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I woke this morning from a vivid dream.
I was sitting at my desk and I glanced at the bottom bookshelf.
I saw two copies of a large white paperback.
These two books weren’t there yesterday. Two duplicates.
The title of the books was easy to read, even from this distance. It was:
WRITING: THE GRIM & THE ACT
I took this as a warning and made this short.
The Clog of the Blog.
The Anxious Analogue.
The Whim & the Pact.
The Dream & the Fact
(of the paperbacked).
The town of Callander, not far from the city of Stirling, is one of those places often referred to as ‘gateway to the Highlands’. It’s a busy little place, and scenic, with great big wooded crags behind it, from which the rain (when it’s raining) comes rolling down. It has a wonderful second-hand bookshop (more of that later).
It has significant history too. In 1645 about 80 Campbells (of Argyll), while retreating fast from a siege, were polished off by the Atholl men while fording the river. It was a fierce time.
And then there’s Helen Duncan – also known as ‘Hellish Nell’ and hence a bit of a connection for me. But although Helen Duncan was born in Callander, that town cannot be blamed for her adult pursuits as a spirit medium, with ectoplasm allegedly involving the regurgitation of cheese-cloth (there is an ‘official’ website that sues, quite rightly for her pardon, since whatever she was, she was not a witch). According to Wikipedia, the poor woman was the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 – in 1944.
But all of this is equalled by something no less extraordinary that occurs usually the first weekend in September in and around King’s bookshop. This is, of course, the Callander Poetry Weekend. You can find the programme for this extraordinary grassroots festival, if you don’t already know about it, on Sally Evans’s website, DesktopSally.
Sally is half of King’s bookshop, and Ian (King) is the other half. From that shop they run Diehard Press which has been publishing from the early nineties, first from Edinburgh (Old Grindles Bookshop) and then, as the twenty-first century rolled into action, from Callander. Diehard, among its other publications, is the source of the broadsheet magazine, Poetry Scotland. And Ian is also a book-binder.
Yesterday, for just one enriching afternoon, I was in the Kirk Hall in Callander with the poetry community that assembles for this special weekend. It is a real community, not just one of those ‘community’ references that surround us these days. On the page for ‘diehard publishers’ on the Scottish Poetry Library website, you will see this statement under ‘Submission Guidelines’:
We are ceasing to publish submission guidelines as we get to know poets through the community and readings. We do not accept online submissions.
The Callendar weekend is a community. Anyone can come. No money is involved (unless you choose to buy books). It isn’t competitive. There are lots and lots and lots of readings, and some high quality listening.
The atmosphere is friendly and supportive. You can feel like you belong, just because you’re interested in writers and writing. It doesn’t matter what nationality you are, or what shape or size or gender or colour or age.
Some of the Callander weekend poets have well-established, and well-deserved reputations. Some are newbies. Some are somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t matter. It reminds you that we are all part of the same thing, the same scribbling and trying, the same footering and listening. The listening is especially important – and at Callander the poets (and sometimes musicians) really listen to each other. They don’t arrive just for their own five minute reading and then bugger off. This is a community, like the bees that Sally keeps behind the shop.
Rilke leaps to mind: Wir sind die Bienen des Unsichtbaren – ‘We are the bees of the invisible. We plunder the honey of the visible in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible.’
Doing away, as we say here. Doing away.
You don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to be published. You can come along with bits of paper. You can come with the poems in your head. You will fit in. There will be time.
And there are provisions: Sally magically summons them (though her magic is of the practical kind, including a basket of real, not plastic, cutlery), and the poets and helpers and friends bring more. This is a poetry community in which you will not starve.
That’s if you can get there – a bit late for this year unless you set off right NOW, but there’s next – you should go, you really should. Add it to your bucket list.
I am absolutely certain there is nothing else like it anywhere in the world.
Why is it so hard to do publicity?
I always thought the most difficult thing to write well was – a poem.
But there’s something else I find more difficult. And it’s writing the publicity material about the poems. It’s almost impossible.
Why should it be so hard to put into words how something you think is remarkable is . . . remarkable?
It may be something to do with fear, fear that the describing words turn into marketing clichés and disappear down the drain. It’s fear of letting the poets down. And beneath that, there’s something else – a kind of rage about the way the world works these days. So much hype, so many shiny, empty words. I’m scared mine will disappear with the rest of the dross.
