When a poet first approaches me about publication, if they’re not web-savvy, they don’t read the guidelines on the website. They don’t read the blog. They don’t get the free downloads. They don’t order publications or subscribe. So they have little understanding of how I work. This don’t, as Shania Twain says, impressa me much.
It used to be an option. Now it’s a necessity.
When a poet first approaches me about publication, if they’re not web-savvy, they don’t read the guidelines on the website. They don’t read the blog. They don’t get the free downloads. They don’t order publications or subscribe. So they have little understanding of how I work. This don’t, as Shania Twain says, impressa me much.
When I publish a pamphlet, I do an email flyer. There are paper ones too, of course, but the first orders come in as a direct result of the email flyer. If the poet is online, with email contacts, those people are the first to order – a small flood of them. If they have no email ‘friends’, there’s a tiny dribble. I need that flood, right? It’s what pays for the next publication.
When the process of putting a pamphlet together reaches white-hot excitement, I need to be able to bounce pdf files back and forward, sometimes very fast. Doing this by snail is a killer. I can do it, but it holds things back horribly. Besides, I haven’t got time. Not any more.
Once the publication is done, it goes into the ‘shop’ on the website. For some poets, about 75% of sales come that way. These are the poets who have a web life. Non-Faber pamphlets don’t sell in shops, remember?
Facebook drives lots of people barmy with continual ‘events’ notices. Nevertheless, it’s one of the ways new publications get noticed. You don’t have to be a Facebook/Twitter aficionado. You just have not to ignore this business. It’s hard to find readers for poetry. ALL the methods are important.
If you’re a poet, being online is not just about you. It’s about knowing what’s going on with other poets – who’s won what, who’s annoying whom, who’s just published a book you want to read, who’s reading at an event in your area. If you don’t take an interest in these things, who’s going to take an interest in you? What goes around comes around.
If you lived in the nineteenth century, you couldn’t have been a poet if you didn’t write letters. I still write letters. I LOVE letters.
Collapsing, nearly fainting and then projectile vomiting at the end of a poetry event, while a young mandolin group is serenading the audience, is wayward behaviour.
Collapsing, nearly fainting and then projectile vomiting at the end of a poetry event, while a young mandolin group is serenading the audience, is wayward behaviour.
But as soon as you think you are not actually making your final exit, as it were, it’s hard to decide which is worse: feeling crap or feeling horrendously embarrassed for your hosts and fellow poets. I’ve never done it before. I hope never to do it again.
I hereby nominate the following people for the Noble Behaviour to Wayward Poets Award (NBWPA):
Helen Birtwell (kind and generous organiser of the reading as part of the Cley and Sheringham Festival). Jehane Markham (whose lovely lunch was unceremoniously splattered across the school hall floor and who had made my visit to Norfolk, up to that point, such a joy). Helen Ivory and Martin Figura, who received WP Helena Nelson at their house in Norwich at three o’clock in the morning when A & E let her out.
The NBWPA is not, regrettably, a cash award, but nominations automatically ensure membership of a secret (but not that secret now) organisation whose members know they will be rescued, whatever the crisis, at any moment anywhere in the world that members of the NBWPA are present. There are more members than you might expect, the organisation having been set up in the early 1990s, at around the time of the first poetry festivals.
Anyway, I spent five or six hours in an A & E ward in Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. I don’t watch much television. In fact, I mainly only watch one programme on a Saturday night when I have finally stopped working. I was brought up with a grandmother who was an addict of hospital drama. We watched Emergency Ward Ten and we watched Dr Kildare. Avidly. So continuing this family tradition, I watch Casualty, even though it is not intentionally funny.
My time in a real A & E was just like a five-hour episode. No, better because I was actually in it. I was the Collapsed Poet storyline. As the nurse extracted my blood, she asked me to recite one of my poems. It’s harder than usual to remember poems — even your own — while your blood is seeping away for nefarious purposes. However, I managed part of the peeing poem. It seemed appropriate. There were a lot of people — much iller than me — peeing and vomiting and groaning around what they call the ‘trolley bay’ (Friday night, remember?). So I was something of an exception, in that I wasn’t drunk.
The people who looked after me there were, every single soul, kindness itself. They were working very hard — I watched them for several hours — but with humour and cameraderie. They checked out more bits of me than I can remember since my only other A & E experience, an ectopic pregnancy 24 years ago.
All of which resulted in my blood pressure returning to normal (it was not co-operating earlier) and me being discharged, no worse for wear, except to be very worried about all the people who were worrying about me.
Back home now, I’m glad of the extra hour. I could wish the bathroom hadn’t been dismantled (it is currently being refitted) so we are still washing in the downstairs toilet (don’t ask — I really mean the washhand basin), but that’s a minor detail.
