NEW HAPPENSTANCE PUBLICATIONS – Page 2 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING

I’ve always thought poems and recipes have much in common. The list of ingredients in short lines. Lots of space on the page. The method of making, sometimes in numbered steps with energetic and commanding verbs.

Weigh, mix, stir, simmer, bake, cool, eat.

So when Alison Brackenbury suggested a collection of poems based on hand-written recipes (her grandmother’s) the idea appealed immediately—but the recipes themselves, or some of them, had to go in too.

Then it got more complicated. If the book was recipes, as well as puddings, we would have to test them—otherwise some of them might work for Dorothy Eliza Barnes (Dot), but not for us, or future readers.

Alison had vivid memories of Dot’s delicious cooking, which was a grand incentive. She set about trying and testing a method for some of her favourites, including ‘Aunt Margaret’s Pudding’, an old-fashioned steamed affair. Who eats steamed pudding these days?

The answer is—Alison and her husband, and then, last December (when Alison had written down the method) me and my family too. You see, Dot’s recipes (she had worked as a professional cook in the early part of the twentieth century) were just a scribbled list of ingredients. She knew how to make them—she didn’t need to record that bit.

Page one: Aunt Margaret’s Pudding.
Take half a pound of flour,
three ounces lard (or butter), egg,
milk, sugar, baking powder.
Spread jam in basin, summer gleam.
Poke fire! For ninety minutes, steam.

[ From ‘Start’ ]

This was a whole new approach to publishing. Not just proof-reading poems but proving the puddings, cakes and scones. My favourites turned out to be Raspberry Buns and Quaker Oat Scones, which disappeared in hours—the ultimate test of a good recipe.

This was a book with wonderful ingredients: poems, recipes (Dot’s version and Alison’s version), photographs, memories. Knowing Alison to be also a first-rate prose writer (not all poets are), I suggested she do a brief memoir too. She came up with a fascinating narrative—a story of rare determination and creativity in tough times.

So the book—Aunt Margaret’s Pudding—is fully cooked. I gave a copy to my old friend Tony (he is not far off 90). Tony has never understood why I should want to publish poetry, and regards the genre as plainly unnecessary. But I knew for a fact that his mother made steamed puddings: he used to talk about them hungrily. Once a pudding lover, always a pudding lover.

All the same, I didn’t particularly expect Tony to read the book, so was rather pleased when he phoned to say at last I had published something he had really enjoyed. ‘And the bit at the end,’ he said, ‘the prose pages about her grandmother—well, that’s more poetry than the poems.’

Hurray! The book can, as I hoped, appeal to a wider audience than the usual poetry people, though I feel sure they will like it too. It’s the ingredients that really make it different—recipe, then poems, recipe, poems, recipe, poems, memoir. And it’s a most moving tribute to Dot, who might otherwise be as lost as ‘The Lost Farm’.

Which is not entirely lost. It’s in the book.

Quaker Oat Scones

Raspberry bun and tea

Quaker Oat Scones

RECIPES FOR POEMS AND POEMS WITH RECIPES

There are recipes for certain kinds of poem. Villanelles, for example.

Ingredients: one rhyming couplet, each line sufficiently persuasive to bear four repetitions and bake on its own with strong flour. If you have any iambic pentameter, so much the better. Select a third line that’s easy to rhyme with, since this pudding (I mean poem) only has two rhymes throughout. Pre-heat your oven to approximately 180°C.

But you don’t want to make a villanelle, surely. I know they’re fun to concoct, but so rarely sustaining. They remind me of Dr Johnson’s unfortunate but memorable observation on women’s preaching: ‘like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all’.

But I digress. I am thinking really about poems with recipes rather than recipes for poems. I am working on Alison Brackenbury’s forthcoming HappenStance publication, which was to have been a pamphlet and has grown into a delightful book. It is called Aunt Margaret’s Pudding and contains a mixture of poems and recipes, as well as a brief account of the life of the woman who inspired them – Alison’s grandmother, Dot – who worked, at one time, as a professional cook.

