2014 – Page 2 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

THINGS ARRANGED IN THREES

The time has come. I can’t put it off another day.

I have savoured every moment of them in the little tree in the corner of the garden near the fence. First they were green, then gold, then burning red. Now, with the onset of October and a colder wind, they are starting to drop. The crab apples must be picked and jellied.

There are many good jellies but my favourite is the crab. And although the bramble jelly might have reminded me of Robert Herrick, it didn’t. It took the crabs to make me think of pipkins; and pipkins took me to ‘A Ternary of Littles’ which I have loved all my life, though I’ve no idea when I first read it. It is not in The Lyric Poems of Robert Herrick edited by Ernest Rhys, which I see I acquired in 1972, when I was nineteen. The little book has no publication date, but its previous owner, Flora E Peel, has inscribed the date 1898. Quite an elderly book, then. And I have put my maiden name under Flora’s: Helen L Curry.

A pipkin is a small cooking pot. Often, apparently, they had three legs. I don’t know whether Robert Herrick’s had. I don’t even know what kind of jelly he was presenting his lady with. Nor does it matter. In my mind it was, and has always been crab apple jelly. Mine will go into small glass jars.

Of course ‘A Ternary of Littles, upon a Pipkin of Jelly sent to a Lady’ is a list poem (they have been around a very long time) but I still like it. Herrick was born in 1591 and survived to the ripe old age of 83. He never married. But I think I had better quote his ternary, had I not? Here it is:

A little saint best fits a little shrine,
A little prop best fits a little vine:
As my small cruse best fits my little wine.

A little seed best fits a little soil,
A little trade best fits a little toil:
As my small jar best fits my little oil.

A little bin best fits a little bread,
A little garland fits a little head:
As my small stuff best fits my little shed.

A little hearth best fits a little fire,
A little chapel fits a little choir:
As my small bell best fits my little spire.

A little stream best fits a little boat,
A little lead best fits a little float:
As my small pipe best fits my little note.

A little meat best fits a little belly,
As sweetly, lady, give me leave to tell ye,
This little pipkin fits this little jelly.

And thinking about it in bed, I realised there are several poems by Herrick that ring in my head and have done these several decades. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ of course, which is really titled To the Virgins to Make Much of Time. And of course To Daffodils, which I met at school (we had to do an exercise comparing it with Wordsworth’s better known daffodil stanzas). He sets a cracking rhythm, does Herrick, which means I can still rattle off the first few lines. And reading him again, now, I see what an influence he must have been not only on W H Davies, but Thomas Hardy too. And even me. The reach of the Tribe of Ben is long.

And then there is Cherry Ripe, and the wonderful poem that taught me the word ‘liquefaction’: Upon Julia’s Clothes. I see Julia’s Clothes is also a ternary: three line stanzas, and rhyming in threes. But I mustn’t forget the wonderfully precise Delight in Disorder. I wonder if this is his best-known poem? Perhaps.

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoestring, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more betwitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

I had forgotten how much I love Herrick. It’s taken the crab apple jelly to remind me that he’s still there. Wikipedia tells me that even in his day Herrick was old hat. Too simple compared to the superior complexity of Marvell and Donne (but oh I love them too). And look how well he has lasted! The line ‘As my small stuff best fits my little shed’ could have been written today. It made me think of Jenny Elliott’s Fife-based Shed Press, which produces extraordinarily beautiful (and small) poetry artefacts. I heard her read from One Old Onion only last night at a Platform event, and it was a rare treat.

Maybe I specially like Herrick’s Ternary of Littles because I am little. I was always small and am getting smaller. And it’s a highly domestic poem. You could argue that it’s somewhat coy in tone, I guess (he was either charming or flirty, depending on how you read him), but I cherish it as a personal rather than a public piece. I believe he wrote it down and presented it, with the jelly in its pipkin, to the lady. The end, to my mind, is particularly pleasing. ‘Give me leave to tell ye’ doesn’t rhyme neatly with ‘jelly’ these days, but it did then. It takes me back.

And forward. Gather ye crab apples while ye may. The job must be done. I’ll end with some words of Herrick himself.

The Departure of the Good Daemon

What can I do in poetry,
Now the good spirit’s gone from me?
Why nothing now, but lonely sit
And over-read what I have writ.

WESTRON WYNDE WHEN WILT THOU BLOW?

There are old poems and there are new poems. But some of the new ones feel old and some of the old ones feel new.

Why should it be that even the funny spelling in the old ones doesn’t get in the way? In fact, when you come to them, it’s almost the other way round. The odd rendition is an attraction.

All this because I woke thinking about the westron wynde. When I first read the poem (and I can’t remember when that was) I knew westron was western. It never presented any kind of a problem, even though we had a maths teacher (this comes back to me only this minute) who was called Miss Rostron.

