July has been busy. Probably the busiest reading window ever. I think I have just about reached the limit of what it is possible to manage. I was away twice for two days, and each time the whole thing got out of hand and I returned to a small mountain. During the windows, it’s necessary to be at home with several hours each day to spend on nothing else.
This window closes on Saturday 28thJuly, when I will also be at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh taking part in a pamphlet fair. Envelopes that arrive on Monday, July 31st are out of luck. I am packing and leaving. Literally.
How does it work during a reading window? The post here arrives between 11 and 12, so that sets up the workload for the day. The largest number of reading envelopes this month has been 11 in one day. It has averaged about 7 i.e. roughly 42 poems of varying shapes and sizes. A couple of years ago, during reading windows, it used to average 3 per day. So quite a big difference.
Each set takes about an hour. Some a little less; some quite a lot more. (I can’t do eleven in a day. I can manage up to six if I work the whole day with no interruptions.) I sharpen the pencils, open the first envelope, read the poems carefully (starting with a short one), scribble in pencil on each one, get out my fountain pen, write a reply to the poet (lengths of this vary: some are quite short, some two sides of A4), then I log the name of the author, the number of poems, and a brief summary of my thoughts on my laptop.
Most poets remember to include an SAE so that bit is quick. Occasionally they forget, or just send stamps, so I need to get up and find an envelope and write out the address etc. Even the ones with SAEs usually need a bit of sellotape since the quality of stickability is highly variable.
I am not reading the poems in order to find new work to publish, though very occasionally the process indirectly leads to that. I read the poems to see what’s going on in them. I’m very interested in poems, their authors (I like the covering letters) and also the trends – what seems to be going on in the poetry in general. One can’t help noticing trends.
This year I commented on punctuation a lot. The whole business of punctuating poems seems to be causing increasing problems. Should we do it sometimes? Always? Never? There are no absolute rules, but if I start to notice the punctuation (or absence thereof), there’s usually an issue. I call this snagging and I’ve written about it before.
The leaning verb is not quite so ubiquitous as it used to be, I think, but I come across poets who are apparently unaware how often they use this style feature. Yes – you see it in published work too. Trends have to come from somewhere.
More ‘new’ subscribers sent me poetry to read than ever before. So most of those people didn’t know that I don’t like villanelles, hate sestinas, and would really rather not read pantoums. I am starting to find prose poems increasingly hard to warm to, as well – the more they arrive, the less I like them.. C’est la vie!
This July, certain features particularly stood out for me, because of their frequency. So I’ll list them, for interest in a separate blog entry (tomorrow). There is no necessity to agree with what I think, of course, or even to read this list.
It is the frequency that is the problem. For a poem to work well it needs to sound fresh and new, and somehow surprising. If it sounds rather similar to most of the poems you read lately, well …I rest my case.