As a recipe lover myself, I have often been struck by the similarity, on the page, of poems and recipes. They both often resemble lists, but they’re a little unpredictable. They can sprawl unexpectedly, and contain little asides that have nothing to do with the food. You can make of them what you will.

Either way, it strikes me as an excellent combination. Alison’s poems are particularly good if read in combination with a cup of tea and, say, a raspberry bun. (I especially like Dot’s raspberry buns and my other half, Matt, who almost never eats cake, has developed an interesting partiality for them.) So this is a little advance puff for her book, though there will be much more about it later.

I once tried to combine a recipe and a poem. That is to say I converted a recipe into what seemed to me at the time to be poetic form. I am not sure the results would have pleased the T S Eliot judges, but at least it has saved the recipe from getting lost – another use of poetry, if you like. Before it became a poem, I once lost it, and my friend Barbara, to whom I had passed it on, copied it out and gave it back to me. It is called ‘Pain de Campagne’ and when Barbara returned it to me, she had subtitled it ‘Tired of Living in the Country’.

So whether or not it’s good poem, I know it’s a good recipe. It is tried and tested by more than one of us and will not let you down. Here it is:

Pain de Campagne

Day 1:
Mix these things in a roomy bowl:

8 ounces of strong white bread flour
A scant dessertspoon of table salt
8 fluid ounces of tepid water
A little dried yeast (a scant half teaspoon)

Cover with a plate and leave till next day.
At night dream richly. Record your dreams.

Day 2:
Return to the bowl.

Add 4 fluid ounces of luke-warm water
and then 4 ounces of whole-wheat flour.
As you stir the mixture, remember your dreams.
They will rise to the surface in tiny bubbles.

Cover and leave. Sleep well that night.
Record your dreams.

Day 3:

Back to the bowl.

Beat in more water—4 fluid ounces
and then add 12 ounces of strong white flour—
enough to make a workable dough.
Knead at length, remembering your dreams.
Add flour if needed. Continue to work
until the dough is beautifully smooth.

Leave to rise till doubled in size.
Sleep, if you wish, while the bread rises.

Later the same day

Punch back the dough.
Knead briefly and form a long oval.
Place on a baking tray covered in flour.
Shake more flour on top of the loaf.
Lightly cover and let it rise.

This loaf will grow.

When the size impresses you
slash the top with diagonal cuts
and bake very hot[1] for a quarter of an hour,
then somewhat cooler for twenty minutes[2].

The crust of this loaf will be domed and firm,
the crumb dreamy.
It will make great sandwiches, keep well
and prove that poetry can be useful.

[1] 230C

[2] Or perhaps a little longer, at 180°

RECIPES FOR POEMS AND POEMS WITH RECIPES

There are recipes for certain kinds of poem. Villanelles, for example.

So whether or not it’s good poem, I know it’s a good recipe. It is tried and tested by more than one of us and will not let you down. Here it is:

Pain de Campagne

Day 1:
Mix these things in a roomy bowl:

8 ounces of strong white bread flour
A scant dessertspoon of table salt
8 fluid ounces of tepid water
A little dried yeast (a scant half teaspoon)

Cover with a plate and leave till next day.
At night dream richly. Record your dreams.

Day 2:
Return to the bowl.

Add 4 fluid ounces of luke-warm water
and then 4 ounces of whole-wheat flour.
As you stir the mixture, remember your dreams.
They will rise to the surface in tiny bubbles.

Cover and leave. Sleep well that night.
Record your dreams.

Day 3:

Back to the bowl.

Leave to rise till doubled in size.
Sleep, if you wish, while the bread rises.

Later the same day

Punch back the dough.
Knead briefly and form a long oval.
Place on a baking tray covered in flour.
Shake more flour on top of the loaf.
Lightly cover and let it rise.

This loaf will grow.

When the size impresses you
slash the top with diagonal cuts
and bake very hot[1] for a quarter of an hour,
then somewhat cooler for twenty minutes[2].

