Author: Helena Nelson

It’s been cold this week. Not deep snow like in part of the States, but serious frost so you slip all over the place on your way out to the car.

I’ve been filling post boxes with packets again – issues of STORY 3 going hither and thither, as well as fresh orders to send out, and at this time of the year, the boxes are often already full of Christmas stuff. Friday night and much of Saturday was spent finishing and printing flyers and review slips and updating mailing lists and publications lists. How long it all takes! The subscriber Christmas mailshot is started but it’ll take a good number of hours yet to complete, and I haven’t begun on family and friends.

The last publication of the year, Clare Best’s Treasure Ground, is at the printer’s. Once that is away and the Christmas cards and presents are posted, I might have a day without working. Yeay! I forget how much time the brass tacks take up.

 

Anne Stevenson sent me a copy of the latest publication from Candlestick Press, The Twelve Poems of Christmas. What a lovely little pamphlet — a gorgeous cover. In some ways I associate anthologies with Christmas. Twice, as a child, I got lovely glossy backed anthologies then. How I loved them! That’s how I first met Charles Causley and Edwin Morgan — even Dylan Thomas and Charles Dickens, in extract. It was like getting treasure.

Which brings me back to Treasure Ground. . . . It really is.

Rob Mackenzie has posted a wonderful review of Mark Halliday’s pamphlet. What a delight.

 

 

 

It’s mega parcel time again – sending stuff all over the place, little packets of this that and the other. Another hundred quid to the local post office this morning. Stamp, stamp, stamp!

Laurna Robertson’s Sampler is done, and very nice it looks too. And Deborah Trayhurn’s Embracing Water, a sequence quite unlike anything I’ve ever published before. Little packets of them are fleeing hither and thither, to copyright libraries, authors, friends, family and early orderers.

And that Unread Squirrel is also home and dry. The card smells a bit funny, but it’ll wear off. I hope it doesn’t come as a disappointment to people who read and enjoyed the first Unsuitable Poems. This one is different: far more long poems, for a start. I’m aware that many of them are well-geared to poets rather than normal people. It’s because these verses spring out of real life: they’re reactions to stuff, and so much of my real life these days concerns poetry stuff  that it’s practically impossible not to get unsuitable about it from time to time.

Today I had to buy more plastic boxes, big expensive ones. The problem of clean dry storage is expanding. And I must do some stock-taking. The accounts are up to December. The submissions box from August has finally been dealt with.

Tomorrow Clare Best’s Treasure Ground should be completed. It is a simply lovely collection of poems. That and the STORY competition anthology 3 are the last publications before Christmas. Watch out for the gorgeous Celestine Recipe.

Over Christmas I’ll be writing Love’s Labour’s Lost. Oops. Shakespeare already did that. I mean I’ll be doing the HappenStance Story Chapter 4, which will have a bit of Love’s Labour in it.

Next weekend is the Christmas postout to subscribers. Should have had that Chapter 4 in it, but at least it’ll be something to brighten the January gloom.

Ron King sent me a gorgeous photo of a red squirrel, so it’s going in here. This is a READ squirrel, as opposed to my Unread. It can also serve as a hurray for Red Squirrel Press, doing such good work.

Or actually the other way around: cracking up with Cracking On.

There’s at least one in every publication: in the last issue of Sphinx I now know there’s at least two, no — three.

In my editorial, there’s ‘arrive’ with one ‘r’: Christmas is due to arive shortly.

Worse is the Grey Hen progress interview. I started the problem by asking Joy Howard about her new anthology, Cracking Up. Only of course, it isn’t called Cracking Up, it is called Cracking ON. She politely pointed this out and I corrected the error. As I thought.

I failed to notice that the title came into the interview four times and I corrected only two of them. Here is some of what I should have said:

Your forthcoming anthology, Cracking  On, focuses on the theme of aging. Could that be something most people want not to think about?

Yes and no. Recently, the topic of ageing is getting a higher profile in the media, which indicates that people (and we live in a society where an ageing population is on the increase) are more open to thinking about it. The contributors to Cracking On both celebrate age, overturn expectations about older women, and confront the reality of the approaching end of life. Insight, humour and courage are always inspiring, but especially so when thinking about aging.

Cracking On is the sequel to A Twist of Malice (a cracking good anthology by the way).

Phew. Please take a look at Katy Evans-Bush (Baroque in Hackney) on Gary McKinnon. It is chilling. Poets can and should get political in such circumstances.

