2017 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

THE BEAUTY OF OLDE SPELLING

How much lovelier an old poem may seem if the original spelling, or something approximating to it, is retained. It takes me back to my early years of reading, when the children in books by E. Nesbit (or Enid Blyton) find an ancient manuscript or a treasure map. They know it’s old because all the ‘s’s are ‘f’s.

What mystery is in that idea — what glory in deciphering the words and phrases and finding they are not so far — not so far at all — from what we might say even now.

When you’re young, you tend not to think an awful lot about the meanings of the words. You can like them, thankfully, without analysing them. You can welcome things that are different and odd. So each December, I remember the time we did Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols in the school choir. Both my sister and I sang in it, and we loved it all our lives.

That Britten stuff – it was weird, right? We’d never sung anything like that before. What we usually did was the descant to O Come All Ye Faithful. But the more we sang the Ceremony, the more we got to like it, and its strange words. I don’t recall anybody explaining what they meant – only how we had to sing them.

So in ‘I synge of a mayden’, ‘Goddes moder’ was three syllables, with mother as mudder. (We were not to sing God’s mother, even though we all knew that was what it meant.)

We did not reinvent the words. We just sang them. With relish.

We sang most carols with relish, whatever the words were, which was just as well. Hymns to us were all a kind of mystery with a good tune, and fair game for creative interference. So the repeating phrase from The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came – ‘most highly favoured lady’ – was invariably rendered as ‘most highly flavoured gravy’. I still can’t hear that carol without thinking of good quality turkey stock thickened with just a little cornflour.

The year after A Ceremony of Carols, I started a degree in English Literature in the University of York. I didn’t go to all the lectures, but I went to all the lectures by one R.T. Jones (Bob Jones) because they were a revelation to me.

He would take just one poem and talk about it for a whole hour very quietly and very carefully. Actually, he didn’t talk. He read slowly from whatever he had written down on the papers in front of him. Little, if any, eye contact with his students. He had an intensely bookish, closed-in manner, as though everything he was sharing was a secret. So you tended to lean forward and listen more carefully.

One of the poems in his series was a medieval lyric from Britten’s Ceremony, and it was ‘I syng of a mayden’. I hadn’t thought of a carol as a poem till this point, or considered the relationship between song lyrics and ‘lyric’ poetry.

This was over 40 years ago, so my memory of what he said is partial. The main thing I took away with me was an understanding of the power of repetition when each repetition is connected to a tiny change. That, and the idea of an experience getting close, and closer, and closest.

I think I had thought (because we sang it at Christmas) that the song was about the birth of Jesus. But it’s not. It’s the annunciation – the point at which Mary – without having sex with mortal man – meets the angel Gabriel, accepts the invitation to be the mother of God, and. becomes quietly and mysteriously with child. Most highly flavoured gravy, in fact.

But I believe this carol is as much about a spiritual change as anything else. Here are the old words, from the Sloane Manuscript in the British Library, thought to date from about 1400.

I syng of a mayden þat is makeles,
kyng of all kynges to here sone che ches.

He cam also stylle þer his moder was
as dew in aprylle, þat fallyt on þe gras.

He cam also stylle to his moderes bowr
as dew in aprille, þat fallyt on þe flour.

He cam also stylle þer his moder lay
as dew in Aprille, þat fallyt on þe spray.

Moder & mayden was neuer non but che –
wel may swych a lady Godes moder be.

So the maiden that is ‘makeless’ is matchless – beyond compare – and a ‘mayden’ means a virgin. If you lost your maidenhead, that meant you had had sex with a man. Here, Mary is a woman with a choice, not meekly bowing her head.

Bob Jones took us through the structure of the piece, the way it’s bookended with couplets about the holy maiden – mudder and mayden, Godes moder – all those ‘m’ sounds and ‘d’ hammering away. Bob was the first person ever that made me aware of the small sounds and their connection with sense.

And then the direction: the way new life approaches and then gets closer, and closer and closer. He comes ‘also stylle’ – very very quietly – first where his mother was, then to his mother’s bower, and finally where his mother lay. Something delicate and beautiful about it all, and increasingly intimate.

The dew in April (lovely idea in itself) is there three times, but first the dew falls on the grass, then the flower (with all its fertility associations), and finally the spray. It is an insemination, of sorts – but as quiet and innocent as morning dew.

And then suddenly there’s the last couplet which is a triumphant assertion. In the Britten version, it was enormously satisfying. You get to sing ‘was never none but she’ – such a wonderful phrase, with each of its syllables belting out the message, and the music suddenly scored to zoom from very quiet to as maximum forte. There is a YouTube recording of a girls’ choir that sounds very much as we did.