The crust of this loaf will be domed and firm,
the crumb dreamy.
It will make great sandwiches, keep well
and prove that poetry can be useful.

[1] 230C

[2] Or perhaps a little longer, at 180°

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!

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…

PUFFING AND PANTING AND PAMPHLETS

So we have two new pamphlets at last!

One is a debut – Robbie Burton’s Someone Else’s Street. One of the poems in it keeps sticking in my mind and I woke thinking about it.

It’s ‘Dawn, Lizard Point’, in which the poet looks out through a ‘picture window’ to sea. She sees, briefly, in lighthouse beam, a man fiercely paddling a canoe through the waves. Then he disappears into the mist.

I keep seeing that man in my mind’s eye, and this in turn reminds me how poems are often like clues. They focus on something we once saw or heard or sensed, something slight at the time, but it sticks in the memory. It seems like a clue (a clue to what’s really going on—or a symbol of it).

Someone Else’s Street has a number of clue poems in it. Even individual lines can be like that. ‘When fat rain pockles the pond…’. There’s a delicious clue if ever there was one.

And Robbie’s pamphlet has a number of mysterious connections with the other one published at the same time, Jennifer Copley’s Some Couples—which was originally to have been titled just Couples, until I recalled a Valley Press publication by Michael Stewart with this very title. So it had to change to Some Couples, and thus two pamphlets at the same time begin with ‘Some’.

There are other synchronicities. Among the poems included, Jennifer has ‘Cellar’; Robbie has ‘Coal Cellar’. Where Jennifer has ‘Some Couples’, Robbie has ‘Uncoupled’. Robbie’s glimpse of the man at Lizard Point is paralleled by Jennifer’s ‘Fleswick Bay’ where she finds ‘a bunch of fresh freesias / wedged in the cliff with a note— / I miss you, I love you. Louise.’

So, yes, more clues from Jennifer. A line that sticks in my head is ‘She was stuck in her life and couldn’t climb out’. But this is a poet with haunting phrases that follow you around—like ‘her mouth that wouldn’t say goodbye’ and—perhaps even my favourite—‘the badger known as Graham’. Tiny stories. Odd angles. Jennifer Copley sets off in a natural conversational tone but can end almost anywhere.

I also woke this morning thinking about my post-pamphlet list of tasks, and whether I’d covered them all, so I thought I’d share them. Useful for those thinking about publishing, and I’m always hoping more people will.

Also a reminder of the practical side of all of this: it’s not just poetry here, you know. It’s packing and planning and punctuating and parcelling and processing and posting, and puffing and panting our way through the waves.

Post-pamphlet process

Scan cover and save in suitable format for use on website etc
Upload the pamphlet details, ISB number and cover scan to Nielsen book data so it can be ordered through book shops & at same time keep my own record
Create flyer
Get flyers printed
Create shop page with pamphlet details for sale
Create poet’s page on website (or update existing page if it’s a second publication)
Add book details to Amazon inventory
Write about new pamphlet on blog and say something I haven’t already said on a) the back jacket b) the flyer c) the shop page or d) the newsletter
Tweet and Facebook the blog link
Update ‘publications in print’ list with new publications, remove any that are sold out and upload to website
Put aside 6 publisher copies in the box in the roof
Put aside copies for entry to Michael Marks etc
Post the free author copies and some fliers to author
Send out the first review copies
Send out gift copies to those and such as those
Send out legal deposit copies to Boston Spa and Agency for Legal Deposit Libraries
Send copy to Poetry Library at Southbank
Send copy to Scottish Poetry Library
Pay the printer
Pay the artist for the graphic on the cover
Publish the shop page created earlier
Supply early orders that come in through website
Find space under the stairs for the new boxes of pamphlets and tell Matt they won’t be there forever
Organise mailshot to postal subscribers to tell them about the pamphlets (order more envelopes, stamps etc)
Write newsletter for mailshot and print 350 copies
Organise electronic mailshot: put the electronic documents in the right place on the website
Do electronic notification for online only subscribers
Send out electronic news about the new pamphlets to people who signed up on email list on the home page
Help publicise launch event if there is one
Remind the author about review suggestions
Collect up all the drafts and versions and sixteen cover designs, and flyer copies and letters and paper records associated with this pamphlet, put them in a labelled cardboard folder with one final printed pamphlet, and file in a box in the roof
Update the accounts
Make a cup of coffee
Start work on the next pamphlet

Caption: The publisher’s grandmother’s day card

How to launch a poetry book

There are many ways.