I can’t remember when I first read it. I only feel like I’ve always known it. Which is precisely how I felt when I first read it. Here it is:

Westron wynde, when wylt thow blow
The smalle rayne downe can rayne?
Cryst yf my love were in my armys
And I yn my bed agayne!

I’ve just googled it to find out what I could. One scholar thinks it’s a lament for someone who’s dead. Just as the seeds grow when the spring rain comes, he says, so the lover wishes his love can come back to life (she’s dead).

Not what I thought.

I suppose at least we agree on the yearning. The lyric (put on paper when set to music in the 16^th century, though it’s older than that) is the epitome of yearning. But I’ve always heard the speaking voice as someone who is stuck somewhere away from home, somewhere very dry.

Perhaps I’ve read it wrong. If it’s ‘westron wynde, when wylt thow blow [so that] the smalle rayne downe can rayne’, that does sound like a longing for spring. I have always read it as a longing for the wind to blow, the wind to change – and the sea was in my mind. If the wind came, I thought, the ship could move and get him back. Back home and back to some lover far away. Perhaps it’s during the Crusades, when a man might well never get back. And hence the small rain would be something not to mind, but to long for – and characteristic of these islands. It’s ‘smalle’ kindly rain, not a tempest or a battering.

So in my mind the speaker is in a hot place – unable to get home. Somewhere hot and windless: a baked desert. He’s longing for England, or Scotland, or Ireland or Wales, where it rains, but it’s home.

Why is there something lovely in ‘the small rain down can rain’? Is it the monosyllables, like raindrops? Or the ‘rain’ both as noun and verb? Or the fact of four words in a row with an ‘n’ sound at the end of them? Perhaps a combination of all these things. And then ‘Cryst’ both as prayer and desperate outcry – in the way a secular voice could say it right now – and the universal snapshot of safety: in bed with your loved one. Rain on the roof outside. Not sex. Safety. And, of course, absolutely not to be had in the confines of the poem, except in the mind.

The photo is of a piece of artwork on marble done by Christina Fletcher, the poem etched without wordbreaks and without linebreaks. I love it. It slows you down as you read. The lyric emerges letter by letter. Like an old friend reaching through the ages, the poem bursts through.

Whatever the magic, it’s timeless. What – in this age of print and electronic files – will endure like this?

WHAT DO PAMPHLET PUBLISHERS LOOK FOR?

This was one of the questions at the Poetry Book Fair last Saturday.

The Book Fair was exceptionally good. The atmosphere was hustling and bustling but absolutely friendly and unhierarchical. Faces you know well from the backs of prize-winning bookjackets rubbed shoulders with faces you’d never seen before. Hang on—faces can’t rub shoulders with faces. But you know what I mean.

Apart from selling books at a stall, and launching D A Prince’s new book Common Ground, and the choc-lit anthology, Blame Montezuma! (with lashings of chocolate tasting buttons), I took part in a panel event, together with Peter Hughes of Oystercatcher Press and Emma Wright of the Emma Press. Joey Connolly (Kaffeeklatsch and Poetry Book Fair manager) asked the questions. Peter, Emma and I all publish poetry pamphlets, but the way we do it, and what we look for, is (and isn’t) different.

The truth is: each poetry imprint is highly individual. It must be. It’s just like writing poems. Making a publishing enterprise is a creative act, and each person who does it does it differently. What we have in common is that we are all making this same thing, a thing that produces and sells little papery publications with poems in them. We’re probably all mad (in a good way). We are all (I think) stubborn and determined.

Anyway, one of the questions was about submissions. What were we looking for?

There wasn’t a lot of time. I answered the question truthfully, but my answer wasn’t the whole answer. So much so that I travelled back on the train thinking hard about what the answer really was.

What did I say on the day? Something like this: that I couldn’t define what I was looking for because I didn’t know what it was. If I knew what it was, I said, I would write it myself. I hoped to be open to poetry that defied all my expectations. Oh, and I also said I looked for work that could be accommodated within an A5 pamphlet format, because that’s what I make. Mundane, but true.

And yet not the whole story. When I read poetry submissions it is exciting to think I might come across something like nothing I’ve ever read before but still instantly recognisable as ‘poetry’ (whatever’s meant by that elusive term). And sometimes I think it happens. Generally it’s in the shape of individual poems, though, rather than poets. That is to say, someone sends a set of poems and one or two of them strike me as remarkable. The rest may not engage me at all, or only to varying degrees.

So, yes, I do look for the unexpected, the thing I can’t define.

But there’s more to it than that.

I look for the expected. I look for the expected but done well. I like mainstream as well as sidestream and substream.

I like traditional forms (except villanelles, sestinas and pantoums). I’m tough on form though: it has to have passed its MOT.

I like personal poems. I like love poems. I like poems that make sense. I like poems I don’t understand. I like poems that make me think hard. I like poems that make me work. I like lyrical poems. I like prosy poems.

But the Book Fair question was really about publishing. What did we look for with a view to publishing it?