Bob would have pointed out the three monosyllables at the end of the line ‘none but she’. I can remember his mouth making the word ‘syllable’. I can remember realising the syllables had something to do with the intense heart of a poem, whatever that might be.

I have only just noted that Carol Rumens had this lyric as her Guardian poem of the week in 2010. She’s a similar age to me. A Ceremony of Carols must have been doing its round of the English schools when we were both busily being educated. She read the words then and now, she says, as an ‘erotic myth’.

Odd how strong a word ‘erotic’ can seem in the context of this lyric with all its subtlety and sweetness. But that’s newspapers for you. They have allowed someone (I am sure not Carol) to introduce the ghastly subhead: Set to unforgettable music by Benjamin Britten, this strangely erotic Nativity is even better on the page. Heavens above! It’s not a nativity. It’s the arrival of the first thought of a baby.

I found it both pure and intimate, and still do. There seems to me something odd about a baby coming to his mother in an erotic way. Obviously people could argue about this till, as they say, the cows come home.

The cows are on their way right now. The stable is just around the corner. One more ƒleep

By Anonymous 15th Century scribe, digitised by the British Library [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

ON NOT RHYMING PROPERLY

Children learn about rhyme probably before they can speak, but certainly they start to be able to do it – for fun and with relish – as soon as they can talk easily.

My granddaughter and I used to go for walks and do rhyming. I would say, ‘What do you want for Christmas? Do you want a mat? …. Or do you want a cat? Or do you want a ….’ and she would roar HAT (or RAT or BAT), and fall about with delight. She would even invent words that rhymed. TAT! WAT! DAT!

Create a space and a rhyme falls into it. Goodness knows why rhyming sense is fun. But Dr Seuss, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, A A Milne, Lynley Dodd and Julia Donaldson are just a few of the names that have profited and continue to profit from this fact. They have entertained children and parents for over a century and a half.

I think it’s something to do with knowing what’s coming while at the same time being slightly surprised. If I read aloud from A. A. Milne’s The Christopher Robin Story Book, or happen to say to you

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother
Though he was only …

won’t you leap into the fray with THREE? Can you resist saying ‘three’? And

James James
Said to his Mother
‘Mother,’ he said, said he;
‘You must never go down to the end of the town, if you don’t go down
with….’

You will finish the line for me, won’t you? Me. Me. ME!

But some of the rhyming verses you learn as a child don’t rhyme properly. The old ones, the authorless ones that get passed down over generations – some of them have terrible rhymes.

Jack and Jill, as I feel sure you know, went up a hill to get a pail of water. When Jack fell down, he bumped his crown, which rhymed nicely, but ‘Jill came tumbling after’ is miserably disappointing. ‘Water’ absolutely does not rhyme with ‘after’.

And this happens a lot. Look at Ding Dong Bell / Pussy’s in the well.

Little Johnny Thin and Little Tommy Stout rhyme neatly. But what about the cat who ‘ne’er did any harm’? ‘Harm’ does not rhyme with the farmer’s ‘barn’, except for the purposes of this ditty (which by the way is grossly modernised on Wikipedia and not the version I grew up with). Still – harm/barn? You can make it rhyme. You can hear the similarity. You can hear a similarity between ‘water’ and ‘after’. But it’s not a full-blooded, satisfying, click-into-place rhyme.

As a child I knew the difference. Everybody knows the difference.

But where are we now? Contemporary poets are nervous about rhymes and go to all sorts of lengths to avoid the delicious neatness they might offer. Perfect rhyme is looked down on, with much the same raising of eyebrows as goes with the word ‘Georgian’.

But poets still pair words like ‘sleeping’ and ‘walking’. Or they may slant-rhyme ‘cat’ with ‘pot’ (Philip Larkin being the grand master of brilliant slant rhyme). They rhyme in the middle of lines instead of at the end. They rhyme without a metrical pattern to drive the rhyme home. They rhyme singular with plural (hope / envelopes). Or most commonly they rhyme not at all.

It has been suggested to me on more than one occasion that contemporary magazines reject certain poems because they rhyme. I do not think this is true. It is more likely that the editor felt the poem weak for other reasons. But rhyming is both easy and hard to do. That is to say anyone can rhyme with certain words (the balladeers exploited that to the full by regularly ending lines on sounds like ‘lie’ and ‘say’, for which there are many matches). But rhyming with the panache of Hilaire Belloc or Roald Dahl or W H Auden or is a true art.

Most of the rhymers I have mentioned here wrote for children or humorously, and it is in humorous writing that rhyme still flourishes. The fortieth edition of Lighten Up Online is proof of this alone, and Martin Parker’s ‘Ermyntrude and the Higgs Boson’ offers a number of inspired rhymes for the Hadron Collider. It can still be done.

