2015 – Page 4 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

LATE AND LAMENTED: GRAHAM AUSTIN

Graham Austin, regular performer and attender at A Poem and a Pint events in Cumbria, has died.

He wasn’t expected to go yet. Sometimes it happens this way.

HappenStance published a pamphlet by Graham Austin in 2010. It was called Fuelling Speculation and on the cover there’s a picture of Jonah inside the whale, complaining.

Graham’s pamphlet was one of a pair that were to be the first in a series: the Po-lite pamphlets. The other was by Martin Parker, founder editor of Lighten-Up Online. The series began and ended with these two. Nothing has ever struck me as so funny since. There has been amusement, of course, but rarely a set of poems that had me chuckling.

Graham made me laugh out loud. Of course I had heard him perform, though only once, at A Poem and a Pint event in Cumbria. But once was enough to know this gentleman was unique. He often seems completely serious. He can work without the usual light-verse markers of rhythm and rhyme. And then the penny suddenly drops and you start to smile and then, if you’re me, you start to laugh. Not just me though. Graham had whole audiences in stitches. In Chapter Five of The HappenStance Story I said he was ‘dry as a water biscuit’.

In the bio on the HappenStance website, he wrote about himself: Graham Austin does not have a degree from Ipswich. He was, in fact, a ‘good honours’ Durham graduate, although he considers himself to be one of the first to go to university who shouldn’t have been allowed near the place. There have been, he says, many thousands like him since.

He was a founder-member of a men’s performing group: A Posse of Poets. Graham was a great person to have in any posse. As a poet (like most of us) he was not a household name, though he wrote some fabulous poems and was an unforgettable performer. But he was a name in many households, including this one.

He will be missed, not least by his many grandchildren. So with that in mind, I’m going to quote the poem that first made me want to publish him, though there are several others I am reading and smiling over at this minute. I will slip in ‘Afterthought’ because you can have it by heart in two minutes:

The stable door is bolted now.
The trouble is, of course,
that that is just exactly how
we can describe the horse.

It is not just the facility in words. It is a whole view on life. It is life off-kilter, life as astonishingly odd. Funny ha-ha and funny peculiar unite. He would want you to read him and smile, even from the Great Beyond, I know he would. This is what he’s saying right now in ‘Afterlife’:

My dearest wife, I’m writing this
to let you know I’m safe and well
and living in a state of bliss
in Satan’s offices in Hell.

I work each day from twelve to two
(including lunch, I must admit).
I do not have too much to do;
I’m still in Human Resources.

And finally, the one I promised: ‘Grandson discovers things he didn’t know about his granddad’:

Bikes? Do I like bikes?
When I was four I had a bike and the
back wheel came off and I crashed into a
wall, cut my lip and tore my trousers.
That’s bikes for you. Shouldn’t be allowed
on the road—let alone the pavement.

Dogs? Do I like dogs?
Let me tell you. When I was four I was knocked
face-down in a puddle by a great big chihuahua
and then it sat on me. And you ask me if
I like dogs! No, I don’t.
Should all be in a zoo.

Little girls? I’ll tell you something about little girls.
When I was four I stood in the middle
of the room while they all made fun of me and
then ignored me completely until bedtime.
You just wait and see.
And they grow up.

Chocolate! Don’t talk to me about chocolate!
When I was four I ate a full half-pound
at one go and felt terrible. I
couldn’t go to the toilet for a week
and my mother pushed bits of soap up my bottom.
Do I like chocolate? Think about it.

Cake? Cake! You ask me if I like cake!
When I was four we couldn’t afford ‘cake’;
we just had a loaf of bread with a
sultana on top . . .
As a matter of fact, I do like cake.
Have you got some?

Fuelling Speculation is sold out but I have a handful of copies.

If you would like one, let me know. I’ll see what I can do.

HOW THE BEST-SELLING POET GETS FORGOTTEN

The poem-novel that made her, as they say, ‘a household name’ went into eleven editions between September 16 and December 12, 1940 in the United States.

Within four years it had sold nearly seven hundred thousand copies, more than half of these in the UK.

A 27-minute reading of the work, with orchestral accompaniment, was recorded by movie star Lynn Fontanne and broadcast on US national radio—then broadcast again – due to popular demand. A third broadcast in western Canada was followed by a Canadian concert performance. During one of the rehearsals, the first violinist ‘laid his bow on the stand in front of him, covered his face with his hands, and burst into tears.’

