2017 – Page 2 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

PUFFING AND PANTING AND PAMPHLETS

So we have two new pamphlets at last!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-pamphlet process

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

Caption: The publisher’s grandmother’s day card

POETRY AND FLOUR

When baking poems, you should use strong flour, which is made from hard words. This produces the right kind of dough for lyric work produced at high temperatures, because it has a high fluten and bard core content.

Fluten (or high fluten) holds the gas produced when imagination ferments. This is how the poem rises and in this way a highly aerated product with even crumb is achieved.

Hard word varieties of flour produce the best medium for poems, if ground correctly. However, UK weather does not lend itself to hard-word flowering. Sometimes the mix is fortified by the addition of refined fluten.

Whole-word flour contains the words ‘grim’, ‘endospume’ and ‘flab’.

Refined flour contains only ‘endospume’.

A device called Alveobum Chopkin, invented in 1921 by Maisie Chopkin, provides an index called P that is now commonly used by professional makars. The P index measures the word strength. The maximum of the curve, identified by Y, represents the toughness of fluten, while X represents the bard core. The higher the value of X the more impenetrable the po.

In general, the more a poem requires long gestation, the more a flour will need a high P, because it better supports synxtax produced in fermentation while maintaining elasticity of expression. Fluten is able to absorb complex syntax for one time and half its weight. The stronger the flour is, the higher the absorption. This varies from an absorption of less than 50% for weak flour up to values higher than 70% for strong flour. ‘Extra strong flour’ may have fluten added.

Under the UK Word and Flour Regulations 1998 (BFR), industrial production requires the addition of certain enrichments (irony, compressin, post-modin and exaspiratin) to all word flour (except soul meal) at the mulling stage.

The Rhyme Ambush

You find yourself thinking in such predictable ways—predictable even to yourself.

How do you get out of the boring loop of knowing too much about where you’re going? No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

This is why I love rhyme. It creates an intervention. It calls in words you had absolutely no intention of using.

Yesterday, I was thinking about scallops. I won’t go into why. Scallop shell of quiet, popped into my mind… and the way the ‘l’ consonants swell between the scallop and the shell, and how it reminds me of the softness of waves.

Collops, I thought. What are they again? Little slices of meat, in old recipe books. Derived from ‘escalopes’ apparently. Give me a dollop of collops. Which made me think of roll mops. Which made me think of Pickleherring, in Robert Nye’s The Late Mr Shakespeare.

Wallops arrived with a wallop. Good old English language for keeping the sound the same but changing the vowel.

Trollop. Now there’s a word that’s gone out of circulation. ‘You Trollop!’ we used to say in mock horror. Why is a combination of ‘l’ and ‘p’ so satisfying to the ear? There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip. Plop, slop, slip, slap, clippety clop.

Which made me starting singing

Horsey, horsey, don’t you stop.
Just let your feet go clippety clop.
Your tail goes swish and your wheels go round.
Giddy up, we’re homeward bound

I sing this, or a version of it, to my grandchildren, and always thought it was an old nursery rhyme. Thank you, Wikipedia for putting me right. It’s part of a longer piece written in only 1937 and so less than two decades older than me.

How did I get here? I was thinking about unexpected interventions and where they take you, and I haven’t even mentioned Coleridge’s person from Porlock yet, though the ‘l’ and ‘p’ sounds of that phrase have had it hovering on the edge of my mind for some time.

All this, really, because of that lovely bit of intervention that went viral yesterday, when a little girl interrupted her dad’s bit of TV expertise. I hope nobody got a wallop, even metaphorically speaking. We yearn for unpredictable delight: surprise, scallops, astonishment, upheaval. And when it arrives (without hurting anybody) we rightly celebrate it.

Reading A Poem Can Be Like Opening a Re-Sealable Packet of Cheese

Tear here, it says. Just in the corner where two thin clear sheets almost, but not quite, seal together.

So you attempt to separate them.

You work your thumb nail between the two so you can, with your thumb and forefinger, pinch the top piece of plastic away from the bottom, and tear.

