2011 – Page 3 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

NOT MOUNT PARNASSUS

I made two firm offers to poets during July’s reading window. What did they have that the others didn’t?

There’s no straightforward answer. All the same, sending poetry to someone like me is not like entering a raffle. I want specific things, and I try to tell people what they are.

But not everybody looks on the web or finds out much about the publisher before they pack up their poems and post them. Not everybody reads blogs like this one. Why should they? I was the same myself once, so it’s something I understand. But in terms of getting published, it’s a mistake.

If I offer to do a publication for a poet, I’m committing to spending several hundred quid and two weeks. That’s a big commitment. It’s invariably a privilege to work with a poet, so I don’t want to suggest I’m totally noble. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t get an incredible buzz out of it. But the buzz is not about money or glory or fame. It’s about poetry.

So yes, there are specific things I look for.

Namely, poems I want to carry in my head and then type out word by word. That’s my way of trying them on, like a dress or a jumper. This won’t apply to the whole submission of course, but there’ll be at least a couple of poems I’ve fallen for and want to share.

Behind the poems, there’ll be someone I like the sound of. I’m likely to get that impression from the covering letter. It will be personal and it will tell me something about them. I’ll have the feeling I’d like to work with that person.

The person will be dedicated. This is a hard thing to measure. Raving about poetry in your life is not the same as dedication. I think dedication is less showy. It’s about reading and learning, studying poetry and absorbing it, drinking it in, thinking about it in depth. Not your own—other people’s.

The person will have chosen to send poems to HappenStance for a reason, not just as one of a lucky-bag of publishers to apply to. They’ll have read some of my publications and noticed something about the enterprise and the values. They’re likely to be a subscriber. Not everyone would want a publication handled by me: I can be really annoying.

The person will have been interacting in the poetry business for a while—sending poems out to worthy publications, noting the feedback, learning. They’ll welcome constructive feedback. They’ll understand a bit about how things work these days, including online things, and they’ll have given some thought to the matter of readership (sorry to talk HORRIBLE jargon) and sales.

But there’s no perfect formula, only various routes up a modest little hill. It isn’t Mount Parnassus: that’s a myth. And sending poetry to me is not a one-way journey with success or failure at the end. Mostly I give some feedback, which I hope people will think about. If they feel what I’ve said is inappropriate (which it’s bound to be in some cases), they’ll know I’m not the publisher for them. There are other imprints, and new ones keep emerging. I update my list regularly (free download in the HappenStance shop).

And if I like the sound of the poet, I hope they’ll keep in touch. Not necessarily because I’ll ever publish their work, but because I’m interested – interested in poets and their activities, interested in poetry and what it’s up to in the second decade of century number 21.

So if you’re thinking of sending me poems in December, which will be on us before we know it –

The beginning of the month is better than the end. By the end, I’ve run out of steam and I’m in process of struggling to shut that window. And sending the work early, so I can save it till the reading window opens, is a Bad Idea.

Please don’t include recommendations from other poets. I’m beginning to think people must be advised to do this by some experts somewhere because it’s happening increasingly. Stuff the experts. If your covering letter tells me Seamus Heaney thinks your poems are ‘remarkable’, it will only put me off.

If some of the poems included have been published in magazines already, it’s useful to know what was printed where, and useful to know the range of magazines you’ve had work in. I don’t need a complete list of every poem you’ve ever had printed.

Avoid mentioning numbers. I don’t care how many poems you’ve written or had published. I only care whether you’ve written three good ones. Besides, I’m biased in favour of people who write fewer . . .

Keep the type-face plain. Make it big enough for me to read but not huge (take a look at one of my pamphlets and go for something similar).

Keep the type-face the same size and spacing throughout, not bigger on some pages and smaller than others.

Name and address on every sheet, not stapled, not bound. If there’s a particular order you prefer, that’s fine. I will read them in the order you present them.

The submission guidelines suggest I’ll read between 12 and 20 poems. Twelve is better than 20, unless your poems are very short. If I like them, I’ll ask for more.

Please don’t think I am a Poetry Person of Power. I am small beer doing my best in straitened circumstances. While I’m reading my way carefully through your submission, I’m also worrying about sales. If the current pamphlets don’t sell well, I won’t be able to publish yours anyway. . . . so if you want to help keep things going, buy one now!