And the whale? Very complicated. The whale is Gillian’s design for Graham Austin’s pamphlet Fuelling Speculation. And the picture is Jonah inside the whale (read the pamphlet and the penny will drop.)
I should have got that whale organised last week: we are running behind schedule. However, Gillian’s computer died, and then the scanning software for the new one wasn’t set up, and then Photoshop wasn’t installed. And one thing after another meant that when she came to meet me at the airport yesterday, to make sure I was fit to drive my car, she brought the sketchbook with the whale so I could scan it myself. I haven’t done that yet. I’m still treading softly.
But brushes with mortality are good for us. They make us hug the people we love a little more closely than usual, and phone the ones we can’t hug, and think how lucky we are. Jonah probably felt like that when the whale sicked him up. Everything connects.
John Lucas’s Shoestring Press is publishing a new books of poems by me, Plot and Counterplot. Arrival of the volumes is imminent, perhaps (or perhaps not) in time for Cromer and Sheringham Festival, where I’m reading with Helen Ivory and Jehane Markham at the Shorelines event on Friday night (29th October).
John Lucas’s Shoestring Press is publishing a new books of poems by me, Plot and Counterplot. Arrival of the volumes is imminent, perhaps (or perhaps not) in time for Cromer and Sheringham Festival, where I’m reading with Helen Ivory and Jehane Markham at the Shorelines event on Friday night (29th October).
The local launch of P and CP will be at the Scottish Poetry Library, Saturday 20th November, 3.00 for 3.30. Do come if you can!
Shoestring specialises in poets who are “established but unfashionable”. This makes being unfashionable sound almost fashionable.
Now I’ll get back to publicising other people’s work . . .
When we went on holiday my dad would have a bag of books — his maximum quota from Knutsford library. Science fiction, the sea, thrillers, anything to do with the war. I had a similar back from the children’s library. My sister must have had the same. My mother had books in German and a dictionary and her letter-writing stuff.
When we went on holiday my dad would have a bag of books — his maximum quota from Knutsford library. Science fiction, the sea, thrillers, anything to do with the war. I had a similar bag from the children’s library. My sister, who was also reading fit to bust, must have had the same. My mother had books in German and a dictionary and her letter-writing stuff.
We stayed in rented holiday cottages, self-catering. They always had a fire and places to read, which was just as well because quite apart from the fact that we were all voracious readers, it rains a lot in Wales and the Lake District, which is where we went. Anyway, even if it was sunny, we took the books to the beach.
We took several tins of cake too. My mother baked for a couple of days before we left and there was a fruit cake and sometimes more than one tin of flapjack. We ate a lot of flapjack. As I read my way through the complete works of Enid Blyton, I munched, and my mother’s baking turned into the slabs of fruitcake in the Blyton pages.
These cottages had no televisions. One had a toilet which was outside. The beds were cosy. We had hot water bottles. One of them had an amazing shelf of green Penguin murder mysteries over the fire place — which was a big open hearth. It stretched from one wall to another. It’s where I met Agatha Christie, Edmund Crispin (who also wrote poetry, by the way, and who liked Ruth Pitter), Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Dorothy Sayers. It was a feast. I never got to the end of them, though we went there several years and I probably read least two books a day. I can’t read that fast now.
I learned a painful book lesson in that cottage. It was in a remote situation in Pembrokeshire. But the bloke who looked after (and perhaps owned) our cottage was on the other side of the bridge with his young family, and we played sometimes with those two children. The older girl was a bit older than me. Their house was pretty primitive inside: dark and messy and musty. You didn’t really feel comfortable there, but you went anyway because when you’re on holiday sometimes you want some kids to mess about with.
My birthday fell towards the end of that holiday and among my presents I got a new Puffin by Patricia Lynch. I’d adoredThe Grey Goose of Kilnevin and I was dying to read this one, but I kept it for later, like you keep good chocolate, a treat for after the holiday was over.
When we got home, I couldn’t find it anywhere. The birthday spoils were intact but the book had vanished. Mystified, I wrote to my friend Carol from across the bridge and asked her to ransack the cottage in case I had left it somewhere. No book was reported.
The following year we went back. Playing one day in Carol’s bedroom, I spotted my missing book. It was on her bookshelf. She had nicked it, presumably. I can’t remember whether I confronted her. I think I may have done because I seem to remember her telling me it was hers. And after that we weren’t friends any more.
You learn. When I was twelve I went to school with a large bar of chocolate in the top pocket of my blazer. Stupidly I forgot it was there and left it in the cloakroom instead of stashing it in my desk. I shot back after assembly to get it, and needless to say, it was gone. My form teacher, Mrs Yorke, who taught Biology and Religious Education, told me I should be consoled by the thought that some hungry child had had no breakfast and so my chocolate had gone to a good home. I was not consoled.