And not just in light verse. Ruth Pitter, who lived into the last decade of the twentieth century, continued to rhyme all her life. She rhymed through modernism, post modernism and beyond. Olive Dehn loved rhyming, and it worked for her. And of course, Charles Causley, whom I wrote about last week – the man could rhyme.

‘New’ poets often go to considerable lengths to flout convention, as artists are supposed to do. They drop punctuation. They spatter words across the page. They right justify. They put things in boxes. They put things in columns. They superimpose text with other text. They cross things out. They invent symbols and signs to substitute for words. (They don’t, usually, write for children.) Despite all of this, most contemporary poems look, at first glance, remarkably similar to one another. For example (as I have pointed out elsewhere) the practice of writing in (unrhymed) couplets is currently so common as to be a contemporary convention, as well as frequently associated with poems that win competitions.

But rhyme is no longer a convention in non-humorous, contemporary, literary, page poetry. (In performance work, it’s a different story, though I might say something about that another time.) Not-rhyming is the convention in page poetry (except at weddings and funerals), even though readers appear to continue to enjoy it, from childhood onwards. I wonder how long it will be before use of rhyme will radicalise the page. It hasn’t been in fashion now, except in light verse, for a very long time. It’s hard though. It’s hard not to sound like a greetings’ card. It’s hard to do it well.

And hard to write good poems – has been from the year dot.

(Hard to write good poems, whether they rhyme or not.)

KNOWING WHAT WORDS MEAN WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT THEY MEAN

So I was listening to the radio – not properly listening – but it was on in the background, and suddenly ‘Timothy Winters‘ came through.

There’s something incomparably satisfying about a poem you can join in with, because most of it has stuck indelibly in your mind decades ago – without your ever having to learn it. That’s ‘Timothy Winters’ by Cornish poet Charles Causley, who died in 2003, and whose poems will be remembered – or this one most certainly will.

Poets are highly preoccupied with the idea of being overlooked while alive, and forgotten when dead. You can mention the name ‘Charles Causley’ in a group of younger poets and see blank faces. But not in poets of a certain age. And not in those who studied his ballads at school. And even those who aren’t sure about the name ‘Charles Causley’ – you see them fumbling through the memory files when you mention him – try them on a line of ‘Timothy Winters’, and see what happens. ‘Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters: / A blitz of a boy is ….’

I think I met Causley in person once, but I was only in my teens, and now I can’t be sure. But I met ‘Timothy Winters’ before that, and he has always stayed close.

What a poem! And it illustrates another thing about poetry: its ability to educate – and I don’t just mean educate about socio-historic human deprivation. Who had ever heard the word ‘helves’ before they encountered

At Morning Prayers the Master helves
For children less fortunate than ourselves

My Picador Collected footnotes the word helves as Cornish dialect ‘the alarmed lowing of cattle (as when a cow is separated from her calf); a desperate, pleading note’. I always inferred it meant ‘appeals for help’, which suggests the sound of the word in context led to not inappropriate interpretation. I have never read the word elsewhere, but I’ve always remembered its strangeness, and its curious rightness in this poem. Not just there for the rhyme, I think, though rhyme it certainly does.

But most importantly of all, the poem ends ‘Amen’. To the many generations of UK children who were once closeted in daily school assemblies and enjoined to pray, ‘Amen’ meant the closing of something formal and the opening of doors. We had no idea of the meaning of ‘Amen’ in Hebrew, or that it was originally Hebrew at all. We just knew it signified the end, and the bit we could join in with, agree with – joyfully – if it meant getting on with something else that we hoped wouldn’t involve praying.

You can know what words mean without knowing what they mean.

But you can never write (or hear) a poem that ends on the word ‘amen’ without remembering Timothy Winters, and therefore Charles Causley: humane, metrical, melodic and haunting.

So come one Angel, come on ten:
Timothy Winters says ‘Amen
Amen amen amen amen.’
Timothy Winters, Lord.
Amen!

THE DREAM POEM COMPETITION

The HappenStance website has a free competition flagged on its home page. It is supposed to change every two months, though this year it has really been every three. To begin with, it was a kind of quiz, but there were few entries. Latterly, it has invited poems, and this attracts more interest, it would seem, though the prizes are modest.

The entries are anonymised before being passed to a judge, who is usually one of the HappenStance poets taking on this role for no fee, though much appreciation. The most recent competition invited poems about dreams (not more than 18 lines). It was judged by J.O. Morgan, and his comments on the competition and the winning poem were detailed – too detailed to fit easily inside the competition page. So here they are as a kind of guest blog.

J.O. Morgan’s comments on the Dream Poem Competition, 2017

The subject of dreams seems apposite for poetry, or so it would appear to me, since the somewhat elusive nature and tumbled imagery of many poems I read does seem to have a sort of dreamlike quality.