No, I haven’t mentioned the author’s name yet. Nor the work. She is no longer a household name. She is rarely mentioned at all, though she can be found on the net, mainly in places and formats that do her no favours. The literary waters that protect poetry from the masses have closed over her head.

But she wasn’t just a poet. She worked her way through a degree in maths and astronomy in Barnard College in the late 1890s. She would have pursued a career in pure maths, had she not fallen in love. She was an ardent advocate of the women’s vote: her widely published satirical verse aided the cause. She is listed as one of the associate editors on the first edition of the New Yorker. She was a member of the Algonquin Round Table. (No, I’m not talking about Dorothy Parker.) She wrote popular and successful romantic novels when her husband’s business collapsed. Some were made into films. She advised on films. She was even in one (unsuccessful) Hollywood film, Soak the Rich. She read poetry all the time, and when circumstances moved her deeply, she wrote it.

She was not a modernist. She loved Tennyson, and Scott, and Matthew Arnold. And she loved a good story. So three times, in the old tradition, she set about verse narrative, though she brought to it a twist of her own that has not been replicated before or since. Her poetic tales were stories of the human heart – romantic drama, if you like – cast in verse form. Not a single mode, but a sequence of lyric poems seguing from one to another, in and out of ballad, sonnet, pantoum, villanelle, blank verse, heroic couplets – you name it, she would do it. And at the same time she set up dramatic pace and cliff hangers, so the reader, even now, can find herself flicking from one page to the next, compelled to read on.

She was a satirist too, and a campaigner for women’s suffrage. One should never think her romantic writing is not barbed with irony. Here is her ‘Advice to Heroines’, for example:

A heroine must shrink and cling
    When heroes are about,
And thus the watching world will think:
     ‘How brave his heart and stout!’
But if he chance to be away
    When bright-faced dangers shine,
It will be best for her to play
    The oak-tree, not the vine.
In fact, the most important thing
    Is knowing when it’s time to cling.

And one of her women’s suffrage pieces:

Why We Oppose Pockets for Women

1. Because pockets are not a natural right.

2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.

3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.

4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.

5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.

6. Because it would destroy man’s chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.

7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.

I had better mention her name now, so you can help it not be forgotten. Why?

1. Because she was remarkable, as a person and as a writer.

2. Because she was reticent, funny and friend to the great and arguably good (Harpo Marx, Irving and Ellin Berlin, Alexander Woollcott, Noel Coward, Harold Ross, John Buchan, Eleanor Roosevelt, Clarence Day).

3. Because she was passionate about baseball and a grand walker who wouldn’t wait for a taxi.

4. Because she had vertigo and believed whole-heartedly in ghosts.

5. Because she dreamed the sinking of the Titanic the night it happened.

6. Because she was a water colourist, and kept a travel diary in sonnet form with illustrations.

7. Because ‘thin volumes of modern verse lay on every table of her library’.

8. Because ‘the bookstand by her bed, held only Matthew Arnold and Shakespeare.’

9. Because she adored cribbage, and Harpo Marx would wire her about his cribbage successes.

10. Because her formal verse, no matter what she writes about, is metrically flawless.

11. Because she couldn’t be bothered with buying new clothes.

12. Because she didn’t like giving advice.

13. Because she believed certain mathematical curves possessed almost supernatural properties.

14. Because you can read her poetry narratives and want to know what happens next.

The author in question is Alice Duer Miller (1874-1942), author of the best-selling volume The White Cliffs. You can still get it in second-hand bookshops (currently even the copy she inscribed to Eleanor Roosevelt) because so many were printed. A full biography of Alice—I have no idea why—has never been written. It certainly should have. The detail here is mainly drawn from her husband’s memoir (Henry Wise Miller, All Our Lives, 1945).

I am not laying claim to her as a great forgotten twentieth century poet. Goodness knows what that would mean anyway. I am saying Alice Duer Miller was an extraordinary writer, who did some things in verse form that were remarkable. Including, of course, selling more than half a million copies of a volume of poetry.

She wrote an epitaph for herself once, as her contribution to a party game. Here it is.

Within the churchyard of the Kirk,
The grass grows green upon the heart
Of one who thought about her work
And never talked about her art.

HOMEWORK: WRITE A POEM ABOUT A LEG

Why would you write a poem about a leg? A leg!