But here I am again about to launch five new publications. Five! Five things to say about five different publications. How can they all be wonderful?
Well four of them are wonderful, and the fifth is funny. How do I know they’re wonderful?
No, wait. I don’t like ‘wonderful’. Please put it back. I’ll have ‘remarkable’ please, and yes, I do most certainly think they’re remarkable. They made me sit up and remark. They made me sit up and remark so much that I wanted to work with these writers. And work we did. It’s taken an age to make them. You have no idea of the time spent debating commas, accents, format, poems to go in, poems to come out, running order, titles that were okay, titles that were rubbish, where to put notes, what to say on the back jacket, which design worked best on the cover, which didn’t….
The books are done. Two are at the printer’s in Berwick-on-Tweed. Three are about to make their way to Dolphin Press tomorrow morning. They’re not in the HappenStance online shop yet because they don’t fully exist yet except electronically, though that is existence.
And yesterday I spent several hours finalising the flyers and the copy for the publications list. The publications list! What a nightmare. Each time I revise it I get something wrong.The words for the new publications either start to sound tinny or I find I’ve described two books in the same way. You can’t have TWO fresh and originals. And since each one is completely different from the rest, it can’t be that hard. Can it?
Take it from me, it’s hard. Even for a bard.
But here’s what it says about the new babes on the sweated-over publications list.
Number one: a whole book, a first book, no less.. And here’s what it says on the publications list:
Noir, Charlotte Gann
Troubled, troubling and fearless, Charlotte Gann’s first collection confronts manipulation and damage, and sails into the light. A book that can be read like a film.
You may think those italics emerged easily, just like turning on a tap. Wrong. I have never before read a collection of poems that resembled a film in its clarity of image and narrative thrust. But for me, Charlotte’s book is like this. Like a noir film. With shivers.
Then there are three pamphlets, described below in alphabetical order of writer’s surname (just in case you think it’s in order of remarkableness).
The Days that Followed Paris, Paul Stephenson.
During a night of co-ordinated terrorist attacks in November 2015, the poet was at home in Paris. He was unharmed but swept up (like the whole city) into a maelstrom of publicity and alarm. These poems, in many shapes and forms, offer a response to that unhinging experience.
Instructions for Making Me, Maria Taylor.
Poems of unfailing vitality and charm. You read them and immediately want to share them. Honestly, every poet and aspiring writer should read ‘The Horse’ …
In the Glasshouse, Helen Tookey.
Haunting and evocative work that crosses the boundaries of form and feeling, searching, experimenting, feeling its way. Between truth and fable, intuition and enquiry, something magical and beautiful emerges.
Okay, what do you think? There’s so much more to be said, but in a publications list you have to whittle it down to the bare minimum.
You can’t read any of these yet, but soon you will be able to.
My slaved-over descriptive words have two purposes. They’re trying to make you want to read the poems – of course – but they’re also trying to evoke these publications as they are – entirely remarkable, but in different ways.
I’m not mentioning the fifth yet because it’s called Down with Poetry! That heretical book will look after itself.
More on heresy soon.
I’ve always specially liked the term ‘little magazine’. It sounds so un-literary. But of course, it’s the reverse.
This is how the British Library defines a ‘little magazine’:
‘a literary magazine, usually produced without concern for immediate commercial gain, and with a guiding enthusiasm for contemporary literature, especially poetry’.
Yes—that just about nails the sort of publication I have in mind. Something both bizarre and respected, in many ways a bit of a throwback, of both academic and amateur interest.
Wolfgang Görtschacher, editor of Poetry Salzburg, has published two whole tomes about ‘little magazines’. Richard Price, who at one time co-edited Gairfish, Verse and Southfields, and in his own right, Painted, Spoken, has (with David Miller) co-authored a detailed bibliography and history of the British breed, from 1914-2000.
So little magazines are started (and sustained) by people with a bit of an obsession, and then they’re written about by people who have a somewhat obsessive interest in them. And meanwhile, the rest of us (when they’re poetry magazines) read them, rage about rejections from them, celebrate them when they print our poems, and wonder how and why anybody does this thing, this magazine thing.