It’s not just a matter of publishing. There’s the issue of selling. I have to sell the pamphlets to get the money to publish more. My most important sales outlet is the HappenStance subscriber group. Many of these people regularly buy pamphlets, and they tell me what they like (or don’t like). This feedback influences my subsequent choices. I might publish something I thought most of them wouldn’t like, but I certainly wouldn’t do that often. If I did, I’d lose them.

Some of my publications sell faster and get better feedback than others. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are the best (or the ones I personally like the best either) but it does mean they’ve gone down well with the people I sell to. So I make a mental note – like a colour in a colour chart – of where that poet fitted in, and what might either contrast well, or harmonise. I try to learn, all the time, about the readers as well as the poets. I want to offer them a range. I want to challenge them but I also want to please them.

Then there’s the fact that I publish two different kinds of poetry pamphlet. One set is from ‘established’ poets with an idea that demands pamphlet form. By the end of 2014 (If all goes according to plan) I will have published nine pamphlets, three of them in this category. I don’t actively go round looking for them at all, because I’m permanently over-committed. But if something turns up that I can’t resist . . .

The other six poetry pamphlets for 2014 are debuts, i.e. the poet’s first step into publication. These are the HappenStance bread and butter. Obviously I am looking for poets I think are ‘ready’. Or nearly ready. It does take time but, as Hamlet pointed out in somewhat different circumstances, the readiness is all.

Sometimes I see a set of poems I think are fabulous. No editing required. Just as they are. In this case, the debut poet doesn’t need me. He or she should win one of the competitions, thereby gaining both cash and kudos. So I suggest they go away and enter. If they don’t win (for reasons I can’t fathom) they come back to me.

At other times, I think a set of poems is amazing, and I also think, for a variety of reasons, they won’t win a pamphlet competition. They are too off the wall, or too emotional, or too retro, or too understated, or too something else. How hard it is to put this kind of thing into words!

But mostly I look (when it comes to debuts) for poets I can work with. Not just in a personal sense (though this is important too) but in a way that can make the work stronger, that can move the poet along a little.

In order to be a good editor, you need not just a sensible head in terms of meaning and impact and presentation and form, but also an intuitive grasp of what each poet is doing and how their method works. For some people, I feel I have that. This means I can be a good sounding bell. For others, even though I may like them—and their poems—I don’t.

The poet needs to be looking for something too, something more than just a publisher. He or she needs to feel an editor’s method and response to the work is ‘right’ for them. It takes a little while to establish this, which I why I encourage people to send small sets of poems during reading windows, and why I rarely offer to publish a pamphlet on first submission.

I used to be a college teacher, but I don’t want to be a ‘teacher’ now. I can’t teach anybody how to write poems. I can, however, work with them on poems. And for a few people I can be the sort of editor I need myself.

So that’s what I look for. All of it.

And at the same time, during each and every reading ‘window’, I hope I won’t find it, so I can have a bit of a rest. . . .

SOME OF THE REASONS

I find liking poetry more difficult than I used to. What a confession!

But there are certain things I know I like. One of these is memory. I know that sounds old hat: poetry as anecdotal memoir. But I like it.

Ruth Marden harvests scraps of her life particularly well in The Little Jockey, one of the two new HappenStance pamphlets out this month. In ‘Visiting’, for example, the poem – a short one – is book-ended by a simple verbal exchange. We’re in a nursing home (at least that’s the implied setting) and a son and daughter arrive to visit an old lady. The capital letters let us know either that she’s somewhat deaf, or that they habitually shout at her: ‘They say you are WELL!’

Perhaps ‘shouting’ is right, because these are the words they ‘assail’ her with, ‘forcing words in her good ear’.

Maybe that’s also what poems do. Force words into our good ear(s). And maybe our response is not a million miles away from the old lady’s: ‘And did you / BELIEVE them?’

So: I think ‘Visiting’ is a good little poem. It’s not ambitious. It doesn’t try to do anything clever. It doesn’t, apparently, take risks, as we’re increasingly told poems should. But it makes me smile, and from when I first read it, I remembered it. I’m on the side of the old lady. We are all – if we live long enough – on the side of the old lady.

But why would I like Ruth’s opening poem, ‘Enamelled Box’? After all, it’s in two-line stanzas, and I’ve belly-ached quite a bit about two-line stanzas lately. And it isn’t even about much.

The poet has a curious little box. She’s fond of it. She takes it out in the sunshine and puts it on the lawn. She describes the box. I have an impression of its impression on her, more than of the box itself:

Blockings and angles and lines
all jostle, all engage

in oranges, greens,
kaleidoscope-shakings of blue.

The two-line stanzas create space around the box, as I try to ‘see’ through the description, to visualise the object. Why do I like this poem? Why one earth would anyone want to read a poem about an enamelled box?