SQUANDERING YOUR WEALTH ON POEMS

Ah yes, well. Please buy some HappenStance pamphlets. You know you want them. Sigh.

When I was doing my gargantuan roof re-allocation and filing my assembled books and papers last week, I also tackled the poetry magazines.

I’ve been buying poetry magazines in quantity since 1991, and keeping nearly all of them. Occasionally I’ve given some away, or lent some and not got them back. I lent a former student 20 Mslexias, for example, and was really annoyed when they weren’t returned. Now I’m glad.

Why? Because I couldn’t bear to take all the poetry magazines up to the roof, and I certainly couldn’t keep them all downstairs. Quite apart from the dust, they were taking up two whole bookcases, a bag, two boxes and some of the floor — and making me sneeze.

HAIKU SNEEZE BY GILLIAN ROSE

So I filed and boxed and labelled sets of Ambit, The SHOp, The Rialto, PN Review, Tin Hat, Seam, Stand, The Frogmore Papers (what lovely covers they have), The London Magazine (Sebastian Barker’s version), Chapman, The Interpreter’s House (Merryn Williams’ version), Poetry Nottingham which has turned into Assent, Obsessed With Pipework, Poetry London, Other Poetry, Poetry, Mimesis, Anon, DreamCatcher, Tears in the Fence, Deliberately Thirsty and a number of others, some of them long defunct.

I kept on my shelves all my Dark Horses and Smiths Knolls, because I’m fond of them and they have spines. At least I can find the others in the roof, if I need to.

I still had a large bag of Mslexias, other writing magazines, some ‘How to write’ books, a Writers and Artists YearBook etc. So I advertised them on Freecyle for budding writers. I threw a few poetry magazines in too. They were picked up within forty-eight hours, and the writer who came to collect them took a rooted sprig of the plant by the front door which I thought was spirea but isn’t.

I stacked another huge bag with poetry magazines – doublers of issues I’d had poems in. A lovely range of publications. Particularly good ones, naturally, since they all had my poems in them somewhere.

And confession time: I regularly read Stephen King for escape. He’s my adult Enid Blyton. As recently as yesterday I was gobbling his latest set of short stories. But by and large, I don’t read the King novels twice (his short stories are another matter). Besides, they’re all in second hand bookshops and holiday cottages the length of the land. So I made up a bag of King novels too, and put that on Freecyle. (That freed up two more shelves of a bookcase for . . . er . . . poetry.)

Stephen King? Five Freecyclers wanted him immediately. One had a boyfriend with a broken leg, who was desperate for reading matter. I hope he doesn’t read Misery. One loved the Master of the Dark Half but couldn’t afford him. And so on . . . I wanted to give my Stephen Kings to them all.

Poetry magazines? Not one reply. Not one nibble. So I tried again. In superb condition, hardly (if at all) read, a range of magazines, ideal for poets or writing groups.

Not a squeak. Not a murmur.

It was with pain that I heaved them into the paper skip at what used to be called The Dump but is now the Community Recycling Centre. But it’s them or me, and I want my life back. One copy suffices, and though I could eventually have found a home for them, everything’s eventual (as Stephen King says).

There’s a message in this, people, though you knew it already. The Constant Reader is not reading poetry. And certainly not poetry magazines. Poetry magazines are for a bunch of nutters. I am one of them. You may be one, too, if you’re reading this.

No wonder it’s hard to sell poetry pamphlets. No wonder I had a tax rebate last year of over four hundred quid.

Not that I’m putting any HappenStance pamphlets on Freecycle. Not yet, that is. Grrrr.

HOW TO GET YOUR POEMS STOLEN

I’ve never knowingly stolen anybody’s poem but I can see how I could.

Both my arms this week came out in red blotches and my legs are still covered in little bruises, particularly just above the knee. Why? Because I’ve been dusting, that’s why.

The dusting didn’t cause the bruises but I think it made my arms blotchy, because I’ve stopped dusting now and the blotches have gone away. It was carrying the boxes and bags up the ladder that bruised my legs.

I’ve been reading and responding to poetry submissions every day, and after that I’ve been trying to make sufficient space to live in. Last week-end, a floor was finally put into our roof, and this was a marvellous opportunity to file the archives under the rafters.