Little magazines start by being anti-establishment. They specialize in reacting against this or that. They don’t always end up that way. Malcolm Bradbury makes a distinction between the little magazine and ‘significant literary journals’ like The London Review of Books and the TLS. But the borderline between little magazine and significant literary journal is a sort of no man’s land. What is ‘significant’ anyway? What sort of person has the authority to express views on literature, on culture?
The truth is, as it ever was, that anybody can start a little magazine. Anybody can print and publish their say, and the say of others. Anybody at all can start it. Even if you have no money at all, there is always a way. But very few can keep it going over decades. The editors who do this are a species apart.
If the story of the long-running little magazine is told at all, it is usually in fragments by a researcher: a chapter in a book, a paragraph in an article. The editor is too busy to do it him- or herself.
And so when Gerry Cambridge, editor of The Dark Horse, said he was thinking of writing the story himself, after two decades, I was encouraging.
I have a connection to disclose. Actually, several. Gerry was the first editor to publish any of my poems (though the first ones were in Spectrum, not The Dark Horse). When he started The Dark Horse, I subscribed and became a regular contributor of both poems and critical writing. I have read every single issue of the magazine from then (1994) to now. As HappenStance editor, I published a volume of his poetry, Notes for Lighting a Fire, as well as his essay about typesetting poetry, The Printed Snow. Somehow, I have now known Gerry for long enough for him to qualify as ‘an old friend’, a person I trust and respect as a poet, editor, type-setter, book-designer, fountain-pen collector and expert on birds and ink.
So—he did it. He actually wrote the story of the Horse. It was neither simple, nor straight-forward. It nearly drove him daft in the middle—doing both this and all the other things that sustain life and the magazine itself. It look longer than either of us anticipated, but the tale has been told—and HappenStance has published it, an honour and the completion of a cycle.
Gerry’s book is called The Dark Horse: The Making of a Little Magazine, and it has a mischievous title-extension too ‘& sundry divagations on poets, poetry, criticism and poetry culture’. It is a handsome volume—large and orange, with numerous colour plates showing the magazine’s design over the years. Among his other talents, Gerry is a first-class photographer, so there are fabulous monochrome pictures of writers too. And, of course, the story of the magazine, in three sections.
If you want to know what makes a person do this little-magazine thing, you may be able to work it out from this account, though I’m inclined to think it remains a mystery. Indexed by Margaret Christie (herself a HappenStance poet), and typeset and designed by Gerry, the book is an idiosyncratic and entertaining source of information about a little slice of literary experience and the associated personalities. You can dip in, or read from beginning to end. If you leave it lying about, someone else will pick it up, start to flick through (nodding and smiling), and may well slip it into their bag. It is that sort of book.
How long does it take to snag a poem?
Or even just read one. I read an awful lot of them, in book, fast. But that’s not reading properly.
But during the reading window (which is now shut and bolted, though various envelopes are still hurtling themselves against it) I read properly, and I snag as I go.
Ok – in any set, I admit I start with the shortest. I look at the shape on the page, and sometimes at the shapes of the rest in the group. Already there’s a personal aesthetic. I like the look of some better than others. Some look easy to read. Some look like hard work. I have never much liked long and thin, and I worry about centred.
But I try not to let personal taste get in the way – even though it can’t be denied. I read slowly, from beginning to end. This is the snagging stage. The poet has built the poem – often in neat chunks and short lines. I am moving slowly through to see whether there’s a clear run; to see whether I can make my way from start to finish without falling over an obstruction.
Often I do meet obstructions. It’s usually something like a noun that could be a verb – such as the words ‘shock’ or ‘fall’, for example. And the line break may create uncertainty what the word’s function could be. The poet knows, of course, where the sentence is going, but the reader doesn’t.
And there’s the business of punctuation. If it’s present, and it’s working correctly, you shouldn’t even notice it. If you start to notice it – if I start to put pencil rings round the semi-colons – it’s a snag.
Using line-breaks to substitute for commas can be an issue. If you have a lot of enjambment – lines where the sense runs smoothly right over the line end and into the next – you rely on the reader sensing that easily. But if you mix those lovely enjambed lines with lines where the line end represents a pause (but you miss out the comma), you create confusion.
Some people miss all the punctuation out. If you do this, your structure on the page – line breaks and indents and gaps, or whatever you do to organise the sense – has to work smoothly. And it can. But it doesn’t always.