I had to think about this carefully, because I wasn’t at all sure. But I think it’s because ‘Enamelled Box’ is about liking a ‘thing’. Not a person, or animal, or even a great artwork. It’s about liking a little box enough to ‘spirit it out for an airing, / letting it shine on the lawn’. Human beings do this, don’t they? Form affections for objects that aren’t in the least logical. The affection is in the action, and in the close attention to the detail of the box, and in the jauntiness of ‘spirit it out for an airing’.

All this tells me something about the poet, which tells me something about myself. Surprisingly hard to explain my liking. But I like it a lot. And the opening lines, for me, connect with the whole pamphlet of poems (this is the very first poem in the booklet after all):

Even now, from time to time,
I am drawn in, and the pattern

rekindles.

When you publish poems you like, you don’t have to explain why you like them. But maybe publishers should. In this world of competing poems, why should these ones win your attention?

We all read differently. What I see is not what you see. I hope you’ll see enough of what I see to share some of my pleasure at least, but it doesn’t always work like that. Delight for me may represent ‘duh!’ for you. I’ve been reading Tim Love’s blog of May 2013 (I catch up with things late) about the way we read, and it’s curiously comforting. He says: ‘I think my poetry appreciation is a patchwork of blindspots – from poem to poem or even from line to line. I approach texts with a mishmash of innate and learnt behaviours, but usually act as if the unevenness is all in the text.’

So what we regard as ‘unevenness’ in a poem could be unevenness in us, as readers. And not reacting in the ‘right’ way doesn’t matter. What matters is reacting at all.

I spend ages trying to work out what it is that makes certain poems distinctive for me. After all, I am selling these poems. I write something on the back jacket and I want it to be both interesting and true. Not much is worse than the feeling of being cheated when you fork out for a book that has had a great write-up. And what happens? It’s just words on pages, and then more words on pages.

Tom Cleary’s pamphlet, The Third Miss Keane, has practically nothing in common with Ruth Marden’s. Chalk and cheese. (Actually, chalk and cheese can both be hard and crumbly, though you can’t grate chalk. And they both start ‘ch’, of course. But I’m wandering.)

There are memories in The Third Miss Keane. But sometimes it’s hard to know what’s memory and what’s invention. (Some of it must be invention.) But Tom Cleary handles memory quite differently. Even just flicking through the publication, the shapes contrast.

Ruth Marden’s texts occupy about half of the A5 page, tall oblongs. Tom Cleary’s are much fatter (long lines), and the rhythms are prosy – closer to the short-story end of the poem spectrum.

Ruth’s phrasing strikes me as traditionally poetic in its gentle assonance and the way line breaks draw attention to sound echoes, whereas Tom’s method is more of an easy flow: the speaking voice of someone sharing an experience that could go anywhere.

Ruth’s poems inhabit a world I know. Tom’s take me into a world I don’t. Sometimes, in fact, I am totally creeped out, as they say these days. And then, of course, I’m fascinated by the power the poem had over me.

I don’t have any difficulty knowing how to read Tom’s poems. They invite me in with no fuss and then I just keep reading them on their own terms, inside their own world. Here’s the start of ‘Birth Control’, for example:

She had her eighth baby, little Jude,
when all the students had gone home for Christmas.
She named him after the patron saint for lost causes
and hopeless cases. While she warmed
the spitting teapot, swishing it about, she told us
she wore six scapulars next to her skin
dedicated to her favourite saints. It made you itch
to think of it. We tried to keep our thoughts
away from those trussed breasts.

And here’s the opening of ‘The Wheelbarrow People Get a New God’:

The wheelbarrow people had a god who lived behind a wall.
He spoke to them every day and gave them reassurance
but he was an old god, and one day he announced his succession.
He had a son he said, James, who lived in the community.
James would soon be required to kill his father.

Wanting to know what happens next is not a bad reason for reading a poem, though not a reason I remember being mentioned in literary circles. And what happens next has to be worth discovering, of course. But it is. Try ‘Hobgoblin’.

I love it.

But will you?

HOW NOT TO PROMOTE POETRY

“As to the Adjective: When in doubt, strike it out.” So said Mark Twain in Pudd’nhead Wilson – and he knew a thing or two.

Still the little bastards creep up. If not inside the poems, they cluster on the book jacket like fruitflies.

Here are some examples from recent book titles. These are all drawn from noble imprints, and the adjectives were harvested from poets, no less.

Vivid and sensual.
Deceptively quiet. Disarmingly tender.
Translucent. Beautifully crafted. Clear, graceful, word-perfect.
Wonderful.
Particular, precise, potent.
Visually evocative. Slightly breathtaking.
Dynamic and refined. Stunning.
Gripping and moving.
Intense, exact and absolutely engaged.

It’s easy to mock. It’s less easy to know what to do about it. And what if you have published a book of poems and you want people to know about it? You’ve spent a lot of time and money making it. You believe in the book, and now it’s time to sell it. Roll up. Roll up.

But the world is full of grand statements. And actually some of you might not like the book. You might not even like the sliced bread since which nothing has been better.