I like the way the word ‘launch’ suggests champagne and an ocean liner. And recently I did attend a poetry reading in the sea. It was almost certainly the first ever event of its kind and it was during Poetry in Aldeburgh in early November.

Poets are tough people. They can do almost anything. Including taking off their clothes and immersing themselves in bitterly cold sea water while declaiming verse. The four fearless poets involved in this reading were each other’s audience because the spectators (I was one of these) were too far away to hear the words – and comfortably dry.

Poetry in the Sea was an unforgettable and stunningly beautiful event. But it wouldn’t do for a launch, despite the possibility of boats, because the books would get wet. And at a launch, there are books.

However, there was also a dry HappenStance launch at Aldeburgh, when we booked a beautiful room (with a sea view and amazing stripes wallpaper) in the Brudenell Hotel to launch Charlotte Gann’s Noir. It’s a dark and shadowy book, elliptical in its suggestion and grace – but there was much laughter on the day, as you can see from the photograph, and many HappenStance subscribers and poets came along.

But what are the essential ingredients for launching books?

Well, you do need an audience. There must be books to sell (this sounds simple but printers go bust every year). There needs to be a signing table. There needs to be an author to read (even this can go wrong and I have known launches where the author was elsewhere). The poet/reader needs to perform well and not for too long. Someone needs to make a little speech, introducing the poet and probably proposing a toast. You need glasses, or at least paper cups, and something with which to toast the success of the publication – anything from purest tap water to champagne.

You need something to put the money in. You need change. You need paper to note down sales etc. You need pens for signing the books. You need a clear head. You need a budget.

Because all this almost certainly costs a bob or two. You may or may not have to hire a room (you could use a free back room in a local pub; you could use your back garden; you could assemble in a park). But there is a cost factor.

If you’re selling the books yourself, you may pull in enough cash from the event to cover the cost. But the launch could be at a festival – like Paul Stephenson’s first reading from The Days That Followed Paris – which was also at Poetry in Aldeburgh. At a public event of this kind, you don’t have to fork out for the venue (and if you’re lucky you may even receive a performer’s fee), but the official bookseller will handle sales.

You can have more than one launch, of course, and bigger publishers do organise these for popular titles at bookshops across the nation. But most poetry titles have just one, and occasionally two.

It all sounds a bit scary if you’re a new poet and contemplating organising such a thing – because often it is the poet who organises the launch – not the wonderful publisher, who is already working on the next three titles and anyway is on holiday in the Seychelles.

I have known poets who got a friend to do the organisation: an unofficial publicity person or secret agent. That works well, and the friend can also do the introductory speech. It’s also often a good idea to launch with at least one other writer: more variety during the reading and someone else to bolster the confidence and share costs.

But there are many models and ways of doing it. The most important single thing is that the audience – and the poet herself, if possible – has fun. It’s a sort of party: a birthday party for the book and a well-wishing. So once you think of this, nothing else matters but a spirit of celebration.

Last weekend I was in Taunton for Annie Fisher’s launch of Infinite in All Perfections. If you give a collection a title like this, you’re asking for trouble. However, it was a fabulous launch with a style of its own.

It was an afternoon launch with glasses of Prosecco, Victorian china, floral decoration on all the tea tables, acres of glorious cake and tea. It was a launch in a terrific hall with microphones and comfy seating. There was a band playing before and after the poetry. It was a launch at which the poet not only read but sang. Such a voice! Such a lyric performance!

If a publication would make a suitable Christmas gift (this is certainly true of Annie’s pamphlet), it’s no bad idea to launch in November or December, so timing’s worth consideration.

