Year: 2010

This time last Sunday the table downstairs was covered in endless printed copies of flyers to send out with chapter 4. Flyers for the three new publications, ‘in print’ lists, Sphinx lists, birthday party invitations. And so on.

 

 

It was a gruelling day. All day and into the evening. Fortunately (well, unfortunately for him) Matt has had some kind of nasty dermatitis-type infection on the soles of his feet, so while he sat with his feet in a bath of salted water, I gave him a box of envelopes and stamps.

Next day I filled two postboxes to the brim and staggered into Pitteuchar Post Office with two more enormous bagsful of ready-stamped packets.

I had thought my subscribers were down (some have died, some have lapsed) to about 100 but I underestimated. There are about 130, and thanks to the mailshot some wonderful people have enrolled new ones this week – another 6 or so already. And lots of them have sent in orders for the new publications. Thank you folk! So now there’s another mountain of parcels downstairs.

Meanwhile, Clare Best’s Treasure Ground is breaking HappenStance records by selling faster than any other publication so far. I’ve just packed up another 50 to send to Woodlands farmer Andrew Dennis who is selling them like hot carrots at Farmers’ Markets. That leaves only 30 out of the entire print run. I think we really have reached Reader A this time.

Sphinx 12 will be in the hands of Levenmouth Printer’s tomorrow, so that’s me braced for the last mega post-out for that. A friend sent a postcard saying ‘I hope you get that Marks and Spencers Award this year’. So that’s it Michael Marks. Renamed forever, though only in secret on this public blog.

Today is for writing reviews, and I might get time to read a couple of magazines (and buy some food). Two of my favourites, The Dark Horse (which came last week and is still unopened) and The Rialto are still unread (the current Rialto cover is gorgeous).

And I am starting on the next pamphlets. Just tentatively. Just a wee nibble. The HappenStance bank account is not balanced enough to pay for the next lot yet, though Treasure Ground is helping. I have been thinking a lot about the financial side of things, about how poetry is not commercially viable really — or I can’t see that it is — or I can’t see that pamphlets can be — not without ready outlets other than the poets themselves. Farmers Markets could never sell multiple poetry pamphlets. Fine words butter no parsnips.

But this means the role of the poet herself in selling the publications is incredibly important, which means active, out-there poets are valuable indeed. But not all poets can be ‘active and out-there’.

And there is so much poetry. I often feel so saturated with contemporary verse that I have to read something older, something dyed-in-the-wool (which reminds me of Clare’s sheep last week), some Coleridge, some Rossetti, some Soutar. I veer between celebrating the multiplicity of modern poets and being wholly overwhelmed by the impossibility of keeping up.

I wonder whether plays could ever sell without theatres and performances, and whether there isn’t a connection with poetry-problem here. Not all poetry lends itself to performance maybe but there is more than one way of doing things. That relationship between the poetry and the person reading or hearing it, that dialogue. And yet there are so few plays compared to books of poetry. And plays have narrative and characters and lots of poetry doesn’t. Thinking aloud in a blog is not a good idea. All the same, I am dying to hear Robin Vaughan-Williams perform The Manager. If that sequence isn’t theatrical, I don’t know what is. Meanwhile, Jon Stone is busily folding paper-characters, some of the strange strange characters in Scarecrows. . . .

Actually not really, not yet. Not party time yet, that is. But this year spells five years of HappenStance so there is an event fixed — at the Scottish Poetry Library — Saturday June 12th 3.00 pm for 3.30. Invitations will go out to subscribers this week with CHAPTER FOUR! (let me know if you’re reading this, are not a subscriber and would like one). And yes, that means Chapter Four (the Shakespeare chapter) is finally done.

Not just that. Also in the mail to those and such as those is: Robin Vaughan-Williams’ The Manager, Jon Stone’s Scarecrows and Tommy McKean’s long interview with Ruth Pitter (A Conversation with Ruth Pitter). The cost of postage and stamps alone yesterday was £146.00. In fact, total costs for HappenStance this week have exceeded £1,000 — a scary amount for one teeny weeny press in a week. “Never mind. It’s only money.”

