Helena Nelson – Page 12 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

Wanted! Echoes for rose petals. . .

So what is an OPOI again?

I wrote about them before last November and on the Sphinx website too, where there already quite a few of these little beasts are congregating.

They are responses to poetry (or prose) pamphlets that focus on just One Point Of Interest. Not more than 350 words each and can easily be shorter, depending on what the point of interest is.

They are reviews with a difference. The aim is not to evaluate (forget praise or blame). The idea is just to focus on something interesting in the publication, a point of discussion. It could be line six in one particular poem. It could be your inability to make sense of any of the poems. It could be a particular metaphor. It could be the use of ellipsis.

What I really hope will happen is for a publication to attract several responses, not just one. Polly Clark’s A Handbook for the Afterlife has two already, but there must be dozens of you out there fascinated by that set of poems. We have room for more.

This is not just another ‘send me your pamphlets and I will organise reviews’. Never mind the pamphlet and the stamps. Send me your OPOI!

There are a few rules. Very simple:

100-350 words.
Only focussing on one point of interest (preferably with a heading to indicate what it is).
Must approach the work with respect (no cavilling or carping).
Written in prose.
Details of price, date of publication and source/publisher required.

Of course people can post whole pamphlets to me too and my trusty team will do their best to organise a starter OPOI, though equally you could look at what we have already, and send your OPOI to join the others. It is a friendly fray. Please join it.

Remember ginger beer plants? The way they grew and grew in the cellar (well, ours was in the cellar)? Each day you had to divide the starter and let it begin its work again. So you would give a ginger beer plant to a friend in a jam jar, and they would give one to their friend, and so on. In the end, the delicious ginger beer took over the town, until no-one could bear to think about it any more.

I don’t envisage quite that end for the OPOI but I would like them to be a different kind of response, and to grow. Alan Hill reminded me last week that Don Marquis said ‘publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo’. Echoes to rose petals – that’s what these OPOI are, but louder. You don’t need to be a weighty reviewer. You just need to respond to a single point of interest in any (probably poetry) pamphlet that has come your way, new or old. Send your thoughts to me in an email or via the contact box. Don’t be shy.

Are you, by any chance, contemplating the publication of your own poetry pamphlet? If so, it’s time to read and have thoughts about other people’s. What makes a short collection interesting to you? What has made you want to keep one forever, as opposed to flicking through and smiling politely?

The Grand Canyon is waiting.

The Strangeness of the Present Tense

I pick up the book in my left hand. With my right I riffle through to page 31.

I start to read. ‘She’s drowsy and deep,’ I read. ‘She’s drowsy and nearly asleep. She sits on the high chair and nods, like a little old lady, though she’s only two. She makes one weary cheep, a baby sparrow. From nowhere, in a flurry of perfume and patterned frock, her mother blows in, smothers her with kisses, and sweeps her up and away.’

That paragraph was in the simple present tense. Most novels and stories are these days. You get used to it, though in the nineteenth century (Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës) they were all in the past, except for passages of direct speech:

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
(First sentence of Jane Eyre).

Like stories and novels, poems used to describe experience in the past tense: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills’. In those Wordsworthian days, some words (o’er) were squashed to fit the metrical pattern. We regard that as seriously retro now, and most mainstream poems these days are in the present simple. It almost seems natural.

She’s drowsy and deep.
She’s drowsy and nearly asleep.
She sits on the high chair and nods
like a little old lady
though she’s only two.

However, it’s not ‘natural’ at all. It’s a literary device. We do funny things with verbs for creative reasons. When we’re just talking and not creating a literary effect, the simple present tense is what we use for habitual actions: I go to the gym on Tuesdays. I catch the bus and get off in town. If we’re describing what we’re doing ‘right now’, it’s the present continuous tense: I’m sitting down on the bus and I’m looking out for my stop.