Also, the way in which poets read their poems aloud often has a similar dreaminess to the tone of delivery. Had I not known the subject before I began reading the submissions, it might have taken me a while to realise what they all had in common.

And yet many of the poems did capture the sense of dreaming remarkably well; that stream-of-conscious-craziness where the unlikely seems wholly possible, even expected, and what might at first sound metaphorical is in this case simply real – at least in dream terms.

That then could be a problem: a poem’s metaphors have clear meanings, whereas a real dream’s imagery may have a meaning so muddled that it is in essence meaningless. As such, do you stay true to the dream and have a meaningless poem, or stay true to the poem and in so doing tweak the dream to give it a false profundity?

Both approaches were evident in the poems submitted, and both with interesting results – some with the sheer delight in dreamy weirdness, others with dreams of sometimes worrying portentousness.

‘Formication’, the poem I chose as winner, did something else again. It stood out at once for its shift in perspective. But also, in particular, for how much it achieved through suggestion, while actually saying very little and in so few lines. There seems to be a great deal going on beneath the surface, as well as an interesting take on how the anxiety produced by nightmarish visions bleeds through into waking activities.

I’ll share some thoughts about it shortly, but first here it is:

Formication

The Dictionary for Dreamers says insects
are worries, at least in dreams. Therefore
all those ant poisons, the Raid and Nippon
under the sink, are there to calm me.

I loathe their collective mind, the purposeful lines
that trickle from my ears onto my pillow.
I hate how once you get one, you get more,
lofting bitten dreams in their leaf-cutter jaws.

Peter Kenny

The dream itself is only hinted at in the first half of the poem, but the hint is enough to put us on our guard. Later the dream is still only mentioned from the perspective of the waking world, but it’s a dream we can immediately recognise, even if for us – thankfully – it’s not a recurring one. There’s subtlety in how a real-world, almost off-hand, reference to the dream suddenly becomes the dream, even if only for a single line.

And then again, following a reference to dream-architecture, how the brain won’t be satisfied with a small cast of antagonists, there’s the sudden description of tiny delicate mouthparts, which – closer-in, and arrayed in multitudes – might be a lot more concerning for the dreamer.

I also loved those simple phrases ‘I loathe’ and ‘I hate’, which seem so controlled, almost polite, in their expressions of dislike, but which have a sense of annoyance, of frustration, of helplessness, of resignation.

Of course we have already been told of the familiar brand-name products that may have no effect on dreams, but which will certainly help in the moment of waking, when the imagined world and its unassailable army lingers for a while in the dark of the bedroom, and then beyond into the daylight hours.

And does the consultation of a dreambook ever really help? Probably not. But when the products of your own mind trouble you this much, what else is there to do?

If it seems that I’ve analysed this poem partly backwards, that’s because it made me read it that way. I read it down, then back up, then through again. It was the poem that made me want to do that. And poems so rarely make me want to do that. A clear sign, for me, that it was something just a bit special. And that last image, both in the dream and out, is really rather marvellous.

ON ‘SWASHBUCKLING’

Sometimes you don’t realise you’ve learned a word somehow wrong.

Then someone, or some thing, pulls you up and makes you think about it.

Like…. swashbuckling, for example.

There’s a lot of stuff these days about pirates. Kids love pirates.

My understanding of pirates evolved long before Johnny Depp. Pirates for me were Long John Silver and Captain Hook.

So it’s a very long time since I first met the word ‘swashbuckling’. It must have come in somewhere back then, because I know it well, and like it as well as most people. Swashbuckling pops up whenever pirates are mentioned—for example, Ten of the most swashbuckling Puffin pirates.

I never looked ‘swashbuckling’up (I never looked anything up as a kid—my sister and I read voluminously and picked up the meanings of things as we went along). So somehow I developed the idea that ‘swashbuckling’ was something to do with the pirates’ giant buckles on their belts. At the same time, in my mind some of those belts were more like huge sashes (or ‘cummerbunds’, another word I like).

As a result, I sort of made swashbuckling into sashbuckling. I certainly had no idea what the word actually meant, though I knew it was fiercely piratish.

It was a cartoon that made me think long and hard. Cartoons work like poems, I find. Often they hinge on a single word combined with an image, and it creates an intense cluster of associations and meaning and fun and joy.

This time it was Savage Chickens on September 13^th: a chicken with an eye patch is applying for a job, and the interviewer is looking at his CV: ‘Hm… I see from your résumé that you’ve done a lot of swashbuckling’.

It made me laugh. And I started to think about swashbuckling and what it actually was. Had I myself ever done any?

I looked it up. And it’s not what I thought at all. Well, it is and it isn’t.

It means ‘acting in the manner of a swashbuckler’. Ha. What is a swashbuckler?

