Year: 2009

Still plugging away at getting issue 10 of Sphinx together. The po-rating is SO complicated.

Bluechrome interview tied up though – really interesting. And I’ve been interviewing George Simmers in heroic couplets. Could that be a first? Oh probably not. Could be the best though.

Back to the grindstone. I feel like I’ll never ever get to the end, because of the other work I’ve been trying to do at the same time. Not HappenStance. Just day-job STUFF.

And I’ve joined Twitter. Now that is an odd phenomenon. Nell_Nelson is my twittering nomenclature. However, I can resist the impulse to tweet incessantly. I’m quite proud of my inner strength in that regard. Tweet.

 

 

 

There are times when you wonder about your own sanity in starting something that is really hard.

The Po-Rating Pilot (currently underway) is a bit like that.

Sphinx only reviews chapbooks/pamphlets. That’s because most magazines only review books, so it’s an attempt to restore the balance in favour of the flimsies. However, it is a very feeble attempt because for many pamphlets, the Sphinx review is the only one they will get. There might be the odd mini-reference or two-line review here and there, but chapbooks don’t get much attention generally.

That means the sole review can sound like the last word on the subject. Which, of course, it is not. It is just one reviewer’s opinion. And even Sphinx reviews are relatively short (about 300 words usually). Who writes an in-depth consideration of a 32-page booklet?

The Poetry Book Society, however, does select a pamphlet choice every quarter. It seems likely that the Chosen One is

• more widely read
• more widely (and more fully) reviewed.

However, that selection – from all the pamphlets submitted in triplicate – is made by only two poets. Again, not many people’s opinions weigh in the balance in this situation and, as we all know, the response to poetry is subjective. Even though nearly every single poetry editor says the sole criterion for selection is ‘quality’, nobody can agree (where poetry is concerned) how quality should be defined.

So I thought it would be interesting to see what happened if a pamphlet was run past a good number of readers, and in an attempt to make the judgement process a little less subjective and a little more transparent, those readers should have rating criteria — just like ice skating.  This would arrive at a rating result based on the feedback from all of them. I thought I’d try to get 10 because statistically speaking that makes it easy. I even thought a pamphlet might get a certain number of stripes, according to the readers’ reactions – so you could be rather proud of having published a five-stripe pamphlet but a lot less pleased about a two-striper. A one-striper will probably send me hate-mail.

So far, so theoretically reasonable. I drew up 10 criteria and restricted the readers to a maximum of twenty minutes with the publication (because in that time, I reckon, most people have either decided whether they find the chapbook interesting and would recommend it, or they have dumped it in the recycling bin. Besides, longer than that is asking too much of people who have another nine pamphlets to consider).

For each of the ten criteria (e.g. Typography, Cost, Overall Design, Quality of Writing, Originality etc), the reader had to award a rating between 1 and 5, with 1 as Ugh! and 5 as Yeay!

Each rating was done anonymously, but I asked for personal feedback on the process, and already some fascinating comments have come back. I’ve had time to reflect, too, and already I can see several things are quite wrong.

Out of my ten criteria, for example, four related to production quality and only three to the poetry itself. That can’t be right. The poems must be the most important thing – although in twenty minutes…?

So there should probably be five criteria, not ten (though definitely ten readers). And I wonder whether I should have suggested picking two poems and reading carefully – forming a judgement on that basis. The first and the last, maybe? Or simply the first two that caught the eye?

It’s already clear too that some of my raters are very sparing with their fives, while others are much more generous. But hey – isn’t that typical of any set of judges in any competitive set-up? It is the group assessment in this case that restores the overall balance. Maybe.

Think about it. How do you read a poetry publication – not as a reviewer, I mean, but as an ordinary reader. Don’t you pick it up, weigh it in your hand, decide whether you like the look and feel of it, flick through, look at a couple of poems and think either — ‘Oh yes, quite like the look of this…’ or ‘Oh no, life is too short’? This is complicated by other factors like whether you know the author, whether the pamphlet was a gift or a purchase, whether you have bought the pamphlet after a reading, whether you’re thinking of submitting your own poetry to the publisher and are comparing yours and theirs, whether you’re having a Bad Day or a Good Day, whether you really need to be somewhere else etc.

Anyway, the Po-Rating Pilot is in progress. Already I see other problems (not listed above) and also some very interesting results. I haven’t given up on this yet, despite the guddle and cost of posting things all over the place to people who post them back to me to post them, in haste, to someone else. The organisation is less than ideal because I am so busy. But eventually Sphinx 10 WILL be finished, and I’ll write more about this there.

[Re. being busy: the attempt to change my teaching from full-time to part-time has not only not worked yet, but has been complicated by another educational job that I’m also engaged in and also haven’t got time to do properly. So everything here is behind and I’m struggling more than somewhat. By April, things will be better. However, apologies if you are reading this and also waiting for a letter from me; sorry for being behind on Sphinx and behind on this year’s publications in general. I am not a person who defaults on deadlines, so I’m finding this painful. But it can’t be helped.]

 

Po Nott Rules.

 

Po Nott Rules.

 

At least it does in my book. I’ve always liked this little magazine and the current issue has contributions from no fewer than five of ‘my’ poets: Trish Ace, Martin Cook, Gill McEvoy, Matt Merritt and Martin Reed. (I think I have begun to collect Martins since I also published Martin Parker last year…)

Then there’s a review of D A Prince’s Nearly the Happy Hour by Ian Collinson. I liked the way he described ‘The Pig-Killing Knife’ as possessing “a delicate brutality”‘ though I think the collection may be rather more uneasy than he finds it. He opens with the issue of gender, an interesting one. Davina has always written under the gender-neutral D A Prince, which is, after all, her name, like C K Williams is his, like K D Laing hers.