Even if the leg had been detached from its owner. Even if the leg were detached during, or immediately after, the Battle of Waterloo. Even if the poem about the leg was written just before the bicentenary of the battle in which the phrase ‘met his Waterloo’ was born. Even if the battle was fought on a Sunday (when some people are peacefully writing their blogs).

There’s no logic behind what poems are written about.

But if the Earl of Uxbridge, who lost the particular leg as a result of a cannonball injury at the age of 47, happened to be your distant relative, then maybe. And if there was a story: not just the fact that the leg was lost but what happened to the limb later, well . . .

And if the resulting poem (or sequence of poems) had such wayward character and wit that a publisher could not resist it, so she squeezed it into her impossibly crammed publication schedule six months before the bicentenary, then maybe you might want to read it, or buy it and send it to a friend. Because poems are sometimes fun, and easy to understand and delight in. There should be more of that kind of poem.

The one I’m referring to is in the HappenStance shop, waiting for you to find it. It’s by Jo Field, and she’s good. (She’s in Blame Montezuma! too).

There’s no time like the present and I’m not pulling your . . . No, I must resist silly jokes. This is not a silly poem. Wit and charm. Those are the key attributes: wit and charm. (But it won’t cost you an arm and a.)

NOT REGRETTING THE GRITTER

Snow isn’t like anything else.

Or perhaps that’s not quite true. The first time I ever went in an aeroplane (I was ten years old) and saw clouds from on top I thought they were snow. The astonishment and dazzle.

I like it when it gets into poems and stories and novels, fiction and non-fiction. The most prosaic of writers writes differently about snow. I remember when our golden retriever first saw snow: her excitement, her attempts to bite it, then jump in it, and roll in it, and chase her tail in circles. She was a drunk dog in the snow.

And it’s noiseless. It obliterates.

Poems have much to do with the relationship between words and silence. So snow and poems are friends. Letters on the page and white space. Footprints. The solitary tracks.

There hasn’t been much snow in my bit of Scotland for decades. But once you’ve seen it, you remember it. No-one forgets snow.

But we don’t want it now, do we? We’re too grown-up to want roads closed and journeys interrupted. We don’t want to be stopped. Except for the bit of us that does.

When my father was dying in Cheshire, it snowed. It was early January and we drove with our two small children to see him after the heart attack. Only a five-hour journey. It wasn’t hard to get there. It looked like he might get better, or at least that nothing would happen fast, so after three days we drove back again, planning to return at the weekend. And then it snowed.

He was in Cheshire in a little hospital room – because soon he was moved from the ward where people may get better to the quiet wing where people don’t – and we were stuck in a Kingdom of snow. We couldn’t open the back door. The children couldn’t get into the garden. Roads stopped being roads. The A74 and the M6 shut up shop. When my husband finally got through to his workplace, he reported roads lined by white walls six feet high.

It was over a week before we got back to Cheshire. In the warm kitchen of my parents’ house, I hugged my sister while the children ran round the hall and up and down the stairs. We’d made it. The phone rang. It was my mother, phoning from the hospital. Dad had just died, would we come and pick her up now, please.

This was twenty years ago. Last week I was with magical people doing writing exercises. One of them was this: take the phrase ‘It had snowed for twenty years’ and keep writing. Try it.

Snow brings strangeness, and surprise. It places you somewhere betwixt and between. A no-place. It isn’t unkind but it is absolute. For me, it’s the space between life and death, the space of no choice. Acceptance and astonishment.

Yesterday morning I was in Yorkshire, standing in it. It came in the night when we were fast asleep. It was hard to see because of the white-out and more of it falling, and the skies festooned with great grey looming swathes of cloud. The hills loomed in and out. One robin on a white wall.

But a gritter got through. I was too grown-up to regret the gritter. I sat on a train and the train took me to places where snow had never been.

Today outside our garden, there’s just a white sprinkling on the flying saucers. You could think it was your imagination.

TEN REASONS FOR SENDING YOUR POEMS TO MAGAZINES

So I’m flicking through poetry magazines, old and new.

A pile of them on the floor at my right and I’m dipping in and out, out and in. I’m half interested, half bored.

I’ve read this one before at least twice. How come I don’t remember this page? How come I don’t remember this poem, the one I’m reading over and over, startled into absolute attention? Good grief – what a poem, what an astonishing thing in 15 lines! And it stays with me all day, that experience made of words, while all the other poems settle back into a blur, like the grounds in a cafetière after the coffee’s been poured out.