Sometimes a snag – for me – is a word I don’t know – though I count this as a Good Snag. ‘Parkour’ was a new word I learned in July. So I stop reading and go online to Merriam Webster. It’s the same with references to paintings, music, or famous people. I have to look them up, and usually I do, unless it’s the fifth reference in an hour, in which case I just note what I don’t know.
I get tied up with imagery too. Decades of reading poetry has made me into a literalist. So I get the metaphorical application pretty well, but at the same time I log it literally. If you tell me love is like riding a bicycle, I’m ok, I can see you rolling merrily down the street. But if I find you, on the next line, washed up on the shores of a stormy river, I’m wondering what happened to the bike.
I am adjective-averse, and it’s getting worse. Sometimes there are a lot. Sometimes every single noun has an adjective (or two) to help it on its way. But – trust me – they start to cancel each other out.
It’s the poet’s job to sort out the snags, but often we can’t see our own. It takes another reader. So that’s all I am really. A snagging expert. Or that’s what I am at first.
If the snags are serious, I limit my feedback to snags alone. Because until they’re sorted out, the real work of the poem can’t begin.
If there are no snags, I read the poem two or three times more. I decide what I’m picking up at a literal and intuitive level. And then I write a response. Sometimes I just think it works. Some poems do what they set out to do. A pleasure to read – and it doesn’t always have to be deep stuff. It can be small. It can be ephemeral.
But I read poetry in a peculiar way. I can only describe it as like swimming breast-stroke while wearing goggles, where I’m seeing both above and below the water as I progress. The above and below views don’t quite match but that’s as it should be. I’m picking up on stuff. Trying to get the feel, and the tone, and the possible symbols. Whether it’s personal or theoretical, funny or tragic.
Some poems are strong writing. You know it when you hit it. You don’t even have to like it. You just know you’ve read something that works on its own terms. Often these poems will have a detail that you remember for the rest of the day. A reflection in a polished plate. A view of three ships through a window.
Most poems are a mixture: good bits, best bits, weak bits, straggly bits. An awful lot of poems have a poem inside them trying to get out.
How long does it take to read a poem? It takes me at least five minutes for a short one, and up to 15 if it’s more complicated. I probably average 8-10 minutes per poem when I’m giving some feedback, and then I write each person a note too – and some of the notes are long.
In July I read around 1000 poems. It took a long time. If I include the notes and finding of envelopes for those who forgot them, I reckon around 130 hours. I like doing it, and I think it’s important. For me, it isn’t about looking for new poets to publish. It’s about being part of this thing we do, whatever it is, this poetry writing thing.
By the end of the month, I was tired. It’s like the opposite of PoWriMo – what I do is PoReadMo, twice a year.
But after July ended, envelopes kept arriving. Another one yesterday. Please don’t send any more!
I have moved over to a different kind of work now. It’s upstairs, not downstairs like the window weeks, and it involves writing and typesetting and publicity for books (watch this space). So there’s no time for reading more poems, except the ones I’m putting in books – which takes even longer.
The next window opens in December. Brrrrrrr.
I thought at first I was getting fewer submissions this time round. I was managing to open the envelopes, read and write back. I was managing quite well.
But then I went away for four days and in that time another twenty or so arrived, and some more electronically.
I am still sitting with a large pile, so I haven’t time for bloggery or comment on the world of Po.
Eventually I may have some thoughts about sentences, especially those poems were the poet decides to run a long sentence over three or four stanzas, or even extend from beginning to end of the poem. It’s a lovely thing when it works. Mainly it doesn’t.
And description. I might have something to say about description and how too much of it can be a killer.
But I might not.
I think I’ve had far more submissions from women than men this time round but I haven’t actually counted yet. I wonder whether my no-holds-barred feedback is more crushing for men than women. Or perhaps I’m gender stereotyping already.
I was going to put in a picture of a closed window but didn’t get around to finding my camera. So here is a picture of me taken through a window (you’ll have to take my word for that) by Gerry Cambridge. It was in a Costa cafe in Glasgow, and the manuscript in front of me is Charlotte Gann’s Noir, of which more very soon.
There is a pile of envelopes on the stairs, ready to post back to their owners, and another pile on the sofa unread.
The poems that were sent by email are on the dining room table – my task for this afternoon. I was going to read them on the screen but then I decided not to, and printed them all out in a font that suits me. I can read on screen but I don’t do it so well.
