quid to the local post office this morning. Stamp, stamp, stamp!
Laurna Robertson’s Sampler is done, and very nice it looks too. And Deborah Trayhurn’s Embracing Water, a sequence quite unlike anything I’ve ever published before. Little packets of them are fleeing hither and thither, to copyright libraries, authors, friends, family and early orderers.
And that Unread Squirrel is also home and dry. The card smells a bit funny, but it’ll wear off. I hope it doesn’t come as a disappointment to people who read and enjoyed the first Unsuitable Poems. This one is different: far more long poems, for a start. I’m aware that many of them are well-geared to poets rather than normal people. It’s because these verses spring out of real life: they’re reactions to stuff, and so much of my real life these days concerns poetry stuff that it’s practically impossible not to get unsuitable about it from time to time.
Today I had to buy more plastic boxes, big expensive ones. The problem of clean dry storage is expanding. And I must do some stock-taking. The accounts are up to December. The submissions box from August has finally been dealt with.
Tomorrow Clare Best’s Treasure Ground should be completed. It is a simply lovely collection of poems. That and the STORY competition anthology 3 are the last publications before Christmas. Watch out for the gorgeous Celestine Recipe.
Over Christmas I’ll be writing Love’s Labour’s Lost. Oops. Shakespeare already did that. I mean I’ll be doing the HappenStance Story Chapter 4, which will have a bit of Love’s Labour in it.
Next weekend is the Christmas postout to subscribers. Should have had that Chapter 4 in it, but at least it’ll be something to brighten the January gloom.
Ron King sent me a gorgeous photo of a red squirrel, so it’s going in here. This is a READ squirrel, as opposed to my Unread. It can also serve as a hurray for Red Squirrel Press, doing such good work.
This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!
This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!
This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!
It doesn’t rain in Midhurst apparently. Not like here. So we had a very nice time visiting beautiful gardens and I took our photograph on automatic through the teapots.
There was serious work going on too though. For some time, a pamphlet has been in hand called Night Brings Home the Crowes. Written by my mother (Kathleen Curry), it tells as much of the story as we can recover (from her memories and a few other sources) of the Crowe family — that’s my mother’s grandmother and her nine siblings. It will mainly be of interest to family, but there is some lovely period detail that others will also enjoy, I think.
Anyway, one of our tasks this week was careful proof-reading, page by page, and collecting a few more photographs to go in. The publication, with luck, will be finished and go to the printer this week.
And yet another publication under scrutiny this weekend has been my own next collection, which John Lucas of Shoestring Press is publishing. It’s due some time in the autumn – perhaps October – and although I got it together, more or less, a good few months ago (in fact, last summer, I think), I put off finalising it until the ultimatum came.
Which it did, while I was dipping in and out of A Field of Large Desires, an anthology of Greville Press poems, brought out just a few months ago by Carcanet (I thoroughly recommend it — the contents are different from anything you will find elsewhere). Astbury’s Greville Press is, of course, chiefly and justifiably renowned for poetry pamphlets. In the preface to this book-length volume, Grey Gowrie says,
Poems are best read [ . . . ] with but few of their fellows. The great collections of great poets are useful for reference but hell to read. A slim vol is okay; a pamphlet best of all.
Increasingly, I agree. My Shoestring Press book will be a slim volume, but even at that, it’s weighing down the world with more poetry. I hope Plot and Counterplot justifies its place. We’ll see. When your main task has come to be publishing other people’s work, you end up feeling bizarrely guilty writing poems yourself. Like counselling people to smoke less, while cultivating your own cigar habit on the side.
Anyway, this week I’ll also be working on the Thomas Hardy pamphlet, amongst other things. Thankfully, the submission period is now over, so letters to poets are off the agenda, unless they’re poets in progress, as it were. I’ve been amused to find that several people have congratulated me for publishing Selima Hill’s winning pamphlet, which of course I did not. I haven’t even seen it: it hasn’t come in to Sphinx for review. Speaking of which, there are a couple of reviews nearly ready to go up too. Another task for today.
I’ll conclude with a bit of James Reeves (another under-rated poet) from the Greville Press Anthology. It’s titled ‘The Prisoners’, and every second line should be indented, but I can’t make WordPress do that for me (if anyone reading this knows how, please tell me):
Somehow we never escaped
Into the sunlight,
Though the gates were always unbarred
And the warders tight.