Also what if this book of poems is by an understater? What if the work isn’t visually evocative and slightly breath-taking? What if it’s plain? What if it includes lines like “Her eyes search for scraps, for something more / but only the old bread made proper crumbs”?

Anyway, there are other titles to sell too. It’s like peddling your own children. Which one do you love best this week? Aren’t they all, in their different ways, lovable?

Yes, well.

There’s a new HappenStance hardback book. It’s called Common Ground and it’s by D A Prince. My task today is to write about it without using any adjectives.

The book has an adjective in its title. But it’s a kind of anti-adjective. The title poem (‘Common Ground’) is about a funeral. Death is the (great) leveller and what we all have in common. If I were allowed to use one adjective (I have just given myself permission), I would say what this poem is not, which is comforting. Here are the last three lines:

We must meet up at other times, we say,
weaving good-byes, fingers crossed against
the M6, rush-hour tailbacks, evening rain.

You might know some of D A Prince’s poems already, so you might have an idea what she does and doesn’t do. You might have read her in some of the magazines. She is a practising-poet who practises. She works at it. She writes poems and she sends them out. They’re always popping up here and there. They don’t shout much. Often they stick in your mind. My mind, anyway.

So how to peddle this book? How to promote?

I honestly don’t know. She didn’t even want her photo on Nearly the Happy Hour, so we settled for a monochrome snapshot of her as a little girl. There is one on the jacket of Common Ground, but it’s hidden inside the back flap. There are no blurbs or endorsements on the back cover but there is an eight-line poem called ‘Sea Interlude’.

There are a few adjectives inside the front flap from Tom Jenks, but I can’t quote them here because adjectives are banned today.

I can reveal that Common Ground contains a sestina, and those of you who know my preferences may experience shock equivalent to sixteen adjectives on hearing this fact. You may, indeed, send for the book just to read that sestina. Or you could come to the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair at the Conway Hall in London on September 6^th, where the poet might read that very poem at the book launch. But then she might not.

Only one more thing to say really. Here’s the poem from the back jacket, ‘Sea Interlude’. I can’t even explain why I like this so much. Well, I could. But instead I thought I’d just publish a whole book by the person who wrote it.

A lucky morning and the sea
flat from shore to sky
and that line of clouds, tight
as a line of fine knitting.

Or possibly braided rope. One day
I won’t be here to ask
Would you ever write that?
You, looking up puzzled, saying What?

DOWN WITH LIST POEMS!

On my desktop I have a file titled To Do List AUGUST.

That’s because I belong to a species of human beings known as listmakers. It’s not a bad species. They are never ever listless.

The list on the desktop varies in length. Just now it comprises 24 items. It will never become a list poem. (I espouse lists, not list poems.)

I add and remove things to this list daily. In fact, just now I added eight things just because I started to think about what I needed to do today in addition to what was already on the list.

However, seven items of the 24 have been on the list all summer. Two involve having cups of coffee with friends, or writing reviews, or whole publications.

An interesting (to me) aspect of lists is how all the items look the same size. But individually some are much bigger than others. A great advantage of a list, though, is that deleting a quick item (like ‘make dentist appointment’), removes a significant proportion of the string. It shortens the list just as much as, say, ‘write autobiography’.

Five items on my current list are connected with the Blame Montezuma! anthology (there were eight yesterday, which is cheering). But I have photographed the chocolate fish and added them to the webpage. I have designed and ordered the badges. I have ordered and received the chocolate tasting buttons for the event at the Conway Hall on September 6^th. I have sent out the copies already requested (though not the sample copies to shops.) Have I mentioned how the first 25 website orders will get free fish? But they won’t go out till Wednesday because I don’t pick up the fish till Wednesday (it’s on my list).

Only one item on the August list has to do with the garden. It looks small. ‘Do garden.’ But it is big.

When August ends, I will save the list to the ‘To Do’ list folder (2014) and rename it To Do List SEPTEMBER and save back to the desktop. There is a system to all this.

I shouldn’t have started thinking about the list. The act of thinking has caused me to add two more items. No, three.

Also I’ve just realised that writing this blog isn’t even on the list. That means I need to add that too so I can have the pleasure of deleting it later. Oh – I’ve just thought of another thing. Posting the mail. That’s 28.

Item 28 involves a car and filling several postboxes. The photographs with this blog are what’s going into the postboxes.

Inside the envelopes, there are flyers and postcards and a newsletter. For every publication, I make a flyer. Four of those flyers were on the list last week, but I removed them when they went to Robert at Dolphin press. I hope the flyers are nice things in and of themselves: they try to be. They have a sample poem on them and order details – because we are also desperate to sell poetry here. (It’s not edible and you can’t sit on it.)

You could think of all this HappenStance activity as an admirable occupation. Or you could think of it as crazy. Why the hive of industry? Why the flying flyers? Why the persistent communication with four hundred subscriber/readers?