I remember when I first heard those words. I was in my early twenties and not long married. We had been renting a flat in Altrincham, Cheshire but my then husband had got a new job, and we were about to move to Scotland (where I still am). The agent we rented from came to inspect the flat. Then they wrote to us to say they were retaining our deposit to meet redecoration costs. All right, I had stuck wine labels all over one wall of the kitchen. But hadn’t we redecorated the huge bedroom? And not just an amateur job either  – Proper Painters had done it. We had perilously little money and we contacted our lawyer (who was not ‘our lawyer’ really but my dad’s best friend and my ‘Uncle’ Stewart). It was Uncle Stewart who said, “Never mind, it’s only money.” Okay for him. He had lots of money. We had none.  Anyway, he got our deposit back for us and off we went to Scotland with it.

That’s not the sort of thing people are supposed to write in blogs. Back to the plot.

I now have so many publications floating around I’ve had to acquire large plastic boxes which I’m about to label. I find it difficult to keep stock with efficiency. Whenever a new publication arrives, I start by keeping a careful note of where the copies go, to whom and when, which are paid for, which are complimentary. And then at a certain point there’s a flood of orders, and I am working like mad and also posting things hither and thither and I lose the ability to write down what has gone where. Which means I end with a partial record and have to tally the final sales by means of deducting the copies that are left from the total that came in. Not impressive.

The online shop is great in this regard because it automatically saves the data. Even sales by flyer slip are useful because I keep the slips. But somehow it always gets out of hand in my hurry to get things into parcels and make my frantic way to the post office.

I recall Duncan Glen (Akros) telling me that Margaret (his wife) kept a note of every single sale in ‘her book’ and I wished I had a Margaret. She also kept track of every invoice. I can’t do that either – I just don’t have time. If someone orders a pamphlet and doesn’t pay, I don’t have time to chase up. Which is why two bookshops (and I do remember this with a degree of bitterness) never paid for orders of 12 pamphlets, which were duly invoiced and sent. My ordinary purchasers are incredibly honest. The truth is I am dealing in lots and lots of small payments, because pamphlets cost relatively little, although cumulatively they cost me — well, not an arm and a leg exactly, but at least a foot and an ankle. They cost, annually, just under half my employed income (at least three-quarters of which is recovered, eventually). All very interesting. I’ve done a worked example on one of last year’s pamphlets in Chapter Four.

So today is the subscriber day. The flyers, the envelopes, the invitations, the printed labels, the list to check off is sitting downstairs. Just got to print the backlist of Sphinxes. With luck issue 12 will be finished this week. Just waiting for the final two chickens.

Clare Best’s Treasure Ground is continuing to prove a treasure at farmers’ markets. After I posted last week about Dr Fulminare’s write your own blurb, she sent me an amazing picture of a sheep dating back to an episode during her residency at Woodlands Farm (see below). This was in the middle of the worst summer rains ever. She had spent a couple of hours in the shearing shed spraying the sheep (both sides with the same word, one word each from a short poem based on ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’)and then they all jostled together in the truck on the way to the field. By the time they were making their poetic ways around the field, most of them were just an even shade of pink, or blue or green.

Below is one of the legible survivors. Better than Damien Hirst, eh? At least these sheep are alive . . . .

 

 

Have you ever written a review of a work of Po? Then you’ve got to take a look at Dr Fulminare’s Irregular Features.  Go to Things to Make and Do, Vitally Urgent: The Game of Blurb, and below THAT, you can write your review by magnet. This is different, fun, clever, intelligent. Yeay! I recommend Top Trumps too. There is an interview with a strange woman called Helena

Nelson. She sounds a bit nippy to me.

I have been blurbing myself recently. It is so difficult to write something that is true, memorable and doesn’t sound inane. I wish I had had access to Dr Fulminare. No, I don’t. I might not have been able to do it at all.

Busy week. Four publications are currently being assembled into boxes at Dolphin Press, which means a mania of posting is about to begin. Yesterday, I was parcelling review copies of the before-Christmas publications hither and thither. And more Treasure Grounds to Woodlands Farm. The pamphlet has been finding Reader A. It has, it has! It has been selling at farmer’s markets, no less. A bag of sprouts, a big bunch of carrots, four lamb chops and one of those poetry thingies, please hen.