HappenStance generates a huge amount of paper. I keep a fat wallet of papers and correspondence for every publication (there have been about 110 of them so far). Then there are the publisher’s copies – boxes of them, the business correspondence, the accounts. Oh dear me. And the publications themselves.

Latterly it wasn’t actually possible to get into the ‘spare’ bedroom and the space beneath the stairs was not a space. There were also boxes of flyers and pamphlets in the sitting room, and the submissions box was in the conservatory, which leaks.

I firmly believe the physical environment in which I work corresponds closely with my mental territory. Clutter, clutter, clutter.

It took five days to move all the stuff, put it into boxes, label them, carry them into different parts of the roof, dust and re-order the books which stretch from floor to ceiling on three walls, as well as on seven other bookcases. I’m not a great duster normally. Spiders like me.

But it’s done, and at last I can think more clearly. One eerie thought is uppermost: the next person to open these boxes is not particularly likely to be me. Most of my files will only be examined, if they are examined at all, after I am gone.

In fact, one of the motivating factors for the labeling of things was the thought that my poor children would be overwhelmed with the stuff. And even if they offered most of the HappenStance files to the National Library (which may not want them, let’s face it), the librarians would quail. We’re approaching an age of electronic files. What was H Nelson doing with all this PAPER?

Back to the stolen poems. I had a huge box of personal correspondence under the table to my left. The box had plastic wallets of letters and poems from various people and it sat underneath the wire basket in which I collect paper for recycling. A lot of it.

Originally the correspondence box, which was very large and dated back to the late 1990s, had a sort of filing system, in that I did keep letters by person, in a polywallet (or two) for each correspondent.

But as time went on, and pressure built up, I started just to stuff papers into the box, with a person’s latest communication somewhere near their polywallet, but not in it, because the wallet was full.

Opening this box was fascinating, of course, though also lamentable because I knew I should have done it all better, and the pages of some letters had become separated from themselves, and I simply hadn’t time to marry them all up again. There were cards with illegible signatures: I had no idea who had sent them, or when, because they weren’t dated. I found an old poem of my own, copied out in my mother’s handwriting – I think I wrote it when I was at school. Nobody but me would know what it was.

I found a Valentine poem written by my mother, unsigned. I think she may well have forgotten she ever wrote it. But at least I know.

Several other poems had become detached from the letters that once accompanied them. Most of them had names on them, so I could file them with the letters of their authors. But there were a few with no name, no address, no date.

I sat on the floor on the landing, surrounded by a scattering of unnamed poems. In three cases, I thought I might have written them myself, but I’m not sure. There were two I really liked. I wrote an awful lot of poems once. Were they mine? Or whose were they?

I suggest to poets sending in submissions they should add their name and address to every sheet. Often it’s the tried and tested poets who are most resistant to this idea. They believe nobody will treat their valuable poems carelessly or drop them on the floor or misfile them, or remove them from the annoying red binder. They are wrong. Ultimately poems are no more than dust collectors.

And tomorrow, more will arrive.

I did the decent thing with the author-less poems that could have been mine. I put them in the paper bin. Honestly.

James Thurber cartoon

STUFF AND NONSENSE

The number of poetry submissions has vastly exceeded all previous reading months. Help!

It’s interesting and it’s difficult. I read each one, each poem, carefully, even if it’s apparent from page two that it’s not a go-er. Then I read them again and scribble pencil notes on the pages. Then I write a letter or card to the poet trying to explain my response.

I wish I could, with my own poems, see immediately how the real poem begins at line 6, or the last line needs to go. I would be a better poet if I could.

I’m interested in the person behind the poems. Perhaps that’s why I do this. I think it’s teaching me something, though I’m never quite sure what. When I find out, perhaps I’ll stop.

I’m already over-committed this year. I’ve taken on more publications than I can cope with, in terms of time and actually money too. While I was away on holiday in the first few days of the month, I resolved not to let it get out of hand in 2012.

However, my schedule for next year is already intimidating, which means I’m looking at 2013. And what I hope, each time I open another envelope, is that there’ll be good reasons to knock back the submission. Yes, I love it, but yes, I’m crumbling.

Generally, reading poetry submissions is just like reading books of poetry. By and large, you like a poem here and there, or you think they’re well made but not to your taste. Then one comes along and knocks your socks off – but that’s rare. If I knew what it was, what the secret thing was that makes this happen, I would tell you. “If I could tell you, I would let you know,” as R D Laing, who knocked my socks off once, says, though I think he was quoting Auden.