Poetry. That stuff. Once I just wrote it. Now I write it, and write about it, and print it, and publish it. And finally, the most difficult bit of all, peddle it. I am not a member of the salesperson species. I am, in fact, a fully-trained understater (as well as a listmaker). And I have never ever been good at making money, though I can make a number of other things, lists being only one.

You don’t need to know any of this. But if you’re one of the 400 subscribers, an envelope will reach you on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week. All you need to do is open it, read the contents, and buy something.

Then enough money may arrive here to print the next publication. Which would be good. Or not; depending on whether all this is admirable or crazy. It could be both.

Oh! A semi-colon got in there. I must be weakening. Time to cross ‘write blog’ off list.

CHOC-LIT TAKES OVER

You’re getting obsessed with chocolate.

No, I’m not.

Yes, you are. You’ve been staring at those chocolate pictures on screen all day.

Not all day. I wrote the flyers for the two new pamphlets and the press release for Montezuma and did the bio pages for Ruth and Tom on the website and the August competition. And I made two lists, wrote a letter to Tony, several emails, all of the ironing and emptied four kitchen cupboards ready for tomorrow when the Men come.

Well, what are you staring at right now? It’s that chocolate thing AGAIN.

I’m making the postcard.

Postcard? How much chocolate stuff do we need?

I don’t know. But it’s fun, isn’t it?

Fun. Two thousand pamphlets sitting in the bedroom unsold and she’s talking about fun. And what are those things?

Templates for the choc-lit badges.

Badges?

Bands have them. And magnets. I thought it’d be nice to do choc-lit fridge magnets.

Eight boxes of chocolate books under the stairs and you’re talking about magnets. Magnets. So when do we get to SELL any of them?

I can’t put them in the shop until Sophie’s done the fish. And the bookmarks. But I’ve done the product page. Or nearly. And Sarah’s thinking how to set up the fish ‘special offer’.

Fish? Special offer?

The Pittenweem chocolate fish. I thought the first 25 orders could get free fish. Sophie makes chocolate shards too. Which would have been nice, but I thought fish.

I thought we were trying to make money. Not give things away.

Well, sort of. The superior chocolate fish are an incentive. The orders will come flocking in.

Like the one order for one pamphlet that flooded in this morning?

Yes. But more-so.

It’s nearly nine o’clock, you know. Stuff chocolate. When’s dinner? And what the f*** is that music? Sounds like Jamie with a ukelele.

It is Jamie with a ukelele.

So what’s that about?

It’s a chocolate song.

A chocolate SONG?

Yep.

CURTAINS

The submissions window is shut. Here’s what came through it.

There were 117 submissions in all (ten more than the previous window).

The envelopes of poems included between 6 and 70 poems, but about three quarters of them held 12, as requested on the submissions page.

I read and responded to around 1500 poems, and to their authors. It got more difficult as the month went on and my brain got fuller.

77 of those sending poems had never sent to HappenStance before.

40 were on their second, third or fourth submission. (That doesn’t mean they were making a fourth desperate bid to get a pamphlet published. For a good number of people, it’s just about getting thoughtful feedback on work in progress.)

14 were not ‘new’ poets. They had been previously published in book or pamphlet form, 6 of them by HappenStance.

4 people warmly invited to send poems didn’t send any. They know who they are!

77 were women, 40 men. Ages, so far as I could tell, varied from early twenties to eighties (people don’t always say – and why should they?). Ethnic minority poets could be numbered on one hand (I would like to see more).

30 were from Scotland (most ever)

16 were from London.

8 were from Wales (most ever)

2 from the Irish Republic.

61 from the rest of the UK (a couple of these have addresses both in the UK and France).

About 80% were HappenStance subscribers, or took out a subscription just before they sent in the poems.

I made offers to 7 people for slots in 2015, 2016 and 2017.

3 of these were to poets I had been working with for some time, so I already had them in my book as ‘maybes’.
2 were to established poets with more than one previous book-length publication.
1 was to a HappenStance poet for a second pamphlet (rare but occasionally happens).
5 were women, 2 were men. (All were too old for a Gregory Award.)
2 of them live in Scotland. Both men.

Publishing schedule

2015 is now full to the brim.
2016 is full.
2017 is beginning to fill up.

There were many good and memorable poems and poets. In my notebook (apart from the offers) I marked 22 as long-term ‘maybes’, although (with a couple of exceptions) I didn’t tell them this because it’s miserable to get up hopes if in the long-term they aren’t realised. In any case, I couldn’t publish all 22, whatever happened.

There was a problem this month, in that the reading was too intense and voluminous (if all the poems were haiku or tanka it would be fine). In some cases, I didn’t read all the poems people sent because I ran out of juice, especially where the poems were lengthy or dense. By ‘dense’ I mean long lines and filling most of an A4 page. I always read poems three times and think hard. So those kind of poems take me at least 20 minutes to process and respond to. If there are 12 of them . . .