The anticipation of the cheese assails you.

Except you tug and nothing happens.

You pull again, harder. Nothing.

You apply full force and the plastic corner slips out of your grasp and the cheese thuds onto the floor.

You pick it up to try again. You are nowhere near on speaking terms with this cheese.

You go back to the key corner, the official way into the cheese.

You read it very carefully.

It definitely says ‘Tear here’ – that MUST be the answer.

Again you get hold of the little plastic tab and pull as hard as you can, and again … nothing happens.

Is there something wrong with you? Has the packaging lied?

It’s impossible to get into the cheese this way. What sort of a person does it take to get into this cheese?

Or perhaps it doesn’t mean ‘tear’. Perhaps it’s tear, as in sob, wail and cry. If you weep over the cheese, will it open for you?

You are not prepared to cry just to get into the cheese.

So you fetch the scissors, the little pointy ones that will slide down neatly between the edge of the cheese and its containment. Snip, snip, snip.

Like a time-served brain surgeon, you fold back the plastic lid. The cheese is exposed.

It looks oddly shiny. Shiny and polished. Too polished, like the cheese itself is made of plastic.

You can stare at it but you don’t want to devour it.

And of course, you can’t re-seal. You can wrap it in cling-film or foil but you can never start again from scratch.

What will you DO with the cheese now?

In a spirit of vengeance, you go for a workshop implement.

You grate the cheese. You reduce it to a pile of airy syllables.

The whole meaning and literary tradition of the cheese – where is it now? And who is to blame?

The person who put that cheese in that packet, that’s who.

The person who said it was intended for consumption.

The person who said ‘Tear here’.

FOURTEEN TIPS FOR DEALING WITH REJECTION

I don’t mean in love, or in life. I’m talking poems here.

And I’m talking both as a rejectee and a rejecter. Both are unpleasant roles, but the former is worse than the latter. Or worse for some people.

I vividly recall the early days when I was sending out a lot of stuff in A5 manila envelopes. Sorting out the poems into groups. Typing up the accompanying letters to editors. Printing final copies as consistently and beautifully as I could. Folding them precisely, popping them into the envelopes, slipping the envelopes into the big red post box. This was long before Submittable. Long before Email. Those were the days.

Until they began to come back. Inside the first manila envelope was a second, addressed to me in my own handwriting. It had a fold down the middle where A5 had been folded to A6 to fit inside the first envelope. You could see these envelopes returning a mile off. You could hear them flop onto the floor in the hall. You could hear them flop heavily, like envelopes with six poems in – not three or four (which might mean two had been accepted).

The worst aspect was the flip-flop heart on opening the envelope: a mixture of hope (you can’t help it, even if the envelope is heavy) and pragmatic anxiety. If some non-poet is with you at the time, you have to hide these feelings. You can hardly stand there and curse when your Aunt Emily is waiting for her cup of coffee.

Some people are very good about this stuff. ‘So what?’ they chuckle, and get on with their lives. Not me. I used to feel dismal for the rest of the day, at the same time as being furious with myself for having that ridiculous response. After 24 hours, the negative emotion had shrunk to a whisper. After 48, it had gone completely. This was good, but there were more rejections on the way. And each time, the same cycle of ridiculous emotions.

When you open an envelope with returned (rejected) poems, the wee souls never look the same. They go out so hopeful and clean and nicely folded. They come back rumpled with their tails between their legs. Where has their confidence gone?

So why on EARTH do I suggest that other poets, many of them fragile in confidence, should put themselves through this? The reasons are complex (more of this in my book How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published), but I do still suggest it, even at the same time as still – to this day – finding it difficult myself.

Yes, I have some tips. It’s the sort of thing you expect from blogs. But as well as this, you can of course remind yourself of various truths, like that none of this is personal; that the return of the poems doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t like them (or you); that they may just not like poems about dogs/sex/the menopause/Donald Trump; that they may already have two poems about frogs in this issue; that the poems were the wrong shape, style or size for the magazine; that your work arrived when the issue was already full; that the silly one about human fleas may have given them the wrong idea about you etc; that it may not be the best idea to share your feelings about the editor on Facebook….