There was one like this yesterday. I’ve been doing about seven a day, which is incredibly hard work – the hardest unpaid work I’ve ever done, bar none. Officially, I only give detailed feedback to HappenStance subscribers, who with their annual £7.50 keep the press afloat, but unofficially I do it for nearly everybody, hoping wistfully they’ll at least buy something afterwards, maybe subscribe. They probably won’t – not after they’ve read my comments on their syntax.

Meanwhile, we have two men (family members) upstairs flooring the roof. Somehow we have to create more space for the files and archives and boxes of STUFF that are taking over the whole house. It’s completely out of hand. I wish I was worth half as much as Wendy Cope.

However, before they started work in the roof, we had to bring down all the boxes that were already up there. The dust! In our bedroom, the spare bedroom and my study, everything’s stacked with STUFF, dusty stuff – the sort of stuff you daren’t start looking at because it’s your diary from 1972 and you’ll get dragged in. I’m typing in a little space in the middle of STUFF.

The door to my study is open because it won’t shut now. So over my shoulder I can see the silver extending ladder with red feet that stretches up into the loft space, the hot little loft space in which Graham and Mike have been coughing, hammering and working away. They haven’t arrived yet but they’ll be here any moment. Then I’m off to the conservatory, where I’ll sit and read in the dry corner, contemplating the row of bowls set out to catch the drips from the leaks. It’s very upmarket here, you know. I haven’t done any ironing for ten days, my hair’s a mess. Who cares? July rain gleaming on the leaves, pattering on the glass:

…….Elephants get sprayed with it
…….Scotch is made with it
…….Water
…….I like that stuff

as Adrian Mitchell said. Even tortured by poetry and dust, it’s all part of the same stuff, the stuff of living and being rained on. I can hear his voice through the rain, old man rhythm:

…….Well, I like that stuff
…….Yes I like that stuff”
…….The earth
…….Is made of earth
…….And I like that stuff

THREE NEW PUBLICATIONS, AND MORE ON SIR JOHN . . . .

Three new pamphlets are cooked to a turn for July reading, but also read on for a post script to last week’s J C Squire entry.

Lydia Fulleylove’s Notes on Sea and Land really does have a lot of sea in it, in the best possible sense. And the sea is subtle, personable and female: “I wait for her, stroked by early heat, / an arrow dance of seagull feet.”

Crossing the Ellipsis, by Lorna Dowell, stretches the boundaries. Do you, like me, ever swim in your local pool? If so, you mustn’t miss the vicious early-morning swimmer in ‘Measures’. There’s preoccupation with communication, and the lack of it in most of these poems: “you lie in your sleep / in a speech bubble / it’s too dark to read.”

And then there’s Michael Loveday, editor of 14 Magazine, who presents his first collection: He said / She said. The tension of opposites is at the forefront: male/female, English/Polish, secret/public, forgetting/remembering: “have you got / the can’t forget / don’t forget / the can’t forget.”

So don’t . . . forget. You’ll find these in the online shop (with sample poems), or send for all or any by post if you prefer, enclosing a cheque (they are £4.00 each):

HappenStance
21 Hatton Green
Glenrothes
Fife
Scotland
KY7 4SD

And on another tack – the J C Squire blog entry last week produced some lovely responses, D A Prince pointed out that the ‘one liner’ I mentioned is in fact a line from a whole comic poem, The Ballade of Soporific Absorption, which happily can be found on line, because I can’t find it in any of my Squire volumes. Wonderful.

Another response was from George Simmers quoting ‘If Gray had had to write his elegy in the cemetery of Spoon River instead of in that of Stoke Poges’. It’s originally from the volume Tricks of the Trade, a satirical collection in which 10 poems are grouped under the title ‘How they would have done it’.

The poem George quotes (thank you, George!) is also titled ‘If Gray had written Spoon River Anthology’, and like all parodies, it partly depends not only on your knowledge of Gray (which is probable, since the elegy is still widely anthologized) but also on your acquaintance with the American poet Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915) – perhaps fairly unlikely. Squire almost certaintly didn’t think much of Spoon River (though parody can be a form of compliment), and you may note he has a passing swipe at Masefield, whom he also held in dubious regard, see his parody of ‘The Everlasting Mercy’ in the same volume (it’s actually a parody of how Masefleld would have written Dorothy Heman’s poem, often known as ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’).