The other problem was that I ceased to be able to do anything else but read submissions. The days were not long enough. And so I have to make some changes.

Because it is impossible to read a large number of people’s work with a possible view to publication and at the same time keep a publishing business going. There isn’t any life left to do the publishing bit. That’s why most publishers have that little notice that says ‘no unsolicited submissions’ (though they get them anyway).

I was supposed to be finishing work on two new pamphlets in July – by Tom Cleary and Ruth Marden. Both ground to a halt as I disappeared under a tide of poetry submissions.

Even now I am wabbit, and this week 16 boxes of books arrived to be packaged and promoted and all the associated activities therewith (the Choc-Lit Anthology and D A Prince’s second collection, Common Ground).

So in December, I know I can’t read 117 submissions again, or not in the same way. Besides, I have reason to suppose, if things increase as the way they have over recent years, there will be 127. When I started this, there were 30 – one a day for about a month. Please don’t think I am moaning. I invited people – nay urged them to send me poems. But I always knew my capacity had limits, and this summer I reached them.

I intend to continue an open submissions policy, but I can’t read so many poems at once again.

I am really operating two separate services.

The first of these invites people, if they feel they’re ready, to make a pamphlet proposal and include a few poems. (I hardly ever make an offer on this basis. I have only done it once in the last three years, for example, with a debut poet.)

The second (and this is the one I prefer) invites people to send me a few of their poems simply for feedback, with a personal letter giving a bit of background. The second option avoids the accept/reject situation. I hardly ever find myself in an accept/reject position, though it does occasionally happen. It is more a case of how interested I am, and over time, how much more interested I get.

Some revised details are on the submissions page. Interestingly, one thing seems to have clicked in my head lately: when it comes to approaching a publisher about a publication, six poems really is enough. (I have, nevertheless, changed my guidelines to suggest a maximum of 8 for a first submission, because I think it useful for people to get feedback on more than half a dozen, and I think I can still manage that. At least I’m going to try.)

I know poets must think, when it comes to considering a pamphlet proposal, that one would need more – more of their range or their styles or their thematic idea and so on. But it isn’t so. You can sense your own quickening of interest almost instantly, and in that case, it’s easy to send compliments and a request to see a larger set. Some people’s poems welcome you in; others don’t. It’s not just about quality; it’s about whether the reader and the poems get on. The covering letter, to me, is also important. Publishing is about a relationship, and that’s where it often begins. I always reply personally too, and that won’t change.

Thank you to all the people who trusted me with their poems in July. I know some of them found the feedback useful because they’ve written and said so. Some found the reverse, and I apologise for heavy-handedness in some cases.

And now it’s back to the business of trying to create and sell the books! And the two latest are not even in the shop yet so nobody can buy them!.

CLEANSING THE POETRY PALATE

Reading poetry in fathoms has a weird effect.

One of our garden birds sometimes flies into the window (birds can’t see glass). Thunk. It sits on the path stunned for half an hour, unable to articulate a plea. Gradually it hops into the undergrowth and from there, eventually, away. That’s how it is with me after five hours of poetry.

In bed, at night, I’ve been reading The Chocolate Connoisseur by Chloé Doutre-Roussel. The author of this book was once the chocolate buyer for Fortnum and Mason. She’s now a ‘freelance chocolate consultant’. She eats about 450g of chocolate a day and gets up at 6.00 a.m. to start tasting. According to Chloé ‘a successful tasting needs exam conditions: no smoking, no drinking (except water), silence, paper, pen, an organised table. . . no smell or noise to distract you . . . and your body and mind should be calm and comfortable’. She drinks water or eat bread as a palate cleanser after each different chocolate. And when she’s finished tasting, she swims for an hour. Every day.

Perfume samplers take the business no less seriously. They talk about ‘the nasal palate’ (a nice one for oxymoron spotters) and they cleanse it between different scents with coffee. Coffee’s an olfactory palate cleanser, unless the thing you have to smell is . . . coffee. In this case, you sort out your nose between coffee beans by sniffing your own skin.

So – you guessed this was coming – how do you cleanse the palate between the poetry?

Because I have been dwelling on this matter. So much so, that I looked up ‘cleanse’ (as opposed to clean). You clean the bathroom (at least you would if you weren’t reading poetry all day) but you cleanse your palate. ‘Cleanse’ comes from the Middle English clensen, from Old English clǣnsian ‘to purify’, which in turn derives from clǣne (‘clean’). Cleanse sounds intense. I feel my elbow leaning into the word, with a scrubbing brush in my hand.

So how do you purify your poetry palate? I don’t think I do it properly. I wish I did. Like Chloé, I prefer to read first thing, though not quite as early as six a.m. My brain is clearest in the morning. If I had time, I’d go for a short walk between each set of poems. Instead, I sniff some coffee, and sometimes drink water and/or eat bread. I have tried sniffing my own skin but it doesn’t work.