Let’s get down to the tips then.

1. It’s a business. Get down to the paperwork. You sent them out … when? They came back … when? From … where? Keep a meticulous record. You need to know how long each mag sat on the work. And how many rejections you have had from them so far, since there is a point at which you will stop trying.

2. Remember the unique collection you’re in process of making. I mean your collection of rejection slips. Some of them may be valuable one of these days. So go for that slip, grab it and check how rare it is. (The rare ones have comments, coffee rings, blood stains, or were intended for somebody else, not you. Seriously.) File it.

3. Some people say ‘send those poems right out to the next magazine’. I wouldn’t do that. I think you need to put them to one side for a little while. Read them again once your negative emotion has dwindled. Then decide whether you should tweak or change or even abandon. This can teach you something. You might vary the set next time too.

4. Check how much work you still have out there, circulating. Something should be doing the business for you. So you might send a few other poems out. And if you feel really rebellious, include one of the ones that came back today with a totally different title!

5. If your emotions are intense, find a field or open space, or somewhere with few people around and scream at the very top of your voice as loud as you can. This is fabulously therapeutic, not least because – after the scream – you’ll laugh.

6. If you still feel TERRIBLE, write a poem about it. Strong feeling is great. I have several poems written after rejections, one or two of which found good homes.

7. Go and read a couple of your favourite touchstone poems. Remind yourself what this is all about. And how vitally important being a reader is.

8. Maintain perspective by checking the world news. So many awful things can trump rejection from a little magazine. Especially right now.

9. Remember persistency is your friend. If a specific poem has already been rejected six times, the seventh is far less painful. In fact, it becomes fun to see whether it will ever be accepted.

10. Send a couple of rejectees to a good critical friend for comments. The critical friends – your good readers – are enormously important.

11. Do a thorough review of the magazines you’re sending to. Do you like enough of the work inside them to justify wanting to be printed there? If you don’t, then don’t send there again. Reject that magazine.

12. Be naughty with your multiple rejects. Cut them up and change the stanzas round. Make two little ones into one longer one. Share the very short one on Twitter. Then photograph it and have it printed on a mug. (There is a home for every pome.)

13. Start a little magazine. Nothing too complicated. You could do it online, if you like. Changing your role from rejectee to rejecter is hugely educative. (Or read Gerry Cambridge’s book: The Dark Horse: On the Making of a Little Magazine. You start to see the whole thing in an entirely different way.)

14. Be aspirational. Decide whether the poem has been rejected enough times to qualify it for the fabulous Salon of the Refused, where rare items from your rejection slips will also be joyfully received.

What makes a successful poet?

Or should I put it another way: what makes a poet successful?

One kind of success is marked by competitions and awards. The ten poets who were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize this year achieved success in terms of public acclaim. Their work was selected, reviewed and will probably be more widely read than the work of most other contemporaries.

On the other hand, only one of them (Jacob Polley) won the entire award, so that was the big success, wasn’t it? He got the twenty thousand quid. He has made it.

Except the money will vanish. There will be another winner next year. And in the meantime Jake has poems to write, and a mass of expectation to live up to. And as Paul Muldoon once said in a Master Class – or at least this is something like what he said – the poet is never a master on writing poems because he has to discover how to write each one all over again. Each new poem demands its own way of writing.

And meanwhile there are all the poets who didn’t win. And all the poets who will never win. What is success for them?

For a long time, publication alone was regarded as the big validation – and despite some successful self-publishers, that idea still carries some weight, though it’s worth bearing in mind that some hundreds of published books will have been entered for the TS Eliot prize compared to the shortlist of ten. These were all books that by virtue of publication had achieved some success. Just not not TS-Eliot-prize-shortlist success.