It’s a sad (to me, anyway) thought that Squire, who was a brilliant parodist, could write in the style of practically anybody, and produce huge mirth. Now it’s hard to believe a) anybody could do this and b) readers would be sufficiently well-read to get the joke.

In any case, Hemans’ poem celebrates the tale of young Giocante, son of the French commander Casabianca, who heroically remained at his post on deck of the French ship Orient, during the Battle of the Nile in 1798, as his father had instructed him, until the ship blew up.

Here’s a bit of Hemans:

The flames rolled on – he would not go
Without his Father’s word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.

He called aloud – ‘Say, Father, say
If yet my task is done?’
He knew not that the chieftain lay
Unconscious of his son.

‘Speak, father!’ once again he cried,
‘If I may yet be gone!’
And but the booming shots replied,
And fast the flames rolled on.

And here’s a bit of Masefield:

Up go the winders, out come heads,
I heard the springs go creak in beds;
But still I heave and sweat and tire,
And still the clang goes “Fire, Fire!”
“Where is it, then? Who is it, there?
You ringer, stop, and tell us where.”
“Run round and let the Captain know.”
“It must be bad, he’s ringing so,”
“It’s in the town, I see the flame;
Look there! Look there, how red it came.”
“Where is it, then? O stop the bell.”
I stopped and called: “It’s fire of hell;
And this is Sodom and Gomorrah,
And now I’ll burn you up, begorra.”

And finally, here’s Squire doing Hemans in the style of Masefield:

Dogs barked, owls hooted, cockerels crew,
As in my works they often do
When, flagging with my main design,
I pad with a descriptive line.
Young Cassy cried again: “Oh damn!
What an unhappy put I am!
Will nobody go out and search
For dad, who’s left me in the lurch?
For dad, who’s left me on the poop,
For dad, who’s left me in the soup,
For dad who’s left me on the deck.
Perhaps it’s what I should expeck
Considerin’ ’ow he treated me
Before I came away to sea.

[You might want to know that Masefield shocked readers when ‘The Everlasting Mercy’ was published because it contained words like ‘Damn’ and ‘Bloody’, as well as passages in the vernacular. And though I am a Masefield supporter, Squire has a point. Several, actually.]

ps For your homework this week, rewrite the first section of In Memoriam in the style of one of the following:

UNDER

I woke up thinking about a poem. For some reason, it isn’t well known, though I can’t think why not.

The author is J C Squire, Sir John Collings Squire, a trouble-maker of superior order in his day. An anti-modernist. A ‘Georgian’. A heavy drinker.

His own band of followers were known as ‘the Squirearchy’. They sat, in metaphorical terms, on the opposite bank to the Bloomsbury group, although he certainly published some of them in The London Mercury, during his 15 years of editorship.

You can see some lovely photographs of him in the online collection of the National Portrait Gallery. He was clearly fond of stripey blazers. He was known for his antagonism towards current trends in poetry and he was enthusiastic about cricket.

His Wikipedia entry is dodgy. Obviously nobody has taken sufficient interest in him to do it well, though under ‘Reputation’ it does tell us ‘he is generally credited with the one-liner I am not so think as you drunk I am‘. It is all a long time ago. The literary squabbles of those days (in which JCS certainly played his role) are largely forgotten, just as the literary squabbles of today will be.

Knighted in 1933 (I don’t know why — perhaps services to literature?), he loved poetry and knew a lot about it. He wrote several volumes of poems himself, most of them forgettable, as is true for most of us. He also penned some extremely clever parodies – and given that he’s credited with being ‘Georgian’, he’s remarkably good at mocking some of the features of that period, and indeed the features of any period.

He was astute, witty and . . . wrote one poem at least I shan’t forget. Technically, this is in copyright but I feel the dead Sir John would sit up in his grave cheerfully at the thought of being read.

So what do you make of this? It is from Poems, First Series published by Martin Secker in 1918, when the author would have been only 34, but feeling much older. Thanks to his poor eye-sight, he had survived the Great War. Many of his contemporaries had not.