If I go back to that magazine another day (I may or may not, the pile’s still there on the floor) I’ll go straight to that poem, go back for a fix. But maybe there’ll be another one I didn’t see before. There probably will. It happens like that. Poetry magazines are odd things. They don’t read logically. They never do what I expect. Often not what I want either, but that’s okay. They’re stubborn creatures, made by editors who are poets. They’re meant to wake me up, not calm me down.

But I’m thinking in particular about magazines after reading Jo Bell on her method of sending poems out. Which I admired and shared, not least because as a publisher I’m always telling poets to get on with the business, send the poems out, get them into the best magazines they can. Why? That’s the thing. Why?

There are many reasons and they accumulate. There are poets who leap into publication without a previous ‘track record’, but it’s rare. I like the magazine (and sometimes ezine) route. Here are ten (which are not all) of the reasons.

1. Peer validation. If a prospective publisher suspects your poems are good, they do like to have this confirmed by other editors. (It sometimes happens that poems I think are brilliant don’t get into good magazines, but it’s rare). Also publishers do read magazines sometimes and notice the poets in them and nod and note down a name. But this is not the most important of the reasons.

2. Once printed in a magazine, the poems are out there finding readers, which is what poems are for. Someone, somewhere is sitting up in a chair astonished, and thinking ‘Good grief! What a poem!’ That’s one reader. Two readers thinking the same is a readership. Which is what poets need to sail in.

3. In magazines, the poet’s name is bobbing round the waters gathering momentum and recognition. We buy or borrow books (eventually) by people we’ve heard of, not people whose names mean nothing to us (I know there are exceptions, there are always exceptions).

4. The poet who works at getting the poems out there is a member of the community of jobbing poets. It’s part of the apprenticeship, if you like. It’s an honourable striving. If the poems aren’t accepted, the effort is no less praiseworthy. Besides, you’re going to stick at it. You’re going to send them somewhere else. There are many publications for your messages in a bottle to float away to.

5. When you do have a poem accepted, you find yourself between the covers with other poets. You read their work carefully then, especially the ones on pages near you. Most especially the one on the facing page. You feel almost as though you’ve met those poets in person. And sometimes you do. You go to a magazine launch and blimey – there you are sitting next to your facing-page poet. It’s a bond that can last, with luck, a lifetime. We need these bonds.

6. Most magazines (not all) have a bit of bio somewhere or other about authors. If a publisher has offered to do a pamphlet of your poems next year, you can flag the imminent publication in the bio, which is great. It’s another tiny cog in the great wheel of promotion. It may eventually sell a couple of copies.

7. Once your poems are published in book or pamphlet form, the publisher wants the book reviewed as widely as possible. Magazines that run reviews (not all of them do) will generally review poets they’ve published themselves. If they haven’t published your poems (unless your publication is prize-winning or PBS-recommended) you can forget being reviewed. And reviews are another cog in that promotional wheel.

8. Just as a magazine is a creative work made by the editor(s), so a publishing imprint is a creation, and the proud creator wants it to be well-regarded. Publishers work tirelessly for a good reputation, because a good reputation brings the best poets and the best poets strengthen the reputation. Recognition and momentum. Each time one of ‘my’ poets has work in a leading magazine and the bio mentions HappenStance, the imprint’s reputation is enhanced.

9. Your first collection is in print. You are still, aren’t you, the jobbing poet, stalwartly sending poems out to the magazines? Someone reads your latest sestina(!) in a magazine and loves it. They look up the bio. They see you have a book in print. They buy it! Yeay!

10. It’s hard graft, this regular sending out of poems, but it strengthens you. Yes, rejection of your favourites is demoralising. But there are at least three key aspects to the poetry business. One is the best bit – the making of poems, the joy and excitement and fun of that. Two is getting those poems as good as they can be, which means exposing them to strangers and learning from feedback (rejection makes you look hard at your loved-ones, and sometimes change them for the better). Three is determination. Stickability. Doing the boring business of getting the poems out there. Earning respect because you don’t give up. Paying your dues. Standing up and being counted. You wanna be a poet? This is your job.

SHUTTING UP

It was difficult getting the window to shut. Several envelopes were stuck in the hinges. But it has shut now.