The letters people have sent (I love the letters) are in a clear plastic folder. I keep them all, though not in any meticulous fashion. It doesn’t seem right to shred them. Each is unique.
Sometimes the poems seem less unique than the letters, which is a peculiar thing to say when you think about it. Nor can it be true. But given the infinite possibilities in which poems might be written, it’s surprising how similar some of them look at first glance.
From age to age, we share ideas of what poems are meant to look like and, perhaps more importantly, what they’re not supposed to look like. Our common understanding starts to be a convention.
Art, in general, both observes and resists convention.
Resistance is great: it has its own energy. Give me a rebel any day. But you don’t get poet rebels unless there’s something to rebel against. Rebellion is only convention in reverse – unless you rebel against yourself, which I think is useful. First you would need to recognise your habits. Habits make you feel safe, and safety is risky for poets.
There’s safety in neatness, for example. Neatness is a widely shared habit. People like to divide poems up into even-sized chunks, and then sometimes add a little decoration like Master Chef.
Sometimes I like this. Sometimes there’s a sense of fun about it.
Sometimes I find neatness wearisome.
Sometimes I suggest that the ‘form’ of the poem – whether it’s neat or sprawly – doesn’t convince me.
Sometimes I suggest dividing a sprawly poem into two-line stanzas.
Sometimes I suggest the poet is using too many two-line stanzas with no organic rationale.
I shouldn’t use the word ‘organic’. It’s starting to be a habit. But what I mean by it is this: each poem has a driving impulse. Some phrase or idea or feeling that drove it into existence. That central impulse looks for a form that suits it. Out of the innumerable ways of expression open to us, what will that be? It could be anything.
But for some writers it can’t be anything. It can be four-line stanzas (left justified), three-line stanzas (left-justified) or the long thin left-justified block that stops about two-thirds of the way down the page. It’s a habit.
I was at the launch of Magma 65 on Friday. It was in the LRB Bookshop in London. There were about 16 readers, every single one distinctive in her or his method of projection. I didn’t hear any stanza breaks, though it’s likely there were some. I couldn’t hear the justification (in terms of page format) either.
There was a lovely variety of accent and intonation (people had come from many different parts of the UK, and one from Germany). Some readers stood very still to read. One strode about joyfully and put the microphone behind him. A couple held the paper in one hand but delivered by heart. Some wore a little smile when reading. Others were extremely grave. Some delivered the words as though there was a push of air behind them. Others let them float out over our heads like bubbles.
When you hear poetry – poetry you haven’t read before – you don’t get it all. You get some of it. Our ears aren’t very good at making sense at first hearing, unless the words themselves incorporate significant repetition. One of the Magma poets deliberately exploited that technique, and the audience responded with delight. Repetition is very enjoyable because (ironically) it allows you to listen for difference. It’s one of the great oral conventions.
Repetition in neat chunking is one of the less great print techniques. But it does allow the reader to pace herself and see the white-space ‘rests’ coming up. These appear to divide the poem into a journey with stations (though it’s a new habit to enjamb every one and thus undermine this idea).
Sometimes, in my reading window, I get poems that are word-dense, with lines that extend right to the right-hand margin, and hardly any stanza breaks. Before I start, I take a deep breath. In fact, I invariably flick through the pages and choose the shortest one first. It looks like it might be hard going. And indeed it may turn out to be. Or it may not. In which case, you can start to love that poem quickly.
Have you noticed, at poetry readings, how often the reader tells the audience, as a sort of placation, ‘it’s only a short one’? As though we all agree that short is better because it means we won’t have to concentrate for very long.
During the reading window, I am concentrating for long periods on poetic text. I like it very much. It’s sustaining for the spirit to concentrate wholly on only one thing, one piece of human expression. Reading is an art too. We know this, but we forget it all too easily. There is no arts funding – that I know of – for poetry readers, though (done well) it takes a long time, quality time. The reward is what you get out of the experience. And what do you get? You learn. These words are what human beings have made of their lives. I am trying to make something of mine too, and it’s hard. It sustains and heartens me to see the attempts of fellow travellers.
Usually when you read poetry, you read but you can’t reply. You have a response but you can’t give it back. So although poetry is a communication, generally that communication goes only one way. In my reading window, it goes two ways.
Though only for a little while..
Because the window is only half open now.
Photo credit: the inimitable Ron King
Robert Nye died last week. He was a poet.