Tonight is Rob Mackenzie’s valentine’s event, love poems inspired by the Song of Songs (or one verse of it). It’s from 7.45-9.45pm at the GRV, Guthrie Street, Edinburgh. ‘Special touches’ are promised. Hmmm. Lots of poets reading a little love byte. I am one of them. I must remember to find the poem (and the verse).

I’ve been fulminating (like Dr F) this week about my Adobe applications which have started to play up. All of them. Periodically they open up, then immediately shut down again. I have to restart the computer to get them to behave. Pursuing this matter (interesting error messages appear from time to time), I see I am not alone. I am depressingly not alone. In fact, I am comparatively lucky because in my case (so far) the applications will run after a restart. So far I have tried various Adobe suggestions to fix this. None has made any difference (this doesn’t surprise me after reading the bulletin board exchanges), and I am not clever enough or confident enough to go to some of the lengths that other users have gone. When it comes to matters of registry, I bow out. The awful thing about this is the TIME it takes up when you’re trying to do something else. Like create an invitation to a HappenStance birthday party.

Yes! There is going to be something to mark the five year arrival. It will be at the Scottish Poetry Library on Saturday 12th June, 3.00 pm. Put it in your diary. Come if you can. I think Robin Vaughan-Williams may do a world premiere of the whole of The Manager (bits of it have been seen here and there before). We’ll see. But there’ll be lots of stuff happening, lots of poets poetting, and a reduced-Shakespeare-type overview of the publications so far (about 60 by June). Less of a launch and more of an event, at which things will be launched (after lunch).

Sphinx 12 is nearly done. Doug Savage is doing an interview with me in cartoons. They are nearly finished. Nearly nearly. It will be the longest and most expensive issue of the lot. A collector’s item. Who are these collectors? Where do they PUT their collections? In this house, we keep thinking the ceiling of the spare bedroom might collapse because not only are there two walls of books, there are dozens of boxes of poetry pamphlets . . .

How did it get to February already?  Ah well, it’s wet, it’s driech and dreary, but the Spring is on its way. The pussy willow is budding. All the spring bulbs are well through in the front garden. Two little patches of snowdrops have survived the snow.

Meanwhile, on the HappenStance front, several publications have nearly made it into existence. Already with the printer are the Ruth Pitter Conversation, Chapter Four of the HappenStance STORY (yeay!), Robin Vaughan-Williams’ The Manager and tomorrow, all being well, I’ll take a surprise addition, Jon Stone’s Scarecrows.

In Chapter 4, I talk about scheduling and how some things in the schedule always disappear (for good reasons) while other things appear that were unplanned. Scarecrows is one of the latter. I offered to do a publication for Jon ages ago. He had other plans at the time, plans which (for the moment) haven’t materialised. So he mentioned this fact. I knew he was good. I’ve always known that. Send me some poems, I said. He sent his recent Gregory application set. Wow. Quickly I put a pamphlet together of some of these very ‘finished’ (but weird) poems and Gillian did some cover images yesterday.

I say “quickly”, but nothing here happens quickly. “Quickly over about ten hours” is what I should say, though at least I don’t get in such a mess with InDesign as I used to, the practical side of things being at last much more straightforward.

We’re not quite done yet, but Scarecrows will go on sale at the same time as The Manager, and there’s something very pleasing about that. Both deal with the surreal (in very different ways). Both are young male poets. Both have an intoxicating sense of energy surging through the work. (That, of course, is not necessarily a good thing. There’s a lot of intoxicating energy about these days in poetry, some of it splashing all over the place in a wild and furious fashion. But these guys aren’t like that. The work is controlled, intensely controlled. I think they’re both gifted and unusual writers.)

Anyway, we’ll see what you think, right?

Meanwhile, Sphinx 12 is nearly done. An interview by Chicken is in process: I bet that’s a first ever. The review function has slipped behind but I’ll be catching up within the next two weeks and sending more pamphlets out to reviewers, of which there are now a very large number. There needs to be a lot of them, in order to manage three reviewers for every publication. Most of them are Reader Bs (see below) but there are at least two Reader As.