Meanwhile, I’m back to getting more of the Sphinx tripartite reviews online. It is slow. I think it’s worth it, but slow. The process goes like this:

• I post out three copies of a pamphlet to three different reviewers — actually I usually send the reviewer three or four in a batch.
• I wait for the reviews to come in. As they arive (sic), I read them, edit them in line with house style and format etc and return them to the reviewer for checking, often with a couple of questions.
• The reviewer returns their copy, confirming final shape. I file it as a Word document.
• I wait for the other two reviews to come in, each time one arives repeating the process.
• Finally I’ve got all three! I move them from the Reviews folder (electronic) to the Ready for Joomla folder.
• When I get time, I go into the Ready for Joomla folder and create an In-Design document into which I put all three reviews, reformatting the typeface here and there so that italics appear in italics etc. I decide which order to put them in, usually (though not invariably) with the warmest review last. I export to pdf and check once again that everything makes sense. At this point I often introduce more paragraph breaks so that they’re easier to read online. (At least I think I’m making it easier . . . )
• Then I collect up the ratings from all three reviewers, add them up, divide by three and turn them into a percentage eg. 72% and from that I decide the stripe rating. 72% would be a seven striper. 73% would be a 7.5 striper.
• Then I go into the website and put the various bits of review into the various online Joomla boxes. There’s a bit of fiddling at this stage that I won’t go into. I save them and preview them and check once more that everything seems to make sense and that I haven’t managed to incorporate obvious errors.
• (At this point there’s a wee snag because I’m working from a Mac and it won’t talk to Joomla for images. So I have to make a note of which stripe rating the review has got and then wait till I get to college, where the computers are Windows, and insert the stripe-rating image there.)
• Finally, with the stripey Sphinx in place for the rating, I can click the ‘publish’ button and you can read them.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that there aren’t still occasional errors, but you can see why it takes a long time to do this. Even just the shift from three Word docs to ready on line takes me about three-quarters of an hour per review. Labour of love, or what?

It is quite fascinating. I know and respect all my reviewers. Quite often all three come in with a broadly similar rating and response, although some are slightly kinder than others, and I end up feeling — yes — this must represent a fair judgement of this publication.

But then I look at another one — sometimes with the same three reviewers — and two of them vary dramatically. One has found the publication awful, almost impossible to tolerate; another thinks it is wonderful. How very interesting! I know that my reviewers take quite a while to come up with their responses: these people have READ the poems and thought about them carefully. And yet . . .

What does this say about poetry? Such a dramatic variation. What does it say?

Or actually the other way around: cracking up with Cracking On.

There’s at least one in every publication: in the last issue of Sphinx I now know there’s at least two, no — three.

In my editorial, there’s ‘arrive’ with one ‘r’: Christmas is due to arive shortly.

Worse is the Grey Hen progress interview. I started the problem by asking Joy Howard about her new anthology, Cracking Up. Only of course, it isn’t called Cracking Up, it is called Cracking ON. She politely pointed this out and I corrected the error. As I thought.

I failed to notice that the title came into the interview four times and I corrected only two of them. Here is some of what I should have said:

Your forthcoming anthology, Cracking  On, focuses on the theme of aging. Could that be something most people want not to think about?

Yes and no. Recently, the topic of ageing is getting a higher profile in the media, which indicates that people (and we live in a society where an ageing population is on the increase) are more open to thinking about it. The contributors to Cracking On both celebrate age, overturn expectations about older women, and confront the reality of the approaching end of life. Insight, humour and courage are always inspiring, but especially so when thinking about aging.

Cracking On is the sequel to A Twist of Malice (a cracking good anthology by the way).

Phew. Please take a look at Katy Evans-Bush (Baroque in Hackney) on Gary McKinnon. It is chilling. Poets can and should get political in such circumstances.

Meanwhile, I’m back to getting more of the Sphinx tripartite reviews online. It is slow. I think it’s worth it, but slow. The process goes like this:

• I post out three copies of a pamphlet to three different reviewers — actually I usually send the reviewer three or four in a batch.
• I wait for the reviews to come in. As they arive (sic), I read them, edit them in line with house style and format etc and return them to the reviewer for checking, often with a couple of questions.
• The reviewer returns their copy, confirming final shape. I file it as a Word document.
• I wait for the other two reviews to come in, each time one arives repeating the process.
• Finally I’ve got all three! I move them from the Reviews folder (electronic) to the Ready for Joomla folder.
• When I get time, I go into the Ready for Joomla folder and create an In-Design document into which I put all three reviews, reformatting the typeface here and there so that italics appear in italics etc. I decide which order to put them in, usually (though not invariably) with the warmest review last. I export to pdf and check once again that everything makes sense. At this point I often introduce more paragraph breaks so that they’re easier to read online. (At least I think I’m making it easier . . . )
• Then I collect up the ratings from all three reviewers, add them up, divide by three and turn them into a percentage eg. 72% and from that I decide the stripe rating. 72% would be a seven striper. 73% would be a 7.5 striper.
• Then I go into the website and put the various bits of review into the various online Joomla boxes. There’s a bit of fiddling at this stage that I won’t go into. I save them and preview them and check once more that everything seems to make sense and that I haven’t managed to incorporate obvious errors.
• (At this point there’s a wee snag because I’m working from a Mac and it won’t talk to Joomla for images. So I have to make a note of which stripe rating the review has got and then wait till I get to college, where the computers are Windows, and insert the stripe-rating image there.)
• Finally, with the stripey Sphinx in place for the rating, I can click the ‘publish’ button and you can read them.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that there aren’t still occasional errors, but you can see why it takes a long time to do this. Even just the shift from three Word docs to ready on line takes me about three-quarters of an hour per review. Labour of love, or what?

It is quite fascinating. I know and respect all my reviewers. Quite often all three come in with a broadly similar rating and response, although some are slightly kinder than others, and I end up feeling — yes — this must represent a fair judgement of this publication.

But then I look at another one — sometimes with the same three reviewers — and two of them vary dramatically. One has found the publication awful, almost impossible to tolerate; another thinks it is wonderful. How very interesting! I know that my reviewers take quite a while to come up with their responses: these people have READ the poems and thought about them carefully. And yet . . .

What does this say about poetry? Such a dramatic variation. What does it say?

I had to be at a meeting in Glasgow early yesterday. I struggled off the train at Queen Street with the last huge carrier bag of Sphinxes, which I put into the big round red postbox near the ticket office. Dunnit! Oh, what nice things Ross Bradshaw said about it on his very interesting Five Leaves blog. I am grateful . . .

I had to be at a meeting in Glasgow early yesterday. I struggled off the train at Queen Street with the last huge carrier bag of Sphinxes, which I put into the big round red postbox near the ticket office. Dunnit! Oh, what nice things Ross Bradshaw said about it on his very interesting Five Leaves blog. I am grateful . . .

So things are picking up, though not up enough. The Unread Squirrel and Laurna Robertson’s Sampler are with Dolphin Press (Liz and Robert, the printers). Deborah Trayhurn’s mock-up has been out to her, has swiftly returned for the final tweaks and should go to Liz and Robert tomorrow. Clare Best will be doing the last bits on hers this week, though Gill hasn’t done the cover for that one yet.

Meanwhile, finally the STORY winners anthology is in first draft form. Just assembling the bio and about to send copy back to authors to check. Such an interesting set of stories. Extracts will also go onto the website shortly. Gill has got images to work with: here’s the remit. One bear (the kind that has got a collar round its neck and gets lead round on a chain); one dentist’s mirror; one cake; and last (and hardest) something that suggests riches, or maybe a shower of golden coins.

The big thing in the background is the accounts. Each year they get more complicated and seem to balance less! However, although it is going to be impossible this year to get Chapter 4 out before Christmas, the cards (Christmas cards) are done and there is a box of beautiful red envelopes.

So today’s tasks: tie up Embracing Water, get another couple of reviews ready on the website if humanly possible, check new reviews that have come in, do the STORY extracts, send pdfs to authors, think about flyers, update the ‘in print’ list, do the next month of accounts. Oh somehow will have to get to a supermarket . . .

 

 

Sphinxes have been going in envelopes all week, but only in little showers of about a dozen at a time, packeted late at night. So I’m up to letter L. If you haven’t had yours yet, you’re either at the wrong end of the alphabet, or you’re in the ‘wild card’ list. (Don’t ask.)

I must have sounded a bit pathetic last week since lots of people sent sympathy messages. Sorry. It’s the time of year plus the realisation that all I want to make happen isn’t possible. But what’s new? It’s always been like that for me. Reminds me of the truly dreadful lyrics, made known to all by Frank Sinatra in My Way(which my mother calls The Egotist’s Anthem): ‘There were times / I’m sure you knew / When I bit off / More than I could chew”. I won’t quote the truly awful next bit. In any case, I’m still chewing.

Laurna’s Sampler is done and will go to the printer on Monday. It’s looking very nice indeed and will be on the table at the SPL Christmas pamphlet fair in early December.