Ian Collinson decides, though, that gender neutrality is not the reason for the D A in Prince because the poetry is “unashamedly feminine”. I daren’t go into a discussion of this because I will get myself into unashamedly feminine hot water, I’m afraid, but the name issue is interesting.

I had a submission recently from a poet who wrote gender-neutrally and signed himself using his initials so I couldn’t tell whether he was a he or a she. Actually the poems didn’t give much away either, though I thought the tone of the letter was probably male. I don’t mind not knowing whether the poems are by a man or a woman, but I do like a letter to be signed with a person’s first name, and I got a lot more comfortable all round, once I knew he was a he. All of this is probably very unreasonable.

I have a soft spot for (good) poems which could only have been written by a woman, which come from the heart of what being female is. The same is true for some poems by men. (I don’t mean they come from the heart of being female: I mean — shh, silly — from the heart of being male.) Of course, only a small number of poems in anybody’s repertoire could be described in that way, but it’s interesting when you find them, I think.

In my case, my writing name (Helena Nelson) is unashamedly feminine. My workaday name, after all, is Helen. That added ‘a’ puts me into the bracket of 18th century novel heroines, or at least I certainly hope it does. And it has a rhythm I prefer. However, it is a pen-name and over the years it has aroused some animosity from time to time from male writers and editors. They ask, from time to time, why I don’t use my ‘real’ name.

Such an interesting question! What is my real name? Yes, well. Beaton is my married name, and technically not only was it never mine, but now that I’m divorced it is onloan through an expired marriage certificate and many people would think I should have returned it long ago. Curry was my maiden name, but when I was growing up I was certain sure that Curry belonged to my father. Morton was my mother’s name (and also belonged to my cousins and uncles). I was never quite sure what I was. Some kind of Curry-Morton half-breed. But I was brought up expecting to get married, expecting to change my name into what would become my ‘real’ name and the name of my children.

Which I did for a bit. Then I mucked that up. And what on earth am I now? By email and in correspondence, friends call me Nell. So I figured I’d choose my own second name, one that could be the ‘real’ one. ‘Nelson’ is Nell’s own name. See? It all makes sense in an unashamedly confusing sort of way…

It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, I’ve been nurturing it for ages, working on the rating sheet and thinking it through.

Now, as usual, I’m beginning to wonder.

I spend quite a long time brooding, you see, and one of the things I brood about is awards and prizes. If you publish primarily pamphlets, as I do, it is quite hard to attract much attention to them. There is a quarterly Poetry Book Society ‘choice’, for which I always submit pamphlets in triplicate, but none of mine, so far, has merited being chosen.

Then there is Writer’s Forum Choice (which is nice because you get a logo, and nice because at least one of my pamphlets so far — Cliff Ashby’s A Few Late Flowers — has been selected) but I regret to say the  effect on sales is negligible.

And there’s the Callum McDonald Memorial Prize for pamphlets (Scotland only) which is a nice annual event, and one of my pamphlets (Margaret Christie’s The Oboist’s Bedside Book) was shortlisted for that last year, but again — only six worthy publications can make that shortlist annually. That’s not a lot of scope, especially when you consider how rarely pamphlets are reviewed and how widely they are not read.

Having said which, some pamphlets are read at least as widely as full-collections. But it would be nice for the best of them to get a bit more of an opportunity for accolade. So I decided to invent the Sphinx star-rating system, which then became a stripe rating system and now I’m not sure what it will be at all.

I may be influenced by working in a criterion-referenced (or at least it used to be) educational system. It often irks me that judgements are made about publications but nobody can see on  what basis the judgements were made. So I decided to draw up a set of criteria and then ask a whole group of people (not just three readers) to apply them and come up with a rating.

Does this not sound reasonable? Admirable, even? I think so.

But YOU try drawing up a set of criteria for judging a pamphlet of poetry, especially a set that have to be applied inside 20 minutes because otherwise nobody would have time to rate all the publications Im sending them…

I was quite pleased with the final rating sheet, actually. But now I’ve tried applying it myself and already I see another problem. I created 10 criteria with a rating of up to 5 for each. But the trouble is they are not all equally important. The typography, for example, is not as important as the words (unless it makes the words illegible). I am too weary to go into this in detail. Anyway, you’re already bored.

However, some of my long-suffering reviewers are about to receive requests in the post to take part in the pilot. I’ll write more about how it works, or doesn’t, later.

If you’re reading this, and you think you might be prepared to help (I’m not sure how yet), drop me an email. It is proving complicated and Sphinx 10, which is already behind its schedule, will probably drop even further behind as a result.

Nil Desperandum! Let’s see what the Sphinx thinx.

Colin Begg’s account of the production of D A Prince’s Nearly the Happy Hour (the first HappenStance book-length collection) is available for free download from the HappenStance shop.

 

Colin wrote this originally for part of his M Litt in Creative Writing in Glasgow. Here it’s lost some of its academic footnoting and is presented in a way that’s very readable. If you want to know what went on behind the scenes of this book, just nip into the shop and pick up a copy.

Colin (by the by) had a poem in Unsuitable Companions, the chapbook anthology of light verse, which is now out of print.

Comments welcome!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Patricia Ace (author of HappenStance chapbook First Blood) won a prize some time ago in the first ever Aesthetica Creative Works Competition.

 

 

That poem will now appear in the Aesthetica Annual, on sale at a bookshop or branch of W H Smiths near you. She was first among 97 overall finalists judged by Cherie Federico. The 2009 competition is now open for