But poets, for ‘right now’ descriptions, choose the present simple. It creates a sense of immediacy (and there are fewer ‘ing’ words). Sometimes the event happened ages ago, but the present tense is still hauled in, in which case it’s a ‘historic present’. We cheerfully buy into this literary device and forget it’s a stratagem.

A radio journalist would do it differently. Their immediacy would be summoned by the present continuous: ‘I’m looking at a little boy. He’s probably about two years old. There are sores on his arms and legs and I can see a bruise on his forehead. I’m going to talk to his mother in a moment. She’s coming into the house now.’

Another verb trick for poets (but not journalists or podcasters) is to bring the reader in with a series of imperatives:

Look at her. She’s drowsy and deep.
Look how she sits on the high chair and keeps
nodding like a little old lady.
Watch her mother sweep in now. . .

This can work – if not done too often. Tricks work best when they sneak up on you.

We prize a conversational tone in poetry these days. It’s part of our extended reaction against what was regarded as ‘Georgian’ or ornate in early twentieth century writing. So we do different things and think they’re not stylised. We do like to feel contemporary.

But we’re just as stylised as any age has ever been. It isn’t conversational to say ‘She sits on the high chair and nods like a little old lady’. It’s a cross between surreal dream style and the Janet and John books, ‘John sits on the chair. Janet nods. See, mother, see!’

Oh yes, I use the simple present tense myself in poems (especially in dream poems, where it’s great for capturing a sense of the surreal). It’s something I’ve learned, one of the devices of my age. Most poets use simple present at least some of the time. I’m not knocking it on principle. I’m just doing my bit for raising awareness.

Because sometimes I pick up a set of poems, and every single text is constructed that way. The ubiquitous I + simple-present-tense can wear thin.

There are changes that can be rung. Time for some ringing.

photo credit: Of Tings and tongs via photopin (license)

Hot topic: Age and Aging

As a writing topic, age is in. Age has always been in.

Sarah Catherine’s ‘a classical blog’ quotes Sappho on the topic. And Mimnermus. And Alcman. And Anacreon. The Chinese ancients had it nailed too – all over the place.

Last night I was reading the 2015 Emma Press’s Anthology of Age, edited and illustrated by two relatively young (age is a matter of perpective) people. It’s a lovely set of poems about age and aging – and many of them are heartening.

Meanwhile, the Saltire Society brought out Second Wind last year, a pamphlet by older poets Diana Hendry, Vicki Feaver and Douglas Dunn tackling the aging process with the energy of youth.

And the Scottish Poetry Library, in conjunction with Polygon, is planning an anthology of ‘Scottish poems for growing older’, due later this year.

Even I myself am currently working on a new publication from Alan Hill, a sequence of short poems titled Gerontion. (You may be able to guess its central concern.)

We human beings brood about age a lot. It seems to trouble other animals less, but then other animals don’t look in mirrors.

On her later birthdays (88, 89, 90 and finally 91), I used to ask my mother how she felt about having achieved that particular age.

‘What age?’ she would say.

‘Well, 90 is pretty old, isn’t it? How does it feel to be so old?’

She would shake her head. ‘I feel just the same as I always have,’ she would always say, never one for a fuss. But latterly she looked in the mirror less – much less – which is perhaps why her cardigans were frequently done up wrong, or the patch of melted chocolate on her blouse failed to bother her.

Mum was ill with Alzheimer’s Disease, which confers both bother and blessing, and it was the reason why we were jointly compiling her memoirs. She felt extremely well most of the time. On one of the birthdays, I told her how old she was and she was astonished. ‘Am I really so old?’ she said.

‘You certainly are,’ said I.

‘Well, how old are you?’ she asked me.

‘How old do you think I am?’

‘About 25?’

I laughed, of course. ‘Mum, I am 60.’

She looked at me properly then, and with horror. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘That’s AWFUL! It was like being in a science fiction film, where the main characters are suddenly spirited into a future fifty years ahead, chatting happily, until catch a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, and a horrible reality dawns.