I haven’t mentioned the follow-up pamphlet of “more unsuitable” poems of my own, titled The Unread Squirrel, because each time I’ve started work on it, I’ve had to stop again. But I arrived at something which will become a pamphlet late last night. It has a lovely cover! I’ll to be the first in the Po-Lite series. I have another suitable (or not unsuitable) poetry collection more or less ready too, but that won’t be published by me, and not for some time, so I won’t say anything more about it yet.

For those who wonder where I find the time to do this as well as everything else, I don’t. I write poems rarely, and current collections have been assembling themselves over the last eight years, but I think that’s no bad thing. The world is full of poems and poets. It’s analogous to chocolate: I like one or two best quality, expensive chocolates regularly, but the sheer volume of chocolaterie in the shops makes me queasy.

The second PoLite will be from Martin Parker next year, and there’s a third in the pipe-line for 2011 but I won’t reveal the author yet.

Light verse is hard to sell, harder than the heavy kind. That’s because people’s tastes vary so much. What one person thinks is hilarious, wholly fails to amuse another. I myself am terribly difficult to please, I fear. I think poet-in-performance can often make a tour de force of a poem which falls flat on the page. I include my own work in this.

Deborah Trayhurn and Clare Best will be the the first two in the  Sequences series. There is nothing Lite about their work but there is a wonderful quality of Light in both these sets of poems.

The STORY winners pamphlet is still not typeset but that’s the next thing on the list.

In the background, there are a lot of Sphinx reviews waiting to go on the website, but because they are assembled in threes, it’s slow getting them there. They have to be edited for formatting consistency and so on, checked by their authors; the stripe rating has to be worked out; then it’s all transferred into an InDesign document, and from there to the website. And there are a lot of them. In fact, a whean of them are about to go up, God willing.

I haven’t done the flyers. I haven’t updated the sales list. I haven’t even registered these publications. (Note to self: do that today.)

Kevin Bailey (editor of HQ Quarterly and generally a remarkable person — see final issue of Sphinx due next Spring) has been sending me inspirational pictures of worlds afar: he has an amazing telescope. They are very calming, so I’m adding one.

Well, I do find it usually. Somehow. However, this week I’ve hit one of those less positive phases. I am not going to manage to do all the things I need to do before Christmas. Not quite sure which of them is going to go, but something will.

 

I picked up the red Sphinx — issue 11 — from Levenmouth Printers. Looks lovely despite the fact that a misspelled ‘arive’ somehow stared me right in the face as soon as I opened the first page. Typical. I must remember to use the spellcheck as well as checking and proof-reading and going generally demented.

Last week was very pressurised with over two days of SQA work (neither college, nor HappenStance) and so despite best efforts, I have only posted out ten Sphinxes, though I do have the stamps, the envelopes, the labels etc ready downstairs. The other 140 will follow during the week and between other things. Sometimes one has to sleep.

I set off to Glasgow very early yesterday morning to a meeting, did one set of college marking on the train, read half of Lung Soup by Andrew Elliott for the third time (it’s the hardest book, without exception, that I have ever had the privilege of reviewing) on the way back, then popped in to see my old friend Stewart in hospital.

Stewart, who is in the process of shuffling off his mortal coil (I have never really known what that meant — I wonder why a ‘coil’?), has been a stalwart supporter of HappenStance from the start. Until his health started to weaken substantially, he came to every author launch in Scotland and brought other people with him and bought books. He was a grand friend to me, a grand friend.

I have just looked up ‘mortal coil’. Apparently in Shakespeare’s day ‘coyle’ meant fuss or bustle. So that’s what I’m going back to right now: the fuss and bustle of my trauchled day. I thought I’d look up ‘trauchle’ too, which is a Scots word. If you’re trauchled you’re dragged down or burdened by the daily grind, or that’s certainly how I use the word. Googling it led me to Wordie.

Now this is the internet for you. It takes over your life. One marvellous link after another can leave you untrauchled, but also no further forward whatsoever.

p.s. Stewart left us at about half past ten this morning, while I was writing about him on this page. It was a pleasure and a privilege knowing him. He had a marvellous turn of phrase, and that was only one of the things I loved  . . .

If there were any music that could seem true
it was of a pessimistic piano or violin and it would be
an étude, nothing divertimento, an étude in rain . . .

 

That’s a poem out of Mark Halliday’s pamphlet. I love rain poems and it seems appropriate this morning which has gone grey, which has mulched  the fallen leaves into a miry mess. But work goes on.