Thank you! Thank-you to the writers who trusted me with their poems. It’s not an easy thing to expose your work to a critical reader, especially one who comments on verbs that are leaning, lines that are breaking and sonnets that are creaking. And towards the end that reader was very tired.

There are other thank-yous. If you spend a whole month reading like this, very little else can be done. So the ordinary functions of the press grind to a halt, which is risky. But many readers humbled me with their generosity before Christmas. They ordered publications, they sent donations, they sent stamps, they sent love. This secret fuel is amazing.

The window won’t open again in the same way. This was the apex, the peak, the nirvana of poetry reading. In May 2015 (still difficult not writing 2014) HappenStance will be ten years old. I will be nearly 62. And I plan to change things. How? Not quite sure yet.

But poets mainly create themselves. There will be, and always have be, people to whom making poems is important. Creating readers of poetry is harder. That’s what I’m working on.

Watching my fiendish work over the last weeks, more than one friend has said, ‘Why don’t you charge?’ Of course I have thought about this. The money, if some people paid for feedback, could be reinvested in the press. If payment were required, it would reduce the numbers dramatically. I haven’t ruled it out.

Still, I’ve a deep fear of poetry that’s by the privileged for the privileged. I am on the side of the garret and the baked potato. I am on the side of it is more blessed to give than receive. I believe, ridiculously, enough money will always arrive. So far, it has. Though only just.

***********************

Now here’s the ‘window’ analysis. I love figures.

162 poets sent in work. More than twice as many as the previous December. They sent between 1 and 29 poems, but it would average about 10 each. Most of them remembered the stamped addressed envelope. About 1600 poems, then.

Of these poets 107 were female and 55 were male.

I can’t comment on age range because I don’t ask people about that, though they sometimes tell me, but my unstatistical impression is that three-quarters were over 50 and only about 4 were under 25.

Nearly all the poets who sent poems were (hooray!) HappenStance subscribers. 17 were not. But they might yet be. I am an optimist.

About 30 took out a subscription just before sending poems in. (This is good if they also go on to buy publications, because it suggests they’re active readers. If they don’t buy anything subsequently, the postal subscription makes a loss).

Geography

34 in Scotland
3 in Wales
2 in Ireland
115.5 in England (of which 23.5 were in or near London)

as well as

1 in Isle of Man
1 in Sweden
1 in Canada
1 in Spain
3.5 in France

I hope those numbers add up. This is me, not a spreadsheet talking.

I took 47 pages of (secret) notes. Most ever. These include notes on the bio, brief comments on the poems, and also comments on my comments and the experience of reading. Up to now I’ve done this by hand in large books, but this time I did it on the laptop because the books go back nine years and are hard to search. Many poets assume I’ll remember what they previously told me about themselves. I don’t. I get my Marys and Chris-es confused.

88 poets sent in poems for the first time, just over half. I rewrote the printed reply notes three times.

The level of guilt on my part was at 88% (I made that figure up. It means high). That’s because I made hardly any offers. I agreed to do two debut pamphlets in Spring 2016 (2015 was already ‘full’) but both authors already knew an offer was coming.

Normally I would have offered to do more in 2016. Two things stopped me.

First, it was the volume of poetry. It overwhelmed me. Second, I was astonished by how many possible debut poets, sending for the second, third or fourth time (so I was recognising poems I knew and loved), clearly merited publication in the next two years. I highlighted a group of 24 who fitted into this category. Twenty-four! If I did nothing else from now till 2017, I couldn’t manage that.

Fortunately, other things will happen for most of these poets. They’ll either win one of the competitions (as many who’ve send poems to me have done already) or find another publisher. I hope they’re all on the qui vive, spotting what’s going on in the sector, and which new imprints might be worth approaching. In the first three of four years of a new publishing business, a publisher is actively looking for new, good poets. After ten years, what she needs is not poets but readers. Or even better, poet-readers.

But also it’s important not to keep on doing the same thing in the same way, even if that thing has gone well up to now. Creativity thrives on change.

Also there’s Chapter Nine of the HappenStance Story to be written, three pamphlets urgently needing attention, StAnza tickets to buy, two new books nudging my collar, and the other 13 items on my list. And I had better get dressed.

Thank-you again. Huge thank-you. Thank you poets, blog readers and poetry buyers and supporters. You are not a vast community, in Harry Potter terms, but individually and en masse, you are . . . supercalifragelisticexpialidocious.