I’ve always wanted to do a launch at which copies of the publication were given away free to everyone who came. I’ve never done it but I love the idea; and it could be possible, if it were a launch with a paid entry. Or if the poet (or publisher) was singularly well-heeled.

What’s the purpose of a launch again? It’s to celebrate the arrival of a new piece of making, to send it out into the world, and to find it some good readers. It’s only the beginning, but a good beginning helps.

(One thing to bear in mind: the launch of your first publication is the easiest. Launching subsequent books is much harder. By now, your family and friends have got used to the idea you do this kind of thing. So you may need to think hard about how to do it in a different way with different attractions. A magician. Games. A celebrity guest. Rabbits.)

The smell of the poem

These days there’s a lot of interest in what poems look like.

Issue 57 of Magma was titled The Shape of the Poem and the submission invitation began: ‘Poetry is a shaping of words and that shape can often be seen on the page’. It made reference to the visual cue of lines that turn before they reach the edge of the page: an early indicator that text is poem not prose.

Generally readers expect poems to look like poems. They expect more space round them than around prose. They expect a lot of other things too, many of which are conditioned expectations, operating subliminally – such as rhyme, an aural cue.

If you want to know a reader’s subconscious expectations of poetry, give them a poem that satisfies none of them. Give them a one-word poem. Give them an absence in the middle of a square. Give them a poem in which every line is struck-through or blotted out. Give them a poem they can’t hear. Give them a poem they can’t see.

Poetry – whatever it may be – works by acknowledging, and then – to various extents – both satisfying and disrupting expectation. If it doesn’t satisfy, you won’t like it much. If has no element of surprise, you won’t rate it.

Robert Pinsky says of poetry: ‘It’s voice. It’s a vocal art.’ Well, it can be, although it usually requires more than one sensual response eg. seeing and hearing.

But try watching Cochlear Implant, by the extraordinary British Sign Language poet Richard Carter, and see what you think. That’s if you can see him. Is vision the only way for British Sign Language to be accessible? There might be another way, through touch. Helen Keller could read speech by touching people’s lips with her hands.

We operate through our senses. We make communication in whatever way we can. We call some of those communications – especially those unusually important to us – ‘poetry’. Like water through porous rock, poetry finds ways to reach people.

But what if we think poetry is a visual art, and then lose sight? What if we believe the shape on the page (or the page itself) is essential? What if we believe the poem must be heard?

We are an exceptionally creative species. We find ways. Some of them are technological.

I’ve been fascinated in recent months by Giles Turnbull’s blog. Giles is a poet who can’t see – though he wasn’t born without sight, which means he has his own expectations regarding shape and form. He has acquired a pair of magic glasses, which do the most extraordinary things. His blog about the Orcam glasses is here. And his story is ongoing – do follow that blog.

Giles can’t, I think, respond to Richard Carter making poems in BSL. Richard can respond to Giles because deaf poets can read, though English may not be their first language, so there could be a language barrier. Barriers are not terrible obstructions: they’re creative opportunities.

As for poetry of touch, I expect it’s out there. Taste poetry may, arguably, already be with us. And dogs smell stories. If you don’t believe it, look or listen to this little film.

ps I will be at Poetry in Aldeburgh next weekend. Do come if you can. Paul Stephenson will be reading from The Days That Followed Paris, and Charlotte Gann will have a private launch of Noir on the Saturday afternoon at the Brudenell Hotel, to which you’re warmly invited. Email me (nell) at happenstancepress.com for details or use the message box on the website.

The Danger of Dreams

I woke this morning from a vivid dream.

I was sitting at my desk and I glanced at the bottom bookshelf.

I saw two copies of a large white paperback.

These two books weren’t there yesterday. Two duplicates.

The title of the books was easy to read, even from this distance. It was:

WRITING: THE GRIM & THE ACT

I took this as a warning and made this short.

The Clog of the Blog.
The Anxious Analogue.
The Whim & the Pact.
The Dream & the Fact

(of the paperbacked).