Laurna Robertson’s Sampler is nearly done. A sense of story is at the heart of it. She has a particular delicacy which is hard to describe: spare and restrained, I think, like the Samplers themselves, but also wiry and enduring. Perhaps her Shetland origins have something to do with this quality. She gets under your skin without your quite knowing how she did it.

Clare Best’s Treasure Ground is also well on. It’s a fascinating pamphlet sequence, and it’ll be the first in a new Sequence Series. It is set in the Lincolnshire Fens and the poems are born from a residency she did at Woodlands Organic Farm. While she was there, her poems went out to customers in vegetable boxes! It is a most beautiful set, starting and ending with prose descriptions of the landscape. Somehow she makes everything more than usually alive, often spookily so, and the poems follow the cycle of the seasons. It’s nourishing, somehow. I don’t think you have to be ‘into’ poetry to enjoy this one.

Meanwhile, there’s Perthshire-based Deborah Trayhurn, whose Embracing Water turns out to have unexpected connections with Treasure Ground. I had thought of them as radically dissimilar, which they are in many ways.

But suddenly I see there are strong connections. Deborah’s poems also read as a sequence. She uses entirely first-line titles and an unusual fluid style that washes you through the poems. It’s partly impressionistic but precise too. I can’t quite describe the effect of these because they are unusual. It’s a love sequence, as it seems to me. There’s a tension between city and country here, landscapes of city and farmland, absence and presence. The person in the country yearns for the person in the town, and that’s part of the love, but the other part is for the land itself, for its mysterious and magical metamorphoses and changes.

Oh and did I mention a second set of unsuitable poems? By me? This one is called The Unread Squirrel. One day I’ll even finalise the contents . . .

Phone call from Levenmouth Printers. Sphinx 11 is ready, So the post-out starts this week. If you subscribe, you should get it within the next fortnight, provided postal services are back to normal.

Meanwhile, I still haven’t cleared my submissions box from July. That’s because I can’t respond in detail to a person’s poems quickly. Each takes me about an hour and a half. No wonder I never catch up with myself. And there’s the accounts . . . And the winning STORY booklet, and the HappenStance Chapter 4 to be written. And it’s still raining, raining, raining . . .

This is entirely written, of course, in the additional hour — the one that went backwards in the middle of the night and meant that I got up at half past eight instead of half past nine.

It’s been a week of coming and going, between Glenrothes and Killin, so it was a muddled half-holiday because I got the holiday dates confused this year. Matt stayed there all week. I drove back to work, then back again, acquired a migraine midway through the week and descended into a kind of Autumn sludge, from which I admired the foliage (and started to work through the accounts). Some amazing, amazing trees. Such a glory! You can see from the photos that stormy rain wasn’t far away but  the contrast between the black clouds and the golden beeches was a feast in itself.

 

Last night, while the hour was doing its double act, the wind was raging and the rain lashing, with the result that most of the leaves are now down. The red rowan outside my study window is all bare branches. Still, winter is a good time for working, and all those leaves are mulching merrily.

Nice to see that Salt’s proposed online Review includes an element of ‘rating’ for poetry books. Great minds think alike (or ‘Fools never differ’, as they used to say when I was at school). But Sphinx pamphlets get not one, but three reviews and the overall stripe rating is based on visible criteria and an accumulation of three ratings. I still worry about this, though, despite the fact that I like the way it makes you put your money where your mouth is.

Because what happens if the collection as a whole strikes you as creaky, but there’s one poem in it — one that makes you sit up and think WOW? Maybe it’s accidentally brilliant, but who cares? Or even one part of one poem that stays with you long after you put the book down, a part that follows you round the house even when you’re hoovering? It’s interesting that a bad poem in a collection — even an abysmal poem — is forgivable and forgettable provided the one you love is also there.

In an interview that’s in the current issue of Sphinx (still with the printer but about to go out soon), Peter Sansom says (in response to a question about the current situation in poetry publishing): “But really I’m only interested in poetry, and not even that exactly: I’m interested in poems and, to some extent, poets.”

That’s made me think long and hard, because perhaps I feel the same. I have to find one poem to connect with in any volume before I can start to get my head around the whole book. When reading new submissions, it’s often a single poem that clinches it for me: sometimes two or three. That’s what starts the drive to want to find a whole set that’ll make a publication. And when I think about the poets whose work I love, it’s really individual poems I think of: Ode to Autumn, Spring and Fall, The Collar, Mending Wall, The Lie, Damson Boy. Even then, I probably wouldn’t want to rate an individual poem. I’d rather love it. Here I am undermining my own system. This’ll never do!