For the sketches on the walls
Were to our liking,
And squeaks from the torture-cell
Most satisfying.
Or actually the other way around: cracking up with Cracking On.
There’s at least one in every publication: in the last issue of Sphinx I now know there’s at least two, no — three.
In my editorial, there’s ‘arrive’ with one ‘r’: Christmas is due to arive shortly.
Worse is the Grey Hen progress interview. I started the problem by asking Joy Howard about her new anthology, Cracking Up. Only of course, it isn’t called Cracking Up, it is called Cracking ON. She politely pointed this out and I corrected the error. As I thought.
Or actually the other way around: cracking up with Cracking On.
There’s at least one in every publication: in the last issue of Sphinx I now know there’s at least two, no — three.
In my editorial, there’s ‘arrive’ with one ‘r’: Christmas is due to arive shortly.
Worse is the Grey Hen progress interview. I started the problem by asking Joy Howard about her new anthology, Cracking Up. Only of course, it isn’t called Cracking Up, it is called Cracking ON. She politely pointed this out and I corrected the error. As I thought.
I failed to notice that the title came into the interview four times and I corrected only two of them. Here is some of what I should have said:
Your forthcoming anthology, Cracking On, focuses on the theme of aging. Could that be something most people want not to think about?
Yes and no. Recently, the topic of ageing is getting a higher profile in the media, which indicates that people (and we live in a society where an ageing population is on the increase) are more open to thinking about it. The contributors to Cracking On both celebrate age, overturn expectations about older women, and confront the reality of the approaching end of life. Insight, humour and courage are always inspiring, but especially so when thinking about aging.
Cracking On is the sequel to A Twist of Malice (a cracking good anthology by the way).
Phew. Please take a look at Katy Evans-Bush (Baroque in Hackney) on Gary McKinnon. It is chilling. Poets can and should get political in such circumstances.
Meanwhile, I’m back to getting more of the Sphinx tripartite reviews online. It is slow. I think it’s worth it, but slow. The process goes like this:
I’m not suggesting for one moment that there aren’t still occasional errors, but you can see why it takes a long time to do this. Even just the shift from three Word docs to ready on line takes me about three-quarters of an hour per review. Labour of love, or what?
It is quite fascinating. I know and respect all my reviewers. Quite often all three come in with a broadly similar rating and response, although some are slightly kinder than others, and I end up feeling — yes — this must represent a fair judgement of this publication.
But then I look at another one — sometimes with the same three reviewers — and two of them vary dramatically. One has found the publication awful, almost impossible to tolerate; another thinks it is wonderful. How very interesting! I know that my reviewers take quite a while to come up with their responses: these people have READ the poems and thought about them carefully. And yet . . .
What does this say about poetry? Such a dramatic variation. What does it say?
Or actually the other way around: cracking up with Cracking On.
There’s at least one in every publication: in the last issue of Sphinx I now know there’s at least two, no — three.
In my editorial, there’s ‘arrive’ with one ‘r’: Christmas is due to arive shortly.
Worse is the Grey Hen progress interview. I started the problem by asking Joy Howard about her new anthology, Cracking Up. Only of course, it isn’t called Cracking Up, it is called Cracking ON. She politely pointed this out and I corrected the error. As I thought.
I failed to notice that the title came into the interview four times and I corrected only two of them. Here is some of what I should have said:
Your forthcoming anthology, Cracking On, focuses on the theme of aging. Could that be something most people want not to think about?
Yes and no. Recently, the topic of ageing is getting a higher profile in the media, which indicates that people (and we live in a society where an ageing population is on the increase) are more open to thinking about it. The contributors to Cracking On both celebrate age, overturn expectations about older women, and confront the reality of the approaching end of life. Insight, humour and courage are always inspiring, but especially so when thinking about aging.
Cracking On is the sequel to A Twist of Malice (a cracking good anthology by the way).
Phew. Please take a look at Katy Evans-Bush (Baroque in Hackney) on Gary McKinnon. It is chilling. Poets can and should get political in such circumstances.