In the holiday book bag last week (we were away near Kingussie, reading most of the week beside a log fire), I had Stephen Fry’s Moab is my Washpot. Good read. He was one of the thieves, the boys who went through other boys’ blazers for the spoils. He wasn’t hungry, or not physically. He just wanted stuff, like we all do, but somehow he overcame the thing that stops us taking it. Like my friend did. I don’t think she was especially happy. She was tall and gangly and growing fast, and living in the middle of nowhere.
Anyway, I read a lot of stuff last week, not much of it poetry, and it was good. Kingussie is bucking the trend and has extended its second-hand bookshop. It now has rooms with open beams and carpets and lamps, and its £1.00 for a paperback and £2.00 for a hardback. Another reason to go back.
So I haven’t bought my Kindle yet. I should, I know I should. But the holiday bookbag is part of my brain. I wouldn’t know what to do without more books than I can carry. I can do without the cake, I can do without the chocolate. But not the books.
One man’s laugh is another man’s groan. Not everybody likes Ogden Nash (though I do). Not everybody rolls about at Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales (though I do). T S Eliot’s cats never got half the publicity of ‘The Waste Land’ and Ruth Pitter’s case for The Comic Muse has never really been heard.
Anyway, this week the first two HappenStance Po-Lites are nearly ready to hit the streets.
I think Martin Parker’s No Longer Bjored and Graham Austin’s Fuelling Speculation are a delight. Each of these gentlemen has what creative writing courses call a ‘distinctive voice’. I mean, they really do. The forms in which they write may be familiar (though not always) but the voice behind them is unique.
I knew I was going to publish Graham Austin, if he would let me, when I found myself chortling out loud in the conservatory and looking for someeone to read aloud to. When you feel it’s so funny you’ve got to share it, you’re onto a winner. As for Martin Parker, his Sampler has already entertained many readers: here’s some more of him. You simply have to read ‘The joy of pastry’!
Of course you may not agree. Humour is one of the most difficult things in the world to share. When I brought out Unsuitable Companions some years ago, the poem one person picked out as ‘hilarious’ was the one another reader thought totally tasteless.
So I guess you’re going to have to read these to find out. At least there’s something here you could buy someone who is NOT a poet for Christmas. . . .
Kate Scott’s pamphlet is out and about. Escaping the Cage has a gorgeous cover design. The poems inside look innocent enough at first, then knock you off your cosy chair when you’re least expecting it.
At least they knocked me off mine. Of course, Kate’s not a ‘new’ poet. Her first collection was Peterloo in 2003, so there’s been a long gestation here. And these are poems worth waiting for.
Interesting stuff going on in the HappenStance back bedroom. It’s been straight from Kate Scott, who sends a shiver down my spine, to laughing out loud when wrestling (metaphorically of course) with Graham Austin and Martin Parker.
Poetry is always recycling itself: it’s a kind of permanent landfill.
Or to put it another way, it’s language that continually recycles itself: the soundtrack to our lives, popping up here and there, changing and churning, biodegrading, upgrading, forming a sludge the size of a continent somewhere in the middle of our collective unconcious.
Poetry is always recycling itself: it’s a kind of permanent landfill. Landfill, mindfill, handsfull, sound-swill.
Or to put it another way, it’s language that continually recycles itself: the soundtrack to our lives, popping up here and there, changing and churning, biodegrading, upgrading, forming a sludge the size of a continent somewhere in the middle of our collective unconcious.
If we have a collective unconscious. But then, that term’s just part of the sludge.
It’s an amazing thing, language. At least it amazes me. But it would, wouldn’t it? I’m one of the arch-perpetrators of making the sludge temporarily concrete, printing it onto a substance made from trees and packing it into little cellophane bags.
Rachel commented last week that she wondered why I bothered with the little bags. It’s because I think of the poetry pamphlets as valuable. The little bags protect the corners. The words keep beautifully inside those bags. If you buy a rare pamphlet publication — the kind that costs a hundred quid or so ((I have done this), they tend to come packed this way. So although pamphlets are ephemeral, I suppose I treat them like they’re not. I’m going to stop using the self-seal kind though.
And I like to work with local printers and feel that I am, in a tiny way, part of the local economy. Liz and Robert at the Dolphin Press in Glenrothes don’t do books. They do pamphlets, raffle tickets, flyers. They use machines they’ve had for a long time and skills they’ve had for longer. They talk to me and they have two beautiful dogs. I can pick up the publications on my way to collect my LovedOne from his workplace, so this feels sensible and sustainable to me.