UNDER

In this house, she said, in this high second storey,
In this room where we sit, over the midnight street,
There runs a rivulet, narrow but very rapid,
Under the still floor and your unconscious feet.

The lamp on the table made a cone of light
That spread to the base of the walls: above was in gloom.
I heard her words with surprise; had I worked here so long,
And never divined the secret of the room?

‘But how,’ I asked, ‘does the water climb so high?’
‘I do not know,’ she said, ‘but the thing is there;
Pull up the boards while I go and fetch you a rod.’
She passed, and I heard her creaking descend the stair.

And I rose and rolled the Turkey carpet back
From the two broad boards by the north wall she had named,
And, hearing already the crumple of water, I knelt
And lifted the first of them up; and the water gleamed,

Bordered with little frosted heaps of ice,
And, as she came back with a rod and a line that swung,
I moved the other board; in the yellow light
The water trickled frostily, slackly along.

I took the tackle, a stiff black rubber worm,
That stuck out its pointed tail from a cumbrous hook.
‘But there can’t be fishing in water like this,’ I said,
And she, with weariness, ‘There is no ice there. Look.’

And I stood there, gazing down at a stream in spate,
Holding the rod in my undecided hand . . .
Till it all in a moment grew smooth and still and clear,
And along its deep bottom of slaty grey sand

Three scattered little trout, as black as tadpoles,
Came waggling slowly along the glass-dark lake,
And I swung my arm to drop my pointing worm in,
And then I stopped again with a little shake.

For I heard the thin gnat-like voices of the trout
—My body felt woolly and sick and astray and cold—
Crying with mockery in them: ‘You are not allowed
To take us, you know, under ten years old.’

And the room swam, the calm woman and the yellow lamp,
The table, and the dim-glistering walls, and the floor
And the stream sank away, and all whirled dizzily,
And I moaned, and the pain at my heart grew more and more,

And I fainted away, utterly miserable,
Falling in a place where there was nothing to pass,
Knowing all sorrows and the mothers and sisters of sorrows,
And the pain of the darkness before anything ever was.

NOT FOR AMBITION OR BREAD

Poets should only be allowed to publish as many poems as they can learn by heart.

Scoff, if you will. But sometimes I think it should be so.

When I travel, I take a poem with me to learn, one that’s already half under my skin. My memory is not the best, but I try. There are poems that follow you around – and what if all the books were gone, and all the Kindles curdled?

Perhaps this sort of thinking is a result of getting older. Old enough to wonder what I would remember in a hotel room on my own in Paris, or a hospital bed, or even in my head if my body didn’t work.

This time it was Dylan Thomas, who died the year I was born, when he wasn’t even forty. The excellent thing about learning him, retracing his lines over and over, is the way you get inside the world of the poem. You put it on like a garment:

………In my craft or sullen art
………Exercised in the still night
………When only the moon rages
………And the lovers lie abed
………With all their griefs in their arms
………I labour by singing light
………Not for ambition or bread
………Or the strut and trade of charms
………But for the common wages
………Of their most secret heart.

That’s only the first stanza. This poem was not my favourite in the past. I spent many moons marveling at ‘And Death shall have no dominion’ and ‘Fern Hill’ and even ‘Twenty-Four Years’. But now the crafty syntax of ‘In my craft’ has got me – the way the first line, even just the little preposition ‘in’, drives the momentum, pushes the energy of the syntax right through to the line six – ‘I labour by singing light’. Sit on a train or a plane or a bus and learn this. It is wonderful.

Dylan Thomas drives the swell of the sentence through the poem like a wave which gains further momentum from the lovely construction (repeated twice): ‘Not for . . . But for’. He paces it beautifully. The brief lines, each with an end rhyme, establish a careful, gradual tread. There’s plenty of time to think as you go, and that first stanza is curiously romantic – it makes you want to be labouring by singing light, immune to the trashy business of squabbles and prizes.

Most of Thomas’s poems sound wonderful, sometimes to their cost. But this one combines sound and sense perfectly, and simplicity too, though you ponder over it for hours – what he meant, what he didn’t mean, and in what sense the meaning feels true for you, me, all of us.

Then the second stanza ceases to be romantic and becomes troubling, and sadder by far:

………Not for the proud man apart
………From the raging moon I write
………On these spindrift pages
………Nor for the towering dead
………With their nightingales and psalms
………But for the lovers, their arms
………Round the griefs of the ages,
………Who pay no praise or wages
………Nor heed my craft or art.