He was many other things too. His main income came from novels, not poetry, and at one time he was poetry critic for The Times, and regular reviewer poetry and fiction for The Scotsman and The Guardian. Many a writer has been proud to have a quotation from Nye emblazoned on their jacket. He was a generous reader and a good friend to poets.
But now he is gone. His ‘calling’, as he put it himself, was poetry, and it is for his poetry that he would want to be remembered. He was sometimes described as ‘Gravesian’ although now the number of readers who know what that might mean is dwindling too.
I don’t know that Robert Nye’s poems do resemble Robert Graves’s in style. To some degree, perhaps. The two poets share a high regard for plainness combined with lyricism: they are lyric poets writing consciously in an ancient tradition. And of course, both found far more readers through their novels than their poems. Graves’ The White Goddess, which explores the long tradition of the poetic muse, was undoubtedly a powerful influence on Nye as a young man, and so were two other poets connected with the Graves tradition and what they referred to as ‘truth-telling’: Martin Seymour-Smith and James Reeves.
Robert only died a few days ago and yet already this catalogue of names sounds irretrievably like The Past. Who remembers Martin Seymour-Smith as a poet? Who reads James Reeves? Who openly admits Graves as an influence? Moreover, if you look at Nye’s last collection (An Almost Dancer, Greenwich Exchange 2012), you’ll see each of his lines begins with a capital letter. The poems follow a clear metrical pattern and often also a rhyming form. So Robert Nye was one of the Old Guys, then? Maybe.
Certainly he believed, in the oldest sense, in inspiration – in the idea that poetry has a mysterious source. The poem compels the poet, not the other way around. Writing poetry (unlike novels) is neither a matter of choice nor education. In ‘Runes’, an autobiographical ballad, he writes
It was the muse of poetry
Who held me in her spell
And made me measure all my steps
And dance for her as well.
Before I ever wrote a line
I was her small liege-man.
Playing the fool on the way to school
Is where my verse began.
He is quoted on the jacket of his 1989 Hamish Hamilton collection saying ‘As for poems, I hope never to write more of them than I have to.’ He was not being coy. The statement was factual. He wrote poems when a compulsion gripped him and at no other time. As a result, his entire opus was relatively small, though the range of his poetic reading was vast.
His friend James Reeves said that to be a poet was ‘to say nothing when there is nothing demanding to be said’ (Commitment to Poetry, Heinemann, 1969). Robert Nye did just that. And so what came to him, when it came, was sometimes curiously fragmentary, snatches of something retrieved from God knows where, like the three lines of ‘A Matador Past His Prime’ which comprise the entire poem:
Honour the fat and stumbling matador
Who having lost one shoe kicks off the other
And turns to face the bull in his stockinged feet.
Where did that come from? From wherever Robert’s poems found their source, which was as much a mystery to him as anybody else. His novels won prizes. His poetry collections did not. It didn’t matter in the least. What mattered to Robert was that some poems were written and some insightful, sympathetic readers were found. He was a dedicated and loyal letter-writer (alas – there will be no more letters) and communicated over the years with a large number of poetry friends. This circle of readers mattered to him intensely, and he was an important private responder to the work of others, just as they were for him. He did not pay much attention to fame or fuss. He was interested in the poems that he was interested in, which were of value according to his own intransigent standards, not the award criteria of the day.
Back to James Reeves:
Large profits and quick returns, philanthropic grants and radio attention, state subsidized prizes, book society recommendations and awards by festival committees – all these are irrelevant, even antipathetic, to the spirit of poetry as are interviews in Sunday supplements and publicized television appearances.
That was written in 1964. Lord knows what Reeves would say now! And while in private Robert Nye might have chuckled and agreed, he made no public comment about such things. It was irrelevant to him. He was a self-contained person and interested in poetry, and horse-racing, and his family and friends. For what it’s worth, I think his best poems – like all the best poems – are timeless. But that’s for the individual reader to put to the test. The poems are ready and waiting, though their author is gone.
Nye was the most serious of poets. Obituaries in the Telegraph and New York Times already confirm this. He was not, however, above wicked fun and although it is not (and should not be) the poem he will be best remembered for, I will end with a rare piece of satire, from his 1989 Hamish Hamilton collection and also included in the more recent Greenwich Exchange volume, The Rain and the Glass (2004). Though written some decades ago, it seems to me to have worn rather well.