Actually I rather like all the coloured bins, though I’m trying to put less in them. And Matt and I nearly had a row in Morrisons last week when I refused to buy the carrots in pre-packed bags and insisted on putting them in the trolley loose. All this fuss about one stupid bag! he ranted. But I make even more fuss about one stupid comma. Off to do more of that right now, in fact.
There are new pamphlet reviews on the website! This has been slower than usual because of the rampage of publications going on in this little corner of the world and because of me fighting with the Inspiron machine (which has empowered, but not inspired me). And there will be more soon. It would be nice if I had had review copies from Faber’s new pamphlet imprint. Needless to say, none have arrived here . . .
Look out for reviews of:
David Ford’s Punch Gill Andrews’ The Thief Gina Wilson’s Scissors, Paper, Stone Martin Lyon’s Sandcastles at Evening Helen Ashley’s Ways of Saying Lucy Lepchani’s The Beckoning Wild
I also just lost this entry because I had forgotten the notebook wasn’t plugged in, so it ran out of power just as I got to the end and ARRRGGGGHHH!!!
Honestly, in the end I will get better at this stuff. When did I unplug the mains cable? In my sleep? Why didn’t I notice that little red light?
So I began again. I saved as far as I had got, or thought I did. Suddenly the machine closed down. It was installing Windows Updates. No warning that I could see. I HATE Windows Updates. According to Matt’s bicycle magazine, research suggests that if you curse and swear a lot you can endure higher levels of pain. So . . .
Outside it’s raining again. It rained all day Friday. Yesterday it was sunny while I was sitting in a training session in Edinburgh; it started to rain while I was on the way home. Colin Beavan talks about “the little heralded water crisis”. “If we use it all up,” he points out, “there ewon’t be any left to drink.” It’s hard to imagine that in Scotland. That word ‘sustainability’, which is now a manadatory element on our teaching curriculum, means rain forests in Brazil, water shortages in Africa, bush fires in Australia. It is all somewhere else. What we have is a Sunshine Shortage.
Only it’s not all somewhere else. It’s a little planet and when you read the Beavan book, you feel it shrinking. Like the little cellophane packets I wrap my pamphlets in, each with its disposable unstick strip which I dutifully collect and put into the grey bin but soon it will be a blue bin, the landfill bin. (This week we acquired a green bin. We now have four different colours.) That Colin Beavan book is worth reading. It has some horrible formatting features, but it makes you uncomfortable in a worthwhile way. Unlike Windows Updates.
Jon and Kirsty (Fuselit) have decided to restrict the paper issue of that magazine (beautifully and uniquely assembled by hand) to 100 numbered copies. After that it will be readable electronically. (Colin Beavan’s family could read as much as they wanted electronically during their no-impact year — just no newspapers and no new books.) For Jon and Kirsty the reduced paper commitment means their input will be more sustainable. It’s eminently sensible. They are doing wonderful work. Read them. Get one of the hundred numbered copies and keep it forever!
I think I will reduce the print run of the HappenStance pamphlets again. The boxes in the spare room are reproaching me. I think it’s good to have fewer copies and have them (hopefully) treasured. I can’t bring myself to go electronic with poetry, though I’m not in principle opposed to e-readers or even to reading books on an electronic screen — if I could find one that WOULDN’T SWITCH ITSELF OFF TO UPDATE WINDOWS.
I remember an occasion when my son was eight years old. He was so enraged with his Sega that he shrieked and hurled it across the room. It crashed into his father’s hi-fi.
You think it won’t get you but it does. It does.
I remember an occasion when my son was eight years old. He was so enraged with his Sega that he shrieked and hurled it across the room. It crashed into his father’s hi-fi.
Naturally I separated him speedily from the offending machine and dispensed superior wisdom about patience and so on. I was thirty-eight but I had never experienced what he was experiencing. It was another three years before I started to teach myself word-processing.
The rage! The frustration! The despair! Things disappear! You spend whole days learning to do something, creating a wondrous document, and then it vanishes forever.
Which is the sort of thing that happened to me this afternoon, while trying to master this little machine, and get the missing reviews back on the website. Oh the muddles I have got in! Oh the messes I have made!
‘Use Notepad,’ Sarah advised. What did I do? Used Wordpad. It is NOT THE SAME. And the number of times I have hit the home key by accident and closed the file with nothing saved . . .
Yes, I wanted to hurl the machine across the room. Instead I went downstairs and parcelled up the orders and then read for half an hour in the conservatory with the leaking roof. A leaking roof is NOTHING in terms of annoyance.
I believe all the reviews are back. I think I may have cracked it, since Sarah saved me again. I may not. Watch this space.
Meanwhile, I’ll go and edit the other reviews, the ones that have been sitting untended for the last three weeks to a month. Where does the time go? (Don’t answer that.)