But my mother soon forgot this and went back to being her young self with me cast as a somewhat younger friend. In fact, I thought she was feeling younger and younger in the later years. Quite often she was a child whose parents were just about to arrive.

I think most of us continue to feel much the same inside, throughout our adult years, until some aspect of physical decay strikes us. So poems about age and aging are really about some form of loss, loss being (to my mind) the central and abiding theme of poetry.

Young poets are supposed to write about love. Unsurprisingly, we fall in love with youth which (apart from Jane Eyre) is associated with health and beauty. We do not fall in love with age (the stereotype stoops from street crossing signs).

But even love poetry is really about loss.

Buy this book (please). No, really. I mean it.

I would prefer to give books away.

However, yesterday at the StAnza bookfair, I did my best to sell as many copies of How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published as humanly possible. I told a number of poets they ‘ought’ to read it. What a presumption!

But it’s like this: poets ask things.

They ask things like ‘what did you think of the recent publication by xxxx’? Or they ask, ‘I’m thinking of approaching xxxx. What do you think?’ Or, most worryingly of all, ‘I wonder if I might send you some of my poems?’

‘You need to read this book,’ I say. ‘It’s only taken eleven years to be able to write it, and it might save you a lot of time.’ It’s not the same as the pamphlet publication that preceded it, many copies of which I used to send (free) to poets who sent me their poems and didn’t know what they hadn’t done, but should have done, first.

I hate the way life is full of secret rules. You only find out later what you should have known to start with. To make it worse: some people seem to know these rules. Who told them?

I must get back to poetry, which is so very much more important, but I hope this book will do two things.

1. It will make some money to spend on publishing some poetry.

2.It will share the secret rules which you may, of course, learn eventually, but only after considerable pain. Save the pain.

It’s not just for new poets. Sometimes those who have one, or more than one, collection already in print have even more cause to read it. You don’t know what you don’t know.

The poetry publishing thing stirs up all sorts of emotions, and adjectives start flying in private conversations: unfair, unjust, unbalanced, nepotism, power, corruption, Private Eye. Please deliver us from temptation. Let us not mention funding. Let us not mention gate keepers. Read the book. It is funny in places, which is as it should be. Poetry is a serious matter, but poets should not take themselves too seriously.

I could say more, but today I’m going to StAnza to be on a panel discussing small magazines in the context of one of the best longstanding publications, Gerry Cambridge’s The Dark Horse, with Dana Gioa streamed in virtually from the States.

So no more from me today. Instead, here’s the link to what I wrote about StAnza in 2012. It still sums it up.

http://www.happenstancepress.org/index.php/blog/entry/instead-i-am-going-to-stanza

Relationships? It’s complicated.

My grandmother had a fairly close relationship with a piano. I have an intimate relationship with an Imac.

It is possible, perhaps even probable, to love a machine. I’m sure my computer has altered the way I think. Not necessarily for the worse. Just another tool, or instrument, like the washing machine or piano.

You know this is true when the machine dies, as it did for me this week. My own fault. I decided to install a new operating system: it wasn’t expensive. From what I read online, it wasn’t complicated or risky.

Except it was, and I should have known. It wasn’t a terrible disaster, or anything. I only lost about two hours’ worth of work. Fifteen years of production and human interaction was saved on a back-up drive and re-installed on a new machine, and I do like new machines. They smell so lovely, and are wondrous in their magical ability to do all sorts of things.

But the effect it has on the brain is weird. To begin with, I was almost nonchalant about it all. That was because I was in shock. Then I went back to my very old laptop and managed to do a little of the work I needed to do, and (because with HappenStance time is of the essence) bought a new Imac. I used a credit card and the Bank of Scotland fraud people phoned me to check I wasn’t a thief, which shows how long it is since I bought anything on credit.

Then four days with no computer, during which time I realised how much of my life was sitting waiting inside the little black external hard drive on my desk. Perhaps it’s possible to save too much. Perhaps we should let more go.