Interview
What’s it like, though, being you?
The old dog growls and bristles. This is his favourite question.
Answers win prizes. Nothing interests him more.
Inspired by the pursuit of his own tail
He has written his poems to find out what he smells like,
And now here’s another dog, a dog-fancying thoroughbred,
Just down from Oxford, trained to the minute,
On heat and eager to do some of the sniffing
For him, and to declare the crap remarkable.
Woof woof, the old dog says, bow wow.
I’ll show you where I buried my gift!
Remember the joke about windows?
It’s the one with four experts in a car that breaks down in the middle of the desert, and they all try different methods to get it started – a physicist and a geologist, I seem to remember. and even a priest (no prizes for guessing his solution). All of their fixes fail. But the last one is a Microsoft engineer who suggests they close all the windows, turn the engine off, wait a couple of minutes, and then start it again. Which obviously works.
But that’s a kind of Windows I’m not thinking about. I’m thinking about submissions windows. I have no idea who invented this term. Still I picked it up and have used it ever since. It seemed to make sense at the time, though it was the idea of closing the windows that attracted me. Accepting submissions all year doesn’t mix with actually producing publications – not when there’s only one of you – so if you open a window and let everything in, you have to close it again before it gets out of hand. So I do.
Sending poems between July 4 and July 26 is best.
Sending them on July 30th is not good, and you know what happened to Peter Pan when the window was shut.
For me, the reading months are also a matter of upstairs and downstairs. Upstairs, the literal and metaphorical window is usually closed (though the door is open). I sit at this desk and batter away at a keyboard and pore over a screen that increasingly drives me demented because there is so MUCH to do up here and so many emails flying hither and thither in the middle of everything else, and so many CAUSES and BLOGs and private messages and THUNDERCLAPs and things to buy and see and do and read and change on the website, and write and amend and proofread and typeset and complain about and fix and PAY for. And I have to get people to BUY the CURRENT set of books, let alone produce more. I am prone to headaches. The upstairs world is not good for headaches.
It’s better downstairs if I can just get there. That’s where the pile of books and pamphlets on the sofa is getting higher and higher (like the clothes in the ironing basket). I read some of them, or bits of them, in the late evening, and intend, next day, to write some OPOI upstairs, though latterly this hasn’t happened because of the maelstrom. (But please note there are two new Alan Buckley OPOIs, written by other people, which may be of interest to those of you who have read The Long Haul, or are thinking about it.)
It makes me happy to get downstairs during the reading windows. That’s one of the very good things about those times of year. I start the day on the sofa, or at the dining table, or sometimes even in the garden, and I read all morning, and usually some of the afternoon as well. I have to do it this way, because the noise of messages flying in at me off of the internet upstairs is not good for reading poems. It’s another reason why I prefer poetry on paper to poetry on a screen. Paper is quieter. I get fewer headaches with paper.
Anyway, I’m getting ready to go downstairs. The reading window opens at the start of July, though I shan’t actually start doing anything until July 5th, because I am away for a couple of days before that. This is not a call for pamphlet submissions, though if you’re burning to suggest one, you can. Remember (you will know this if you’ve read my book) that publishers have too many publications waiting to be tackled all the time. They are really looking for reasons to say NO to getting any more. Until something so tempting arrives that – sometimes against their better judgement – they commit.
So is how it will work at HappenStance from next Friday for approximately four weeks.
If you want to send an idea for a pamphlet publication (like you might with other publishers), then send up to four poems by snail with SAE, an outline of the idea for the whole publication and a bit of information about yourself and your background. A pitch. I’ll let you know if I want to see more poems. Mainly I deal in first pamphlets.
Alternatively, you may not be thinking about a whole publication. You might want to send four poems just to get some feedback. This is mainly what my reading windows are for. I like to read and respond to individual poems and individual poets. I get interested in many of them. Over time, if those poets keep sending stuff, I get to know them better. Sometimes I end up publishing a set of poems by one of those poets. Mainly I don’t.
If you’re a HappenStance subscriber, you get a slightly better deal. You can send up to six poems by snail or three by electronic means. I prefer snail, but I understand completely that for those subscribers outside the UK, email is the logical medium (I will come upstairs to read those poems) and nell at happenstancepress.com, formatted in the usual way, will find me. Remind me that you are a subscriber, please.