‘A swaggering or daring soldier or adventurer.’

Okay, yes, Swaggering, yes (I won’t go into how I’ve always visualised a swagger, but fortunately we all know what swag is.)

But still—buckling what! And why? And what is a swash?

It seems there is no swash. There is ‘to swash’, which is to strike something violently. And the ‘buckle’ is nothing to do with the belt. It’s a small, round shield.

A swashbuckler is someone who strikes his opponent’s small round shield violently. In battle. Or maybe while boarding his ship.

Or maybe via Twitter.

Swashbucklers are not subtle.

They are all boys.

Downloaded from http://www.clipartpanda.com/categories/pirate-clip-art-free

WORDS, AND WAKING THEM UP

‘The little rabbits smiled sweetly in their sleep under the shower of grass; they did not awake because the lettuces had been so soporific.’

Soporific.

Precisely the right word.

That’s it, isn’t it? The right one, in the right place.

Soporific.

The fabulous and mysterious surprise of language, which in the ordinary way we use so lightly – merely for talking.

But when you find it fixed and free in a rhyme or simply placed without fuss exactly where it should go in the dark backward and abysm of time – well, the black bat night has flown, that’s what, and ringed with the azure world he stands.

The right word in the right place is the star to every wandering bark.

There is wildness and wet, wildness and wet, and then suddenly it’s long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. From wildness to wilderness, simply a syllable. But slipping ‘wilderness’ into the last line of ‘Inversnaid‘, as if it were inevitable, oh my!

I am working on two new pamphlets. They have provoked this excitement and woken up the wonder of words.

The two poets in question are especially good at putting the right word in the right place, and each time this happens, there’s that little shock of recognition. It feels like a miracle.

Maybe this is how clichés get to be clichés. Somebody puts the right word in the right place and the world falls in love with it. So a heart of gold loses its original beautiful self and belongs to everybody. Then the level playing field flattens. At the end of the day, we’re back to square one, which may or may not have something to do with hop-scotch.

A day job as a copy-writer has been an honorable trade for many poets and if I could write catch phrases for a living, why would I not? I throw you a phrase. You catch it and pass it on…

But there’s more to it than that inside a poem. You linger on the precise and delicious word, yes – but it’s precise and delicious because of where it is in the poem as a whole, which the sum of the parts is greater than. Another mystery: how a poem adds up to something that seems to make sense even if it doesn’t.

Here are two tasters from the poets who have stirred me to dithyrambs.

Ramona Herdman’s forthcoming pamphlet is called Bottle and actually it does contain ‘a taster of pink fizz’, but that’s nothing to what else is in there.

For example, there’s a ship in a bottle and its deck ‘flexes under your feet’. Flexes. Besides, how did you get inside the bottle?

There’s ‘a stumble of ice cubes’ and then ice ‘ticking’ in a glass. Ticking.

There’s a ‘quiver of whiskies’. Quiver.

It is a joyful job to be a poetry editor and linger over words. To set them onto a page one by one and marvel. And then to share them.

Lois Williams’s forthcoming debut may be called Like Other Animals. It’s a bargain. No, really. Read on. She wakes up words and sets them spinning.

There’s a cashier, in Poundland, for example. She’s ‘stuck there, furious, reliable.’ ‘What if our bargains are / our only words in common?’ Bargains.

At the town centre pond, there are ‘goldfish / shimmering their semaphore’. Shimmering. Semaphore.

And at home, there’s her father in the greenhouse ‘dusting off soil, bits of vermiculite’. Vermiculite. I don’t think I’ve ever said the word out loud till now. Vermiculite.

What a sensuous pleasure language is! What an amazing and humbling gift!

THE SUMMER OF BLUE

The poetry window has shut again.

Some of the coincidences that occurred during the reading period were extremely strange.

This always happens, but I forget.

Who would expect, for example, to find more than one poem featuring a walrus?

Also several poems about promises. The word ‘promise’ popped up all over the place (a lovely word, when you think about it).

Dusk, too. A lot of dusk. And silk.

As far as colour went, it was the summer of blue. Many shades of blue, more than one poem being entirely about blueness. Payne’s Grey did once put a look in, but blue was overwhelmingly the colour of choice.

‘Heft’ is, as I think I have said before, definitely the new ‘shard’, and clouds find themselves shrouding the sun quite a bit.

I am a little sensitive to shrouds at the moment, though I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen one.

Dead bodies are sometimes wrapped in sheets, but we don’t (I don’t) refer to these as shrouds.

The only shrouds I can find on eBay are connected with gas nozzles. However, on Amazon I have tracked down a ‘Premier Disposable Shroud with Plain Collar, White, Adult’. How extraordinary. Only ten left in stock.