Why do the lovers have their arms “round the griefs of the ages”? Why are the stages “ivory”? Why does the moon ‘rage’? What is the difference between “craft” and “art”?

And how I love the way the common phrase runs: “pay no heed” and yet he resists that. He goes for “pay no praise . . . / Nor heed”. But this is like a painting by Chagall. It asserts its own world, within which everything is strangely fitting. The rhythm and rhyme make an incantation to feed your secret heart.

After you are done, the spindrift pages can go their way. The poem is inside you, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as ye both shall live.

And I do believe that Dylan Thomas, when he wrote this poem, was not writing for praise or wages. Hear his own voice here.

LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED

But sometimes you can get a bit too much of it.

For example, last December I published a pamphlet by Tim Love. I’m always interested when a poet incorporates in his or her name a word that is ‘loaded’ when it comes to poetry. No single word is more pregnant with emotional cargo than ‘love’.

So what does ‘love’ mean for Tim Love when he includes it in a poem? It can’t not resonate with his own name. Not that this matters all that much. I was at school with a girl whose surname was Darling, and I always envied her that. But that was before Alistair.

Anyway, sometimes synchronicity creeps into the equation. This week I took three new pamphlets to the printer. One was by Michael LOVEday. A second was by Lydia FulleyLOVE. Thankfully, the third author, Lorna Dowell has no love in her name, but she does begin with L and end with A, like Lydia, and she also has two Os, a key vowel in love.

None of this matters in the least bit, except when you get tired.

As you approach exhaustion, suddenly Lydia and Lorna start to sound remarkably similar, and the ‘L’ at the end of Michael shouts accusingly. You get fearful that you’ll end up with a front cover brandishing poetry by Lorna Fulleylove, or Lydia Dowell, and Michael Dowfull looms ominously on the horizon. . . .

NO NEED FOR A NOTEBOOK!

Remember the days when you would read anything? The small print on a bar of chocolate, the rubbish on a packet of cornflakes?

And then, some people would also write on anything. Graffiti folk on walls and bridges. Drunks on beer mats. Children on books and wallpaper. Poets on anything at all.

Scribbling memorably – a human instinct as old as print itself.

I had an emotionally turbulent week last week. However, a small calm place in the middle of this was Nick Asbury’s Wrapper Rhymes project.

From this I learned that St Andrews University, only 20 miles from my home, is home to an august body known as The Tunnocks Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society, a club which this year has no fewer than 120 members and whose president is a fourth year student of astrophysics.

The TCWAS is a whole separate entity from Tunnocks, the noble Scottish family firm which still manufactures the caramel wafers I so often eat instead of lunch.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes – the museum of the University of St Andrews is currently exhibiting a Tunnocks Caramel Wafer wrapper sporting a handwritten poem by Ted Hughes. It is one of three wrappers to inspire the bard.

And this wrapper, having inspired the poet, subsequently inspired the museum to make it a feature for exhibition, then inspired the Scottish Poetry Library to post a picture of the wrapper poem. This, in turn, led to a Twitter conversation between the Scottish Poetry Society, Inpress Books, Glasgow Design Firm Effective Studio and Nick Asbury, of Asbury and Asbury.

Phew. The Twitter conversation (who says Twitter is mindless rubbish?) focused on the idea that wrapper poetry might be a whole new genre.

Could this be? Would you like it to be? Read on.

WrapperRhymes is about to be a whole collection of poems written  on wrappers, following the example set by Ted Hughes. It has been launched by Nick Asbury, using a beautifully designed platform (Effektive Studio) and a lovely little Asbury piece on a Chewits wrapper.

Submissions are invited. It’s free. How could you resist?

But wait. It’s hard to write on a caramel wafer paper. The waxy surface, with smears of chocolate (who left this in the sun?) is resistant. However, it’s not impossible, as Ted demonstrated.

Between periods of turbulence, I have spent a week considering which wrappers you can write on and which you can’t. Ah, it is not as easy as in Ted’s day. Back in 1986, when y-fronts went out and boxer shorts came in, a wrapper might have been silver paper (as we called it then) underneath but a good, old, paper outer-sleeve offered its services on most confectionery products.