Then the new machine came and I began to discover which recovered programs wouldn’t work properly and why. Back to trawling through online discussion groups, always a mixture of horror and fascination for me. Fascination because of the wonder that all these people are there all the time swapping stories and information and helpful ideas. Horror because each one, at some point, tips into terminology that’s a foreign language.

However, I did work my way through a set of suggestions to make Creative Suite work again, after one of its files was corrupted in the hand-over, and something must have worked because the programs are now accessible again. Microsoft Office was more complicated. Apparently I am the only person in the UK to have purchased a year’s supply of software for one machine as a one-off purchase, and then (during this week’s crisis) software for another on a monthly payment basis. The technology wouldn’t install, and so I became implicated with online chat, and phone calls. I online-chatted my way, with different people, in different organisations, through:

Microsoft Office not downloading
an email address that wouldn’t work
I-photo that was there but couldn’t be located.

The online chats and phone calls on Friday lasted till 11.30pm. I was chatting with someone in Jamaica, then someone in the Philippines, and then I think someone in Ireland, though he could just have had an Irish accent.

How astonishing it is that these great conglomerate organisations offer this kind of assistance! I know it’s all in the name of making money out of us – but still. The guys who help (and phone calls became involved too) are kind and charming and intelligent and global. Something humbling about that. And they’re not full of nasty hype. During one phone call, I apologised for being stupid (this stuff does make you feel stupid, and slow). My helpmeet said that on the scale of stupid, in these kind of phone calls, I did not rate very high.

The process of changing all the information, vast swathes of my thinking over the last fifteen years, from one machine to another, involved flashing lights and clicking, and soft, reassuring little engine noises. Most efficient. The new machine is humming softly now in the background. Tiny clicks, familiar as my own heartbeat. The keyboard is soft and new, and the letter M is visible again. The printer is producing documents that look a little different, but it is talking to the Imac, and they’ll learn to get on.

But I have a funny sensation somewhere in my head, a slight disorientation. I feel as though I’ve been poured from one body into another and the world has been re-set. I feel as though I’ve been reprocessed. Re-incarnated, even. It is extremely strange.

ps On Friday afternoon, the door of the washing machine broke. This will be fixed on Tuesday. It hasn’t interrupted my concentration at all.

WORKING WITH THE WORLD’S WORST AUTHOR

The yellow book has gone to print. I’m not sure how it got there and I want to get it back.

The yellow book is, of course, How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published, the book that has obsessed nearly every waking hour between Christmas and now. There’s a chapter of ‘What ifs’, and here’s one of them:

What if you’ve enraged your publisher by trying to change aspects of the collection, including rewriting some of the poems, sixteen times between first offer and printing?

Try not to do this. Relationships are important, and there is a time to let go. If you want to rewrite poems at the last minute, do it later and make a feature of it. Publish a volume titled The B side: rewrites of A. Better still, write some new ones.

What good advice. I shouldn’t have written ‘Try not to do this’, though. I should have written: ‘DO NOT DO THIS!’ Few things are more difficult for a publisher or editor than a writer who keeps rewriting the text. But what if that writer is yourself?

Which it was. Every time I re-proofed that book for the tiny slips of this and that, finding new ones each time, I would see a sentence that could be expressed better, or a chapter heading that felt wrong, or a bit where I was repeating myself (there may still be some of those) or – worst of all – the very morning I was due to send the book to print I decided , at 7.00 a.m., to re-design some of the pages.

These are things you should never ever do. The more changes you make at the last minute, the more likely you are to incorporate errors.

It wasn’t even me but my brother-in-law who observed the mistake on the spine of the book. It read ‘How (Not) To Get Your Oetry Published’. My daughter thought it was a deliberate joke. Beware you poets out there! The HappenStance editor generates Oetry without even trying. One day that oetry could be part of your oevre.