There weren’t as many envelopes as usual – 97 sets of poems, when there are usually at least 120. But I figure people have picked up the fact that things are difficult here at the moment.

However, reading the poems was a pleasure. Real poems, of which there were many, are not written lightly, and they were not read lightly. I copied out three, so I could keep them and reflect. But images and phrases from others linger, as well as some of the lovely letters that came with the poems.

It is a privilege being trusted with people’s poems. I remain convinced that writing them is a good thing, good for the spirit (if not the shroud). and some of that invariably rubs off on the reader.

The work of words is ancient and uplifting. How glad I am to be part of that fellowship.

A MOMENTARY STAY

When life circumstance throw us into disarray, it seems there’s a natural human instinct to create order in a corner of the chaos.

So when sirens sound and bombs are imminent, someone may linger to make the bed, or clear the table, or put another piece of the jigsaw into place.

An ambulance is called, and the caller—never mind the chest pains—packs her overnight bag neatly, each thing in its proper place. These things matter.

A violent storm in autumn whisks leaves off the trees and the next day human beings scurry out of their houses, sweeping them up, pushing them into sacks and wheelie bins and compost heaps. Pointlessly. There will only be more.

And in this house, faced with more than one serious illness in the family, it seemed time to organise the boxes of books under the stairs, though other, more important, responsibilities were looming.

You see, we have one room packed with pamphlets upstairs: from here Matt does the packing and posting out for orders, reviews, competitions. In this room, he also has the acetate sleeves, the padded envelopes, the compliment slips, the review slips, the flyers, the newsletters, the postage stamps and customs stickers—everything carefully in its allotted corner—even to the safety pin with which he pricks each acetate sleeve around a pamphlet to let the air out so it will lie flat in the envelope. (This room was a bedroom once.)

In another upstairs room (my study) more books and pamphlets are in tottering piles on a small chest of drawers. Boxes of toner are stacked in one corner, two more boxes of books, reams and reams of paper, white and coloured. The envelopes of poems for the July reading window are filed on the floor, as are a number of other papers waiting to go up the ladder into the roof. (Don’t ask about the roof.)

But downstairs, under the stairs, there are far more boxes, and when there’s a new delivery, as there was on Friday, yet more boxes go there. It’s almost impossible now to get under the stairs, and frequently we forget what’s there—or believe a box of books is there that isn’t—because we’ve sold them all. Periodically, I do a recce, involving dust, heaving, reconciliation and a new floor plan. That was what happened yesterday. it’s tidier now with a outline of what is where. Some things have been carried upstairs and restacked in other stacks. Publications can be pinned down, their geography (for the moment) fixed. A degree of order has been established in one corner of our lives.

It struck me, while under the stairs heaving boxes, that individual poems are doing much the same thing. Many of them arise from a some kind of maelstrom and attempt to establish their own bit of order. They grapple with problems. The ones I like best creep around the problem describing it from one angle or another rather than solving it. But description is in itself a sort of solution. It puts things into place. it creates a floor plan. The more meticulously it makes its measures and phrasings, the more satisfying it feels.

Poetry likes patterns and patterning. It doesn’t have to be rhyme and metrical form, but in the grimmest circumstances those features come into their own. They solve nothing; but they resolve something. (I’m thinking this morning of Anthony Hecht’s More Light! More Light!, the least consolatory of poems, and yet … )

While under the stairs I was thinking about Andrew Marvell’s ‘Bermudas‘, which has always struck me as one of the oddest of poems. If the singers are pilgrims, why are they in a rowing boat? What happened to the Mayflower? Where exactly are they going? There’s something so surreal about it all, and yet delicious. “He gave us this eternal Spring / Which here enamels everything, / And sends the fowls to us in care / On daily visits through the air”—I like its rhyminess and chime-iness. I find the boat of singers both ridiculous and charming, whatever their sense of entitledness. What they really are is workers. It doesn’t matter what they sing (though singing about delights is preferable to singing about despair) so long as it keeps the rhythm going, keeps them going wherever they are going:

This sung they in the English boat
An holy and a cheerful note:
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.

And then the poem suddenly stops. Just like that—no warning at all.

But we can keep going. We have established a measure of order and pattern under the stairs and we can keep going. A ‘momentary stay against the confusion of the world’, as Robert Frost has it. The reading window is open and poems are welcome, especially from rowing boats and subscribers. There’s plenty of space on the floor.

Some of the books under and beside the stairs

HOW TO BAKE A POETRY PAMPHLET

First, get the recipe from the author.

It will look much like a Contents list, but with no indication of quantities or baking temperature.

But at least it’s a place to start.