And now? I leapt at the opportunity of a KitKat, (which still sells with a paper sleeve as well as the shiny version) but I imagine so did several other would-be wrapper rhymers. I had to cheat with a Curlywurly, although it strikes me as just possible a CD marker might write on that slippery surface. Equally, it might not.

Green & Blacks Organic was better. I have eaten several bars this week while thinking about the possibilities. You can just about write on the waxed wrapper as well as the outer paper. In fact, this week I’ve eaten things I’ve resisted for years, just while exploring the wrapper possibilities.

But oh how things have changed! Do you realize how many chocolate bars are wrapped in a slippery sleeve that nobody could write on? We’re mainly enticed by wrappers made of plastic and aluminum laminates, a combination described by those in the know as “extremely durable, both chemically and physically”. That means not only can you not write on it (unless you cheat in some way – labels, post-its etc), but, unlike poetry, it will probably never die. (I know your alter-eco can make more things out of them, but you almost certainly won’t.)

Meanwhile, there are a few things you can still write on. I’m about to consume breakfast cereal. It comes in a box. You can write inside a box, while thinking outside it, and munching. I could probably fit an epic inside some boxes . . . .

DON’T DO IT YET!

HappenStance has an open submissions policy for poets. There are two reading ‘windows’ per year. The next one is July. Please don’t send them in June!

Generally I like poets. I know they’re all potty to some extent or other, but that’s okay. I’m potty in just the same way myself.

Like most (but not all) editors and publishers, I’ve been on both sides of the business. I’ve sent my own poems away and felt, to varying degrees at different times, embarrassed or inadequate when the response was returned. I wasn’t an expert. I made a lot of mistakes.

But just now I’m stuck on this side of that process. So if you’re thinking of sending poems to me, you need to know something about my expectations before sending your valued cargo in my direction.

I have written a lot about this already, so the first thing to do (please, oh please) is to read it. Think of it as entering a competition. If you break the rules, it’s not going to augur well. So read the submission guidelines carefully. If the ‘window’ for reading is July, don’t send the poems in June, even though it also starts ‘Ju’.

You could also search back blog entries, using the Getting Your Poetry Published category.

Several submissions have arrived already, but I don’t read them in June. If they arrive in May or June they will go to the bottom, not the top, of the pile. (Actually I’m also away on holiday the first week in July and I’m not taking them with me). Best time to send is second week in July.

There is a document called 33 DOs and 13.5 DON’Ts of Poetry Submission available as a free download in the shop. It would be a good idea to get it and check the boxes as appropriate. Different publishers have different expectations. These are mine.

If you haven’t already read it, get How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published. I wrote it because I had run out of energy to tell people all the things that are in it. I think you should read it, even if you think you know it all already. But I would think that.

Chris Hamilton-Emery’s book 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell is depressing in many ways, especially if you’re a gentle, modest, reticent person – the kind of person I like. But you should read it.

Bottom line: I spend most of my time worrying how I’m going to find readers for the poetry pamphlets I already have in print. I don’t make money from these publications, I lose it – and I am not rich.

I will turn down nearly all the submissions I get in July perforce, although I will give feedback, provided people include an envelope large enough to return the poems in (I invariably write on the poems in pencil as I read, and even if I accept the submission, that feedback has to go back to the author). If the submissions are from HappenStance subscribers, it will be detailed.

There are other pamphlet publishers too. I am not the only one. Check out my list of poetry pamphlet publishers – also in the shop. I keep updating it, though it is never comprehensive.

And bear in mind I am working two years ahead. If you want your poems published, in a specific set, sooner than that, enter one of the competitions. If you’re starting out, take a look at Iota Shots. Or look out for this year’s Poetry Business Competition. Hedge your bets.

Actually, there are lots of lovely people not reading this at all. And they are packing up poems to send to me at this very moment. Sigh. And it is starting to rain.

Meanwhile, I am putting together, in much more cheery mode, pamphlets by Michael Loveday (who edits the splendid little magazine 14), Lydia Fulleylove, who lives beside the sea, and Lorna Dowell, who is an expert on chocolate brazil soft-baked biscuits. I have been communicating with all three for years now, but the first approach from each of them was an unsolicited submission.

That’s why I continue to welcome these – and even to look forward to reading them. In July.

ps If you’ve already sent them, don’t lose sleep over it. Worse things happen at sea.