When I was at primary school I was quite good at sprinting but Helen Booth always beat me, no matter how hard I tried. And I was not bad at swimming but Barbara Longbottom was miles better. When I got to secondary school, I got into the tennis team, but only into the third reserve for doubles. And as for hockey, I was in the team because I reliably turned up for practice. The PE teacher once called me (how we remember these things for a life-time) ‘the fly in the ointment’.

Why does life train us to value winning so much? It is a mixed blessing. I went to a children’s party and watched a game with prizes. The kids were very little – just beginning the party game experience. When little Betty or Bobby won the prize, all the other wee ones bawled (or wept, if you read last week’s blog). When they grow up, they will learn to conceal those tears.

What would life be like if we were not competitive? What would poetry be like? How would we find what we want and need to read if there was no process of selection, no concept of a ‘successful’ book?

In Anne Stevenson’s poem ‘Making Poetry’, which I commend to you, she talks about the ‘siren hiss’ of ‘success, success, success’:

And what’s ‘to make’?

To be and to become words’ passing
weather; to serve a girl on terrible
terms, embark on voyages over voices,
evade the ego-hill, the misery-well,
the siren hiss of publish, success, publish,
success, success, success.

So there it is – the downside of success, the huge lure and danger of ‘the ego-hill’ and, on the other side, ‘the misery-well’ – and this is from a poet who has won many prizes.

It is wonderful to win. It’s wonderful when your friends win. But the feeling of elation doesn’t last long. And only a very few people win the big prizes. Some excellent poets will never win. Does that mean they aren’t ‘successful’?

Well, there is a different kind of success. If you’re a practising poet, you’ll know it. You know it when you find it. And it’s not impossible to find though it isn’t an everyday experience by any means.

It’s when some piece of poetry you have made, by some miracle, seems to work, and at the same time to do something you didn’t expect. It surprises you. In some cases, the surprise amounts to astonishment. It’s almost as if somebody else had written it.

And if on top of that, someone else reads it and ‘gets it’ – oh boy. You’ve scored.

Reining in the high horse

Do you say ‘weep’ ever – except inside a poem?

It’s a word I noticed a lot during the reading window. If you’re a rhyming poet, ‘weep’ has always offered temptation because it goes with sleep and deep and keep. Also ‘weeping’, as a feminine ending, has a deliciously mournful fall to it.

But these days there aren’t so many rhymers. The poets are doing other things. These things include a subconscious (I think) attraction to certain ‘poetic’ words. They tend to turn up towards the end of a poem.

The little word ‘yet’ is one to watch. It often signals a mini-epiphany (‘and yet’), which means the poet may be getting onto her high horse.

On the other hand, ‘yet’ (meaning ‘but’) may put in an appearance because the poet has already used ‘but’ and needs an alternative.

Alas (and ‘alas’ has gone, except for entirely mock sorrow), poetic technique is tricky. A matter of getting the balance right between deliberate repetition (allowable even on a low horse) and accidental harping on one word too much.

And yet ‘yet’ is allowable, even in contemporary conversational register, in the phrase ‘yet again’, or ‘not yet’. So it’s not the word itself that’s retro: it’s the way it’s used.

Which brings me to ‘for’.

‘For’ as an ordinary preposition (‘This is for you’) is no problem.

It’ s no problem in a phrase like ‘left for home’ or ‘for the love of Mike’, either. But when you come across ‘for’ meaning ‘because’, you’re back in high-horse territory.

I couldn’t do it here for I would immediately sound odd. (See what I mean?) But it pops up in poems all the time. It’s more convenient than ‘because’, less business-like than ‘since’…

But back to weeping. If you need to weep (in a poem) and don’t want to use the word, what will you do?

I don’t weep at funerals; I cry. But ‘cry’ brings its own problems, for it also means to shout out loud.

‘Whimper’ and or ‘howl’ sounds like a dog.

‘Keen’ is interesting and yet you worry what the person is actually doing.

‘Snivel’ is a person who doesn’t have a hanky, and ‘sob’ is certainly emotive though it sounds blobby.

‘Tear up’ is modern, unless you read the word wrong and visualise shredded paper.

In Scotland, we have the word ‘grete’ for weeping but alas it can get confused with the English ‘hello’, forbye.