Here, for example, in Will Harris’s debut, are the ingredients:

Object
Mother’s Country
Halo 2
Self-Portrait in Front of a Small Mirror
Naming
Bee Glue
Justine
Identity
Yellow
With Cornflowers
From ‘The Ark’ I
Cured
From The Other Side of Shooter’s Hill
From ‘The Ark’ II
Something
Allegory
Imagine a Forest

But what’s the method? And will the ingredients work?

At least some of the contents promise a recognisable cake. First collections nearly always have something autobiographical that fits into the sense of ‘self’. Because when you publish, it’s a public statement – if not about who you are, at least about who you may be. It’s personal, even if the poems aren’t.

In Will Harris’s Contents, you can see, fourth in the list, a self-portrait. Almost all poets have one, though not always explicitly titled. This one is in prose; part of the mixture. You can see ‘Identity’ too, and ‘Mother’s Country’ which has to be a bit of heritage stuff. Most poetry cakes have some heritage.

And ‘Naming’ of course. Poetry gives things names, then sometimes takes them away again. I often think about Gill McEvoy’s poem ‘Difference’. It was in a pamphlet baked back in 2007, her first collection, Uncertain Days. The poet is in a plane, looking down at the grass at the edge of the runway – ‘white clover in the grass, / a bee, a clump of yellow bedstraw, / a small brown butterfly’. All at once, the airport itself is ‘a place where species are defined / by difference’. The poet wants ‘to be out there’, on her ‘hands and knees, / naming things’.

Poets name things. At first for themselves; later (sometimes) for other people.

The name of the publication is part of that. All This Is Implied. Great name. Doesn’t sound like anything I’ve baked (or consumed) before.

Having said which, when it comes to first collections, no two poetry cakes are ever the same. Each is radically different from the next. Sometimes difference is the defining ingredient.

‘Will Harris’? Not much difference there. It’s such an ordinary-sounding name. A white-caucasian-empire-building name. But he’s not. A Victoria Sponge this is not.

All This Is Implied took a good while. The author is a thinker and a craftsman. He’s been experimenting for years, putting things into words, trying them out, breaking them up, putting them back together again. And he’s been working on prose style as well. He writes excellent prose (not all poets do). Blogging about one of the ingredients (‘Justine‘), he says: ‘I think about writing as a way of addressing race, gender, history which might embrace mixedness and confusion ….’

Will Harris is a fellow of The Complete Works III. He self-defines as BAME (Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic). He doesn’t ‘play the race card’ lightly. As he says himself in an essay on this subject, ‘ the race card is not something the non-white person can choose to play. It is what is done to you’. Do read that whole essay, and watch the YouTube film at the end. There is a context here.

So yes – this debut pamphlet does ’embrace mixedness and confusion’, though the complete confection is anything but confused. Numbered among the ingredients are: games, humour, mischief, love, and form – even rhyme. It’s not confused: it’s fused.

The end product has come out pretty well, in fact. It’s hot off the press. Want to try a slice?

Cake in waiting

HOT CROSS PAMPHLETS

My last blog entry dealt with the ‘post-pamphlet process’. I’m mid-pamphlet this week so thought I’d share a bit of that too, rather than writing about hot cross buns. (I may write about the first stage one day, and even the buns, but not today.)

I’m working right now with Will Harris on his debut pamphlet All This Is Implied. I love this title. It caught my attention from the start and the longer I live with it, the better it seems to fit the group of poems. It’s a nice title for a type-setter too. It occupies enough space on a front jacket to open up possibilities, and I like the internal pattern of the ‘is’ in ‘This Is’, and although it does have four letter ‘i’s, which could be a lot of dots, two of them will be capitalised, so that will be fine. (You think a lot about what words look like when you’re designing books. Both Helen Evans’s Only By Flying and Laurna Robertson’s Praise Song had a very useful letter O.)

And yes, I have checked to see there are no other poetry collections called All This Is Implied, although I was already sure there wouldn’t be. You can see my head is firmly on the title as a handle, both for the cover design and for the identity of the publication as it makes its way into the world, with attendant promotion to draw attention to its existence.

But I am jumping the bun. Let me go back to where the middle stage began and how.

In the third week of March I had a tiny opening of time, so I seized it. I grabbed the Word document containing the set of Will’s poems that had confirmed my offer of publication last October (though we have been communicating for some years, and he has been ‘pencilled in’ for longer than he knows), allocated them an ISB number and put the text into an In-Design document.

That sounds quick. It’s not. The reason it’s not quick is not just because of thinking about design principles, though I’ll come to those soon.

It’s because I think each poem through again as I put it on a page. I’m thinking now not just about individual strengths and weaknesses but how the whole thing hangs together. So my brain is focussing on links between the poems, in terms of thought, idea and verbal echo. It’s really a process of thinking of the whole publication as one artefact, almost one poem.