Before sending anything, please check out the guidelines for formatting and so on. If you generally fit in with my preferences, it will mean I read your work in a much calmer and nicer window-frame of mind. You know it makes sense. There are fuller details about everything on the submissions page.
Right. I have one hand on the latch and I’m looking at the stairs. Five . . . days . . . to . . . go.
So do you need to know about the poet’s life?
Well – sometimes – where the poem hinges on autobiographical detail – you might want to.
Alison Prince, whose first full collection of poems, Waking At Five Happens Again, has just appeared in book form, for example, has had a long and extraordinary life. And her poems draw on it openly. This is especially noticeable in the ones that refer to her experience as a child during the Second World War, to her own current health condition, or to her parents, in particular her father, an intensely musical man and son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia or the Ukraine – the grandfather Alison never met.
War, for children, is mysterious and frightening, but also exciting. If you grew up in the Second World War, the stories of the Great War were vividly present. Alison’s father was one of only two men from his battalion to come back physically unharmed from Ypres and the Somme. in her poem ‘Centenary’, she recalls his memory of a trench in Flanders:
A dead man’s hand, he said,
projected from the muddy wall,
useful to lean your rifle on.
This soldier-survivor met the love of his life, Alison’s mother, when she came back from nursing in France. Both of them had seen terrible injury and pain. But they got on with ordinary lives, except that they were far from ordinary, and never ever ‘soft’. Her father did well in his banking career. His aspiration to be a concert pianist was shelved, but he played every night in the front room, wearing an overcoat and hat if the fire wasn’t lit. When he forgot to draw the curtains, people passing by gathered at the garden fence to listen.
There were two children: first Alison and then, five years later, her brother Roderick. But another war loomed. Just before it started, Alison was taken to the island of Arran by her grandmother, and knew for certain that it was where she belonged (she lives there now), but then she was carted back to London and a war began. And the children played in bomb craters and survived. When Alison’s mother asked ‘Where have you been?’, the answer (in her poem ‘Kids’) was:
Hurling a Spitfire through the sky, mother.
Manning an ack-ack gun.
During wars, children get on, as best they can, with the serious business of play:
People in uniform banished our dream.
They had no time for us.
We were just kids,
though not what you could call children.
Alison miraculously escaped death when a bomb lodged in the rafters over her bed and failed to explode. But some of the neighbouring chldren were less lucky. ‘Wartime’ tells the story of two who ‘would have been old ladies now / except the Luftwaffe arrived’. They ran across the road to the public shelter:
A bomb killed one of them
but the other stumbled on.
Only inside the curtain
did the dim light show her hands
holding the spilled wreckage
of her abdomen.
During a war, death is no stranger. There it is at your right hand, sharpening the angle of the light. And this poet, now in her eighties, faces an assault again – not from outside, but from within. Problems with heart and lungs bring back that knife-edge, both literally and metaphorically. Past and present merge, a wild and beautiful blend, as the ‘heart beats in double time’ and ‘rests are not restful’. Here’s the second stanza of ‘Fast’:
The armies of perfection are most beautiful,
helmet feathers waving in the sun,
lances slanting like blown corn,
so good, so generous, so warm,
so oath-bound to serve life
even when life is off somewhere,
flirting outrageously with the dark-cloaked
seductive musician
who will play ‘The Last Post’.
Alison Prince is an artist (she can paint and draw beautifully) and a musician (she plays clarinet in a jazz band) and a story-teller (author of countless children’s tales) and a biographer (lives of Hans Christian Andersen and Kenneth Grahame) and a gardener (it’s in the poems) and a teacher and a mother and a grandmother and a poet. In her later years, poetry is the form in which she brings all the threads and threats of her life together, and the fusion is like no other. Waking At Five Happens Again, published jointly by Mariscat and HappenStance, is the book of a lifetime in which a whole life nestles, offering its stories and reflections, making its own sense out of the great puzzle of existence.
‘Centenary’, which begins with Alison’s father’s story about the dead man’s hand, ‘useful to lean your rifle on’, ends like this:
I knew him in another war,
crouched in another bolthole underground.
The hurricane lamp would flicker when
shock pulsed through the earth from a close bomb.
His hands, clamped round an empty beer glass,
trembled. We pretended not to see,
because there is nothing so dangerous
as being afraid.
***