On balance, weeping in poems is not such a great idea. Though obviously if the reader weeps, it’s quite another matter.

Verbs leaning through the window and other coincidences

The coincidences in the poems sent in to me during the December window ARE uncanny.

Here are some of them:

♥ Two sets of envelopes, one immediately after the other, have both egrets and herons in the same poem.

♥ Four poems in one day’s reading use the word ‘gift’ (as in we gifted her our dog) where once we might have used ‘give’ or ‘gave’. Last window, it was ‘hefted’ instead of ‘heaved’. Now it is ‘gifted’ instead of ‘gave’.

♥ Horses are off the menu latterly. But now a lot of foxes. Ted Hughes started it and Robert Minhinnick continued, so this is nothing new. Nice to see foxes are back, in fact.

♥ Two lots of supermoons arrived in poems on the same day. I thought there would be more, like there were for the last comet, but it may be early days.

Bugbears:

♠ People writing ‘til. It is either until or till. Both of the latter are proper words so you get a choice.

♠ Habitual past tense – ‘I’d run down to the shop / and buy the daily bread. / I’d talk to Mrs Bloggs / but I’d forget the things we’d said.’ I contend that a single action in the past is always more interesting than the things you used to do. (‘I ran down to the shop / and bought the daily bread. / I talked to Mrs Bloggs / but I forgot the thing I said.’)

You get the same construction when filling in back story – ‘I’d talked to Mrs Bloggs and I’d bought the daily bread / but then I saw the postman / and remembered what I’d said.’ Back story tends to be boring, though sometimes necessary in a narrative. In poetry it brings in a lot of letter D, which is involved in ‘I’d’ and ‘we’d’ and ‘you’d’. Too much letter D is a killer, aurally. Trust me.

♠ Too many stanzas starting a new sentence with And (cap A). You can overplay your And.

♠ The leaning verb.

Leaning verbs
It is possible that I’m losing the plot completely. I could be imagining the fact that they’re ganging up on me.

No, I’m not imagining it. There are a lot of leaning verbs in free-verse forms, and especially towards the end of the poem.

What on earth are ‘leaning verbs’? It’s my name for them. it’s a way of describing a series of verb clauses, where two or more verbs have the same subject. There’s probably a proper grammatical term for it. They are sort of in apposition. Like this (I am rhyming my example for fun, but this is really a free-verse thing):

I ran to the shop,
bought the daily bread,
talked to Mrs Bloggs,
forgot the things she said.

A leaning-verb lover would never put ‘and’ before the last verb in the sequence. The verbs are stacked one by one against the subject (in this case ‘I’). The leaning-verb user likes to stack verbs. It gifts (I mean, gives) a good strong stress to the first syllable of the verb, and in a repetitive pattern, this creates a sense of structure and pattern. Often each verb gets a line of its own.

Some poets will do this without commas at end of the verb clause. They will use a line break to substitute for a comma. This is fair enough, unless you plan to use enjambed lines later, in which case the common reader gets anxious.

There’s nothing intrinsically evil about the leaning-verb construction, and it’s certainly not wrong, grammatically speaking. But if it becomes a regular habit, poets should take note. Because habits quickly become convention, and staidly conventional writing is what killed the so-called ‘Georgians’.

Look out for leaning verbs in the last two lines of free-verse poems. You’ll be surprised how often you find them, in poets of all ranks. You’ll find them so often it’ll start to sound as ‘right’ to you as ending on a rhyme once did (witness Simon Armitage’s Cataract Operation).

But you want to sound different from the rest, don’t you?

Delights
Some poems just work. The poems that work work in their own way. They’re not much like any of the other poems that work, generally speaking, so it’s impossible to generalise about what makes them delightful. If it were, I would share the secret with you here.

All I can say is, sometimes poems just do it, whatever ‘it’ is. They make you wake up, sit up and read them again. And again. A poet can sometimes write five pleasantly dull poems and then one that’s a sit-up. If the poet could write the sit-up poem every time, she would. We all would.