So — have you read Bow-Wow Shop 4 yet? Some fascinating comments from James Sutherland-Smith and Carol Rumens about the stage of good old British Po. Editor Michael Glover describes the mag as “an endeavour to bring poets together to talk, sensibly and intelligently, about the past, the present and the future of poetry. “

There’s certainly some sensible, intelligent conversation in this issue and the Bow-Wow Shop index is unmissable! Great stats.

• An estimated 50,000 unpublished poets in the UK. Is that all?
• Most extraordinarily generous advance against sales offered by a publisher to a poet during the early 19^th century: £3,000, by John Murray, to George Crabbe for Tales of the Hall (1817-19). Phew. Changed times.
• Sum offered to – and rejected by – Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet laureate of England, to undertake reading tour of America in 1862: £20,000. Well, would you do it for that?

But it was the debate that drew me in most. Sutherland-Smith talking about reviewing. He thinks a lot of reviewing is a bit woeful. True. Poetry needs to be precise, he says, and should be “supported and advocated by a criticism that is both forensic and passionate. Without such criticism, good poets will continue to write unnoticed unless they are capable of putting themselves about in the current media circus.”

I’m not sure that it’s criticism that gets good poets noticed. Not unless the criticism is written by specific people in very specific places, although I do, very much, care about the quality of poetry reviewing (hence Sphinx‘s attempt to contribute to this in a meaningful way).

Martin Bax wrote to me not long ago and one of his notes (he has marvellously illegible handwriting but not quite so illegible as John Lucas) queried whether it’s sensible to have all these poets reviewing other poets. It does seem illogical. Playwrights don’t generally review other playwrights; they just get on with writing plays.

But then not all poets review. I’m of the opinion it’s good for them to try: I think reviewing makes people read carefully (or it should) — really carefully. And that then informs the writing, or should. I also think reviewing can improve a person’s prose writing. And if they can’t write good words in the best order, why would they think they can manage the best words in the best order?

Carol Rumens must agree with me because she says “too few poets write criticism”. She talks a lot about Reader A and Reader B (Sutherland-S prefers the notion of a continuum). Reader A (this is Seren editor Amy Wack’s terminology) is the “intelligent general reader”. Reader B is “the specialist”. In poetry terms, Reader B is a poet or wouldbe poet. When it comes to discussion of ‘reaching new audiences for poetry’ (sigh), what it means is trying to sell poetry to people other than poets. Not just popular anthologies but the more difficult stuff.

Most HappenStance publications go to Reader B: poets. Most of my subscribers are . . .  poets. But there are exceptions.

At this very moment, flyers (with poems on them) are going out for Clare Best’s Treasure Ground in organic vegetable and fruit boxes despatched from Woodlands Farm. Let’s see how many of them send for the publication. Reader A, Reader A, come in. Reader A, Reader A, where are you?

There are lists, and lists of lists, and files with lists in them. My desk is a mess. I hate the desk being a mess. It directly represents the inside of my brain.

 

It’s like when you go shopping and find the previous shopper’s list inside your shopping trolley. I’m always tempted to use theirs. It might lead to a whole other way of life. Custard creams. Branston . . .

You see? I’ve been distracted already.

Today’s List

• Finish Chapter 4 (four pages to go)
• Pack up RP Conversation to take to printer tomorrow
• Do registrations for  RP, R V-W and Chap 4.
• Look at JS poems
• Send pamphlets for Callum Macdonald Award entry and write rationale (aargh)
• Suggest images to Gill for JS
• Write to TP re poems and make sense
• Send at least 2 poems to PS somehow god knows how
• Write to this week’s submissions, card to remind them about reading window, can’t read anything till July
• Sphinx tweaks
• Update sales list
• Flyer for RP
• Write JL and revise own book poems
• Make pastry
• Go shopping
• Phone mum
• Do ironing
• Hoover
• Breathe

Orders and envelopes pour through the door.
I ought to be finishing Chapter Four.

Stuck on Sphinx 12. And pamphlets. What’s more
Still haven’t polished off Chapter Four.

Migraine descends. A pain and a bore
It certainly rules out a day’s Chapter Four.

It’s started to rain. It’s started to POUR.
It’s miserable weather for Chapter Four.

Slogging at blogging is crazy.  Ignore
The rant. I am thinking . . . about Chapter Four.