Prose is a pretty a good poetry palate cleanser though. So I write to each poet, by hand, after reading their submission and scribble a few notes in my record book.

Sometimes I start to feel impossibly full. I can override this feeling because of years of practice – but I don’t recommend it. The impossibly full feeling should, whenever possible, be attended to.

But reading all the submissions is also not like tasting chocolate or cheese or whisky or wine. The poetry submissions are not, with notable exceptions, work from master artisans at the top of their craft, although the work is single-origin and organic. The source is human beans.

Each bean is clearly different from the next. Each has unique features as well as sharing aspects with her/his fellows. It’s easier to pick out common practice than identify what is, or could be, distinctive.

Still, I start with the shape of the poem on the page. It helps if the shapes of the poems vary from one to the next – a kind of palate cleanser in itself. If a poet favours long lines and dense layout as the norm, I flag fairly soon. I feel bad about this.

It’s good if the first poem is short. It eases you in. It’s also good if several of the poems are not long. I don’t think poems should be short – not at all. But if you’re reading a lot and mean to read each one three times before articulating a response, you manage the short ones more easily and thoroughly. Unless there are only three lengthy poems in the envelope, which is fine, and never happens.

I try to come to each poet without preconception, even though there are many obvious similarities between them. Because you can get distracted by recurring features. I am over-sensitised to what I see most often. For example, the business of laying poems out in couplets. (When I say ‘couplets’, these are not couplets in the traditional sense. They are two-line stanzas.)

Two-line stanzas, yes. We like two-line stanzas these days. Most poets choose to run the sentences across the stanza break frequently. Lots of space. Easy to read (unless the enjambed syntax is fearsome). So I welcome a couple of poems set out in this way. They look friendly and familiar.

But when they start to stack up, I get irritable. I turn the page. Not another poem in couplets! Yes, another.

My irritation with two-line stanzas is the unease of the professional choc-lit consultant and it is obviously unreasonable. In The National Poetry Competition earlier this year the first three prizes went to poems by Linda France, Paula Bohince and Josephine Abbott. Guess how their poems were presented? In groups of two lines. And in the commended section, two of the seven poems were . . . in couplets. Couplets are uncontestably ‘in’.

I must stop calling them couplets, since often the two lines only belong together by virtue of positioning. The poems are more like solid blocks, in which a line-space has been inserted where every third line might otherwise be. They have been aerated, like shaking out a duvet.

For several centuries ‘couplets’ rhymed and were metrically matched. Poetry has to react against itself regularly and break with the traditions – any art form does. So couplets got themselves half-rhymed, then unrhymed, then unmetrical (though even now the lines tend to match lengthwise). Poets broke the unit by enjambing fearlessly. They rampaged down the sheet, revelling unrepentantly in space and counter-space.

Over time, two-line units that were neither rhyming, nor metrical became commonplace. But poetry reacts creatively in response to constraint. Art doesn’t like a ‘norm’.

And I am manifesting all the symptoms of a person who needs to have her poetry palate cleansed. A bit of rebellion, you see, does help. But equally, a poem that follows common practice but does it exceptionally well – that’s just as good.

Meanwhile, there is another method. Yesterday I wrote a poem myself. I felt guilty but I did it anyway.

In some sense, all poems are in dialogue with all other poems. They respond and react to each other, as well as to the world. Some of them react by getting more like the poems they admire; others react against common practice, though soon the rebellions are popularised, and so it goes. My own poem is not in couplets. Or two-line stanzas. It cleansed my palate because I felt bold and rebellious writing it.

Today I can welcome a good number of poems that go into the ark in twos. And threes. And other neat arrangements.

p.s. ‘Poetry does not like to be up to date. She refuses to be neat.’ Stevie Smith, in My Muse, 1960.

LIVING ON CAKE IN THE READING WINDOW

So this is what it’s like.

We perk up in the mornings when there are unfranked stamps to peel off envelopes.

Dinner happens late.

A glass of red wine may be spilled over poems, but only in the evening.

Much pencil sharpening goes on.

Punctuation, and sentences (especially short ones) feel like old friends.

Good poems cause excitement.

We scrutinise interesting poems like other people do crosswords.

We wonder why everyone doing a Creative Writing MA includes at least one prose poem.

There are no days off, though there are days when everything is off.

Sometimes one of us walks round the house muttering bloody poets bloody poets bloody poets or what the f***!

Sometimes that same person says, ‘Aren’t there any orders today? Why don’t they BUY something?’

Sometimes he also says, ‘There’s a roomful of pamphlets upstairs already. Shouldn’t you sell them before you print any more?’

We don’t care how old you are. Or young.

We worry a lot. About upsetting people. And about metaphors.

Poetry is our bread and butter. Except poetry is more like cake, and you can’t live on cake. Well you can, but you wouldn’t want to, would you?

We think of poets as adjective-prone.

‘We’ is mainly ‘I’.

We are fallible.