When you yourself are author and editor, and you can make changes, the temptation is overwhelming. I talk quite a bit in How (Not) to about self-publishing but nowhere do I mention this awful downside: the business of letting go. How do you let go of a book you’re producing yourself? How are you sure it’s good enough, finished enough, comprehensive enough, accurate enough, yellow enough?

I wish I didn’t mind making mistakes. I really wanted to get another bound proof. But if I had, I would have had to read the whole book word by word again, and I didn’t think I could bear it. I’ve read it backwards. I’ve read it forwards several times. I’ve read it inside out. At one point I was pleased with it. Now I really don’t know what I think of it any more (this is not what it will say in the publicity blurb which claims it is ‘frank and funny’ and ‘tells you all you need to know about getting your oetry published’).

I know I did one formatting thing in a stupid way. But I realised too late. It came to me in the middle of the night (when I was not sleeping because I was thinking about the yellow book again) what I should have done. I hope I got away with the wrong method. I hope people like this book.

I can always do a revised edition.

And a new and revised edition.

And a second new and revised edition.

Let the book go, Nell. Let the book go.

On Finalising the Book

Should anyone (I know it’s unlikely) wonder where the blog has gone, it has gone into a chapter about blogging and taken my brain with it.

How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published is very nearly done. We are on the cusp of finalising.

I am currently poring over a chapter of ‘What ifs’ which will be some of the questions that nobody seems to answer. If you think of any ‘What ifs’ about getting poetry published, share them now please and I may be able to throw them in.

Soon I may have some ordinary brain space left again to write something else. It’s slightly alarming to find that the writing exercises in the book (it’s not just about getting published, you know) have made me go and write poems when I should have been doing proper work. Honestly! What on earth do I think I’m doing here?

On Writing The Book

So I’m half-way through How (Not) To Get Your Poetry Published, the new, enlarged, revised, authorised, homogenised edition containing the Answer To It All.

What gets me about self-help books is the knowing tone. So I’m trying my best not to write in a knowing tone. But the knowing tone keeps getting in.

Poetry publishing has obsessed me now for over a decade. I know some things about it, but I still don’t want a knowing tone. I want a questioning tone, a raise-one-eyebrow tone, at the same time as some of useful facts and some ideas. A bit of ‘you need to know this’ and a bit of ‘have you thought about that?’

And it’s got to be funny some of the time. If you don’t have a sense of humour when it comes to getting stuff published, it can only end in tears. Or as Roberto Calasso says in The Art of the Publisher: ‘. . . if our life as a publisher fails to offer sufficient opportunities for laughter, this means it’s just not serious enough.’ This applies just as much to poets.

But I’m finding I can’t bear too many pages about how to prepare, how to make your approach, how to develop a strategy etc. It gets so far away from the joy of writing. Periodically I have to leap out of this book and go and look at something real, like a blob of mud in the back garden or the light reflected in the lenses of my glasses.

So I’m working some reading/writing stimuli into this book – optional, of course – to cheer people up as they go through. If anybody reads it, that is.

If you are reading this now and you think you might, one day, read this book titled How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published) and there’s something you’d particularly like covered in this hypothetical book, could you let me know what it is? You can use the comments section at the bottom of this page or the contact box on the website if your idea’s more private.

What have I got so far? Good question.

Apart from the enjoyable bits (the reading/writing pages) and the case studies (what not to do), this is what I have, but not in this order. (One of the points below is a lie: it’s not in the book at all.)

— motivation (fourteen reasons why)

— understanding the publishing process

— thinking like a publisher (but try not to on a Sunday, it’s very wearing)

— researching a publisher

— choosing the right publisher for you (if there is one!)

— how to make your approach (swinging the odds in your favour)

— thinking outside the box

— DIY publishing

— how people get books published, other people!

— how to gauge whether you’re ready

— track record in magazines

— why you have to use the web

— how to win the National Poetry Competition

— social networking for poets

— thinking about poems in sets: what makes a collection work?