Back to the keyboard. Shutting the door.
Chapter Four summons. I’m off now. Bonjour!

The December/January submissions have been coming in. One interesting poem included the word twitten, which led me to look it up and find it was one of those lovely words for alleyway – like vennel in Scotland and — amazingly — snickelway in Yorkshire. So I started another Wordnik list, after finding other dialect words in Wikipedia, and adding vennel to the Wikipedia page because it wasn’t there. All these things are how I mean to, but don’t, get started in the morning.

 

Improvements in the new year include a proper digital scale, so I can now weigh parcels properly before covering them with expensive stamps. Before I weighed them on the old pounds and ounces shop scale in the kitchen and did the conversion mentally. Roughly. Not very clever really and meant that I usually put on more stamps than necessary just in case I’d over-estimated.

Submissions always make me think I should rewrite the submissions page, since several people do seem to miss the point. But perhaps they wouldn’t read it anyway. It would be nice to think they’d read one of the HappenStance publications, for example, before applying to join the gang, as it were. Oh well.

I’m working on

• Sphinx 12
• Sphinx online reviews (four more went up last week)
• a prose pamphlet which comprises a long and fascinating conversation Tommy McKean had with Ruth Pitter
• Chapter 4 of the HappenStance Story
• Robin Vaughan-Williams’ grim, funny, haunting, beautiful The Manager

As usual, too many things by half. But at least I can weigh the packets accurately.

 

 

Welcome to 01.01.2010—but this, though written this morning, has only just been netted. My attempt to write the blog this morning was foiled by, yet again, a non-responding server. This happened exactly two weeks ago. On that occasion, I spent an hour testing everything in existence, running up and downstairs, checking the phones, the wires, the netgear . . . This time I know what the problem is. It is HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM ORANGE. I suppose I should change my ISP because this is fearfully irritating and twice in two weeks does seem to indicate there is a bit of a Problem.

 

However, there’s a technical name for the kind of person I am, though I can’t remember what it is. It is the opposite of what I am supposed to be educationally (an ‘early adopter’). I guess in internet-server-provider terms I am a Late Adopter. I foster the idea of changing but I don’t ever actually commit.

Or I’m just a person who loathes the hassle of going through the change procedure. A stupid person. It’s why I’ve been with the same bank for the last 30 years, why I’ve never switched from Scottish Gas, no matter how irritating they may be, why my telephone line is still BT.

And it’s why I’m writing this blog (or not writing it) in a Word document. And it’s why I won’t be able to email my daughter (whose landline connection was cut by BT just before Christmas when she attempted to switch to Virgin) or my son, for whom at the moment it’s the only form of communication because his Swiss mobile is out of credit and he’s in Edinburgh.

Oh technology! Oh wonderful white wintry world in which we find ourselves this morning! Thank you God for books. Those old-fashioned papery things, one of which I am going to go and read, happily.

Happy New 2010, with or without technology!

LATER THE SAME DAY (sheepishly)

I telephoned Them (Orange) by evening because nothing had got any better.  That was after I had phoned a whole website (via my phone which has net access) devoted to Problems With Orange. It confirmed my worst fear.

But nothing ventured, nothing gained. It also gave all the expensive phone lines to ring so I did this. The guys at the other end of the phone were patient and very helpful, despite a poor line and heavy accents. One even went to get another one who might have better advice from one using netgear from a Mac. Whiloe they were asking me to check the things I’d already checked, I thought Id’ try unplugging the router and plugging it back in again. Two weeks ago I did this and it had no effect. This time, the effect was instant. Back on line.

So not Orange’s fault then. My Netgear’s fault. The mannie on the phone said I should regularly check my router by resetting it (namely switching it off and on, something even an eejit can manage).

I said, ‘Do you think it’s sign that the box is not very reliable and I should get a new one?’ (Mug born every minute.)

‘You can get one direct from Orange,’ he said hopefully. ‘But you may need to upgrade your Broadband connection to a higher speed . . .’

Oh well, tomorrow it is 01.02.2001. That’s quite an interesting date too, and it might be a better day than today. And I did manage to contact both of my children, and we did meet in Edinburgh and restore Chris’s glasses to him, and it is not snowing. Hurray!