In terms of design, any poem that’s longer than a page will start on the left of the spread, because of the way I have so often, as a poetry reader, thought a poem has come to a beautiful ending, only to turn the page and find there’s more of it, and that the actual ending is less satisfying as the earlier false one.

But this principle of starting on the left often means the poet’s intended running order changes.

Then there’s the issue of the stretched or ‘weird’ poem. Poems come all shapes and sizes these days. It’s a bit like a hall of mirrors. They may extend in any direction and some use a variety of fonts too. I’m working with an A5 page for my pamphlets, and I won’t shrink font sizes to squeeze things in – because I think it looks naff. Sometimes I conclude that a typographically ‘difficult’ poem is simply not going to work inside my page shape. If I love it, I’ll spend a lot of time messing about with it. But if it’s just a ‘liked’ poem, and there are others to choose from, it will go. (The poet’s first full collection may have bigger pages.)

Poems with long lines are another issue. They fit best on a left hand page, where they can stretch into the middle without looking odd. They don’t look so good on the right, and I may have to reduce the margin to let them breathe and avoid breaking lines. I don’t like doing that, though there are exceptions. But starting the long-line poem on the left, also means the running order of the poems may change.

I may or may not agree that the poem the poet has chosen to start or end with is the right one. (I’m more likely to agree than not.)

If there are long poems in the set – and in Will’s pamphlet one extends over three pages and another over four (unusual) – you need to feel they’re in the right place. Of course, with long poems it depends what sort of long they are. Long and wide, or long and thin. Long and reflective, or long with a story. By gum. Well – the poet has already obsessed over this for years, so the least I can do is obsess for a few days.

In this way, I arrive at an In-Design draft, more or less following the author’s original intention. Then I do a second draft in which I make more radical changes. I print it out so I can see it on paper. I make more adjustments. I print it out again, two-sided in a booklet.

I create a cover, which is a rough copy holder with a notional graphic. However, this allows my brain to go to work on what might be there, and it encourages the writer to start to think about the text on the back, since he will need to supply some bio.

I fold the pages into a mock-up, put a coloured page in for flyleaf, and post to the author.

Together with the mock-up, I normally send a contract (not because I am preoccupied with legality but because it defines terms − like how many free copies the author will get, how big the print-run I likely to be, what author discount is applicable to additional copies purchased etc).

And I send some ‘new poet information’. This includes notes on proof-reading; a note about sales and publicity, so they will understand a little more about how the whole cost and promotional side works, and a note about supplying bio. Just lately I’ve produced yet another sheet explaining what information I need them to send after the first draft.

What happens next? Sometimes it’s the phone call. Sometimes the poet reads the draft and wants to change some aspects of content substantially, or wants me to consider some newer work as well. In that case, I think about whatever they send, and do another draft, and another mock-up, and then we talk.

Very occasionally the phone call is an actual face to face meeting. But mostly my poets are nowhere near me geographically so it’s the phone. Among other things, we will talk through the poems page by page. The poet tells me where there are typos or changes. If I have messed about with something, the poet either defends the original version and I take it back, or we agree that he or she will mark a section of a poem for further thought. So that phone call is usually at least a couple of hours, and there may be another before we’re done.

Then, after making the hot cross buns – on a Saturday when electricity is free – I do another draft. By this stage, I’m probably sharing copy by pdf attached to email because the author knows what the publication will look like in print from the mock-up. The author considers draft whatever-number-it-is-by-now. Do we need to talk again? If so, we schedule a time. More likely, I need to add detail – like notes or information on the acknowledgements page, and certainly the cover is work in progress. So I’ll add whatever is to be added, remove some errors, make a change to line 6 on page 15, lines 23-25 on page 17 and so on…

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested some images to Gillian that she might work on for the cover, and she does. What she comes back with is never what I expect. But weirdly it always seems to be ‘right’ in some way or another. I mess about with her images, and my typefaces, and get some covers together, including some poet bio if the poet has sent it (they are always slow to do this because everybody hates writing it) and a sentence of my own describing the contents as I see them. (I have now been thinking about this statement for three weeks at least. Later the copy may change significantly, and the poet has input to this too.)

We try to come up with two or three options for cover design and let the poet choose. They rarely choose the one I like best. However, the reading public usually likes the cover, and so does the poet, which is all that matters. Sometimes, I will do a final mock-up, including covers and post them. It depends how much time we have at this stage, because you could go on forever tweaking a comma here, worrying about a title there. It’s good to get the thing to PRINT and hurray! But the poet (and the editor) have to be happy with what they’ve arrived at.

And then, having consumed a hot cross bun with cheese, and with the print-ready copy taken to Dolphin press, I start on the ‘post-pamphlet process’ that I wrote about last week…