During this reading window, I read about a mile of poems, and every 44 yards or so there was a sit-up. It was wonderful. There were also poems that could be sit-up poems, I thought, with a little tinkering, though tinkering can be over-rated.

Returns
All the poems have now been returned to their owners, though they only went in the post yesterday. Just so you know. For me, it’s back to publications and reviews, both of which are shouting from the sidelines: me, me, me. And my ‘to do’ list, which is up to 21 items.

Also it’s time to eat.

Rodents through the window

Forget horses. Today it is wasps and rats.

The less lovely things in life can be the best inspirations. But the isle of Iona has popped up three times too, and Iona is gorgeous.

The leaning verbs are still leaning. I think I may be making it a bit of a mission to prop them up. Or bring them down − whichever metaphor grabs you.

Honestly, some great poems today.

Among its other virtues, poetry bears witness. Real things that happened and can’t unhappen. The grain of things. Seen as they were seen.

On windows and stacking

Yes, it’s a new year but I’m still reading poems from the old window.

If you happen to be wondering why you sent yours in early December and haven’t had a reply (I am usually pretty quick) it’s because it all went wrong. I did manage the first few as usual, day by day, but quickly I gave up. The pressure of work, as they say, pressed in a pressurised fashion, and I had to start stacking.

Poem stacking is not difficult. Much easier than logs. So the stack didn’t actually topple for a while, at which point I carried it upstairs. Then all that seasonal stuff got in the way. (Try reading poems and wrapping parcels at the same time).

The people I returned poems to in early December returned emails to me. The emails were already out of control so I started a second stack: the poems that had been replied to. But I didn’t post them, and I still haven’t posted them so as not to attract more emails, until I have time to read emails again.

The ‘replied to’ stack is now slightly higher than the ‘waiting to be read stack’.

Soon they will all go into the post at the same time, but not for at least another week because you can’t rush this stuff. Peoples’ lives are in those envelopes. Lives on hold.

So the reading continues. If yours was one of the under-stamped envelopes, it will come back to you, because I haven’t been to the sorting office and offered to pay for them. It does cost a ridiculous amount to send a large letter envelope these days and many of us have still not caught up with that.

If yours was one of the special delivery envelopes for which the postie hammered at the door and woke me up, I forgive you. But please don’t do that again. An ordinary delivery works perfectly fine, and if you choose ‘signed for’ the postie just ignores it anyway.

So here’s a brief review of the preoccupations this time round — half way through the stack.

♦ Most frequently occurring animal: the horse.

♦ Most frequent grammatical things that bug me: ‘lay’ instead of ‘lie’ (I blame Bob Dylan) and ‘were stood’ instead of ‘were standing’ or ‘was sat’ instead of ‘was sitting’ (probably his fault too).

♦ Most frequent poem type: the journey, punctuated by imperatives (turn right, go past the post office).

♦ Most frequent poem structure: the Now and two stanzas later Then poem. Or vice versa.

♦ So many leaning verbs I begin to worry that I’ve made the phenomenon worse. And I’m noticing another thing: the two leaning nouns in the last line, something like this:

We have no other way of attracting
the horses and so we arrive with
our hands full of marshmallows, buttercups.

♦ Using line breaks to substitute for commas (I wrote about this not that long ago and now I can’t find which blog it’s in) while having other line breaks across an enjambed phrase, so the reader starts not to know quite how to read safely without falling off the edge.

I feel unreasonable a lot of the time, and when it comes to punctuation, I get what my mother used to call ‘fratchetty’. Why on earth should semi-colons affect me like the rhinoceros and his skin. Give me simple punctuation and I’ll rest easy.

But really I’m living the life of Riley. There are numerous delights, but each is individual. It’s like the Tolstoy thing about all happy families being alike but unhappy ones being unhappy in their own way; except not. A good poem is uniquely happy, but lots of poems are made unhappy in exactly the same way.

(Riley is living my life, but he’s not very keen on it and wants to go home. And yes, I know I used a semi-colon. Grrrr.)