— how to build a readership

Ideas welcome please as soon as you can manage them. But no knowing tones, towing groans or flowing moans, right? Things are bad enough already in the head of Nell.

Ten Reasons for NOT reading today’s HappenStance blog

1. Because you could read Fiona Moore’s blog instead.

2. Because I considered the topic of rejection but here’s Jeff Shotts on The Art of Rejection and he’s done it better.

3. Because you’ve read enough blogs for one day.

4. Because these sort of lists are hardly original.

5. (You don’t need to read the rest of my reasons. Anyway, there are only ten because the entries that list ‘ten of’ get more hits

6. which is why I’m thinking of stopping at five)

7. or maybe extending it to six in order to say I’m rewriting How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published and I’m up to the chapter headed ‘Should poets blog’ which ends ‘or you could go and write a poem instead’. (This book is killing me.)

8. Because you could go and write a poem instead.

9. Because there are only nine. Pay some attention to the nine muses, especially Euterpe. I’m simply an interruption.

TEN REASONS FOR CLICKING ON STANZA

By which of course I mean the link for the StAnza poetry festival at stanzapoetry.org

And no I don’t just mean to buy ten tickets for events at this year’s festival.

But booking tickets could be reason number one. This year it’s 2-6 March, which is hardly any time away at all. But it’s still the ‘early bird’ window, so prices are cheaper right now and I saved £15.40 by forking out somewhat more than this. (I live in Fife, about 22 miles from St Andrews, where the festival is held, so this is my local poetry event.)

Two: maybe you’re thinking about going but haven’t made your mind up yet. You can read a little about each of this year’s performers. Should you bother, shouldn’t you? Take a look. They’re in alphabetical order with a link. Neat. Most of the workshops are already sold out. Yikes.

Three: maybe you will get some tickets then. You can browse events day by day, and the titles link to a page with more info, which in turns links to the Byre Theatre booking facility. You can add to your basket bit by bit. The Byre website doesn’t work as well as the StAnza website, in that you have to scroll through the whole festival to get to your event each time. But the Stanza end is brilliant and I don’t think I’ve booked any events that conflict with each other this time. In fact, oh wow, oh wow, they’ve got a new thing: a matrix of events so you can see at a glance what’s on and when, including clashes.

Four: So you’re going (skip to point five if this is not you). Perhaps you want to play the game of Spot the Poet as you wander round the streets of historic St Andrews. You can go to the Flickr gallery and browse some beautiful photos of participants.

Five: But maybe you can’t go. You can still spend a long time on this website, which has just morphed into a whole new look. You could take a look at the Poetry Map, for example, Scotland mapped out in poems about its places. Such a fun idea!

Six: would you like a taste of digital slam? Scrolling through past pages of the blog, you can (among other things) read about Stephen Watt, who was the 2014 Digital Slam winner. Digital what? No Watt. There’s a link a video of his winning performance. Just lovely. The blog also has a lovely section of podcasts from past events. You can stay on this site all day.

Seven: Sometimes the whole business of arts festivals seems remote and clever. A mystery that it happens at all. But you can see the people behind it: who they are and how it works. The whole story of how a festival grows, in fact, and how it’s put together year by year.

Eight: Want to read at a festival? How do the people on the programme get on the programme? StAnza has a great page telling you some of the background, including what sort of track record you might need, how to offer yourself as a performer, and when.

Nine: Curious about other poets, and who has read at StAnza and when? You can explore past festivals, including all the performers who have ever popped up on the programme, when and in what capacity. This has often been useful to me when reading up about a particular poet. As one does.

Ten: There’s all sorts of bits and pieces of additional interest. Articles and reviews about past festivals. A little specially commissioned video by Daniel Warren about StAnza 2012 – on the home page, just scroll right down and you’ll see the picture of cheeses. Click on it and before you know it, you’re at Leuchars Station. I’ll meet you there.