Meanwhile, I’m back to getting more of the Sphinx tripartite reviews online. It is slow. I think it’s worth it, but slow. The process goes like this:
I’m not suggesting for one moment that there aren’t still occasional errors, but you can see why it takes a long time to do this. Even just the shift from three Word docs to ready on line takes me about three-quarters of an hour per review. Labour of love, or what?
It is quite fascinating. I know and respect all my reviewers. Quite often all three come in with a broadly similar rating and response, although some are slightly kinder than others, and I end up feeling — yes — this must represent a fair judgement of this publication.
But then I look at another one — sometimes with the same three reviewers — and two of them vary dramatically. One has found the publication awful, almost impossible to tolerate; another thinks it is wonderful. How very interesting! I know that my reviewers take quite a while to come up with their responses: these people have READ the poems and thought about them carefully. And yet . . .
What does this say about poetry? Such a dramatic variation. What does it say?
I had to be at a meeting in Glasgow early yesterday. I struggled off the train at Queen Street with the last huge carrier bag of Sphinxes, which I put into the big round red postbox near the ticket office. Dunnit! Oh, what nice things Ross Bradshaw said about it on his very interesting Five Leaves blog. I am grateful . . .
I had to be at a meeting in Glasgow early yesterday. I struggled off the train at Queen Street with the last huge carrier bag of Sphinxes, which I put into the big round red postbox near the ticket office. Dunnit! Oh, what nice things Ross Bradshaw said about it on his very interesting Five Leaves blog. I am grateful . . .
I had to be at a meeting in Glasgow early yesterday. I struggled off the train at Queen Street with the last huge carrier bag of Sphinxes, which I put into the big round red postbox near the ticket office. Dunnit! Oh, what nice things Ross Bradshaw said about it on his very interesting Five Leaves blog. I am grateful . . .
So things are picking up, though not up enough. The Unread Squirrel and Laurna Robertson’s Sampler are with Dolphin Press (Liz and Robert, the printers). Deborah Trayhurn’s mock-up has been out to her, has swiftly returned for the final tweaks and should go to Liz and Robert tomorrow. Clare Best will be doing the last bits on hers this week, though Gill hasn’t done the cover for that one yet.
Meanwhile, finally the STORY winners anthology is in first draft form. Just assembling the bio and about to send copy back to authors to check. Such an interesting set of stories. Extracts will also go onto the website shortly. Gill has got images to work with: here’s the remit. One bear (the kind that has got a collar round its neck and gets lead round on a chain); one dentist’s mirror; one cake; and last (and hardest) something that suggests riches, or maybe a shower of golden coins.
The big thing in the background is the accounts. Each year they get more complicated and seem to balance less! However, although it is going to be impossible this year to get Chapter 4 out before Christmas, the cards (Christmas cards) are done and there is a box of beautiful red envelopes.
So today’s tasks: tie up Embracing Water, get another couple of reviews ready on the website if humanly possible, check new reviews that have come in, do the STORY extracts, send pdfs to authors, think about flyers, update the ‘in print’ list, do the next month of accounts. Oh somehow will have to get to a supermarket . . .
Sphinxes have been going in envelopes all week, but only in little showers of about a dozen at a time, packeted late at night. So I’m up to letter L. If you haven’t had yours yet, you’re either at the wrong end of the alphabet, or you’re in the ‘wild card’ list. (Don’t ask.)
Sphinxes have been going in envelopes all week, but only in little showers of about a dozen at a time, packeted late at night. So I’m up to letter L. If you haven’t had yours yet, you’re either at the wrong end of the alphabet, or you’re in the ‘wild card’ list. (Don’t ask.)
I must have sounded a bit pathetic last week since lots of people sent sympathy messages. Sorry. It’s the time of year plus the realisation that all I want to make happen isn’t possible. But what’s new? It’s always been like that for me. Reminds me of the truly dreadful lyrics, made known to all by Frank Sinatra in My Way(which my mother calls The Egotist’s Anthem): ‘There were times / I’m sure you knew / When I bit off / More than I could chew”. I won’t quote the truly awful next bit. In any case, I’m still chewing.
Laurna’s Sampler is done and will go to the printer on Monday. It’s looking very nice indeed and will be on the table at the SPL Christmas pamphlet fair in early December.
I haven’t mentioned the follow-up pamphlet of “more unsuitable” poems of my own, titled The Unread Squirrel, because each time I’ve started work on it, I’ve had to stop again. But I arrived at something which will become a pamphlet late last night. It has a lovely cover! I’ll to be the first in the Po-Lite series. I have another suitable (or not unsuitable) poetry collection more or less ready too, but that won’t be published by me, and not for some time, so I won’t say anything more about it yet.
For those who wonder where I find the time to do this as well as everything else, I don’t. I write poems rarely, and current collections have been assembling themselves over the last eight years, but I think that’s no bad thing. The world is full of poems and poets. It’s analogous to chocolate: I like one or two best quality, expensive chocolates regularly, but the sheer volume of chocolaterie in the shops makes me queasy.
The second PoLite will be from Martin Parker next year, and there’s a third in the pipe-line for 2011 but I won’t reveal the author yet.
Light verse is hard to sell, harder than the heavy kind. That’s because people’s tastes vary so much. What one person thinks is hilarious, wholly fails to amuse another. I myself am terribly difficult to please, I fear. I think poet-in-performance can often make a tour de force of a poem which falls flat on the page. I include my own work in this.
Deborah Trayhurn and Clare Best will be the the first two in the Sequences series. There is nothing Lite about their work but there is a wonderful quality of Light in both these sets of poems.
The STORY winners pamphlet is still not typeset but that’s the next thing on the list.
In the background, there are a lot of Sphinx reviews waiting to go on the website, but because they are assembled in threes, it’s slow getting them there. They have to be edited for formatting consistency and so on, checked by their authors; the stripe rating has to be worked out; then it’s all transferred into an InDesign document, and from there to the website. And there are a lot of them. In fact, a whean of them are about to go up, God willing.
I haven’t done the flyers. I haven’t updated the sales list. I haven’t even registered these publications. (Note to self: do that today.)
Kevin Bailey (editor of HQ Quarterly and generally a remarkable person — see final issue of Sphinx due next Spring) has been sending me inspirational pictures of worlds afar: he has an amazing telescope. They are very calming, so I’m adding one.
Well, I do find it usually. Somehow. However, this week I’ve hit one of those less positive phases. I am not going to manage to do all the things I need to do before Christmas. Not quite sure which of them is going to go, but something will.
Well, I do find it usually. Somehow. However, this week I’ve hit one of those less positive phases. I am not going to manage to do all the things I need to do before Christmas. Not quite sure which of them is going to go, but something will.
I picked up the red Sphinx — issue 11 — from Levenmouth Printers. Looks lovely despite the fact that a misspelled ‘arive’ somehow stared me right in the face as soon as I opened the first page. Typical. I must remember to use the spellcheck as well as checking and proof-reading and going generally demented.
Last week was very pressurised with over two days of SQA work (neither college, nor HappenStance) and so despite best efforts, I have only posted out ten Sphinxes, though I do have the stamps, the envelopes, the labels etc ready downstairs. The other 140 will follow during the week and between other things. Sometimes one has to sleep.
I set off to Glasgow very early yesterday morning to a meeting, did one set of college marking on the train, read half of Lung Soup by Andrew Elliott for the third time (it’s the hardest book, without exception, that I have ever had the privilege of reviewing) on the way back, then popped in to see my old friend Stewart in hospital.
Stewart, who is in the process of shuffling off his mortal coil (I have never really known what that meant — I wonder why a ‘coil’?), has been a stalwart supporter of HappenStance from the start. Until his health started to weaken substantially, he came to every author launch in Scotland and brought other people with him and bought books. He was a grand friend to me, a grand friend.
I have just looked up ‘mortal coil’. Apparently in Shakespeare’s day ‘coyle’ meant fuss or bustle. So that’s what I’m going back to right now: the fuss and bustle of my trauchled day. I thought I’d look up ‘trauchle’ too, which is a Scots word. If you’re trauchled you’re dragged down or burdened by the daily grind, or that’s certainly how I use the word. Googling it led me to Wordie.
Now this is the internet for you. It takes over your life. One marvellous link after another can leave you untrauchled, but also no further forward whatsoever.
p.s. Stewart left us at about half past ten this morning, while I was writing about him on this page. It was a pleasure and a privilege knowing him. He had a marvellous turn of phrase, and that was only one of the things I loved . . .