Author: Helena Nelson

Picked the magazine up from the printer today. It is bright yellow this time around, with a black flyleaf. Very waspy! And inside, for the first time, the wonderful Savage Chickens are in yellow. This is because now I know I can’t afford to keep producing the magazine beyond issue 12, I think I may as well be hung for a sheep as well as a lamb. Or an organic turkey as well as a free-range chicken.

I think it’s an interesting issue — but then I’m biassed. There’s an interview with George Simmers entirely in heroic couplets. Well, they started heroic. And they ARE all rhyming couplets. Pope would have been proud of us.

Other interviews are with Jane Commane and Matt Nunn (Nine Arches), Peter Carpenter on Worple and Anthony Delgrado on bluechrome.

Oh, and Joy Howard has a feature about Grey Hen, which is being so very successful with its first anthology –A Twist of Malice. A great book — such fun to read. And there’s Colin Will on where Calder Wood Press is going.

I’m starting the mass post-out tomorrow morning. Spent three hours this morning updating the mailing list and doing the sticky labels. If you’ve ordered a copy and it hasn’t arrived in the next week, let me know.

A week beside the Falls of Dochart has taken years off me. I’m only 46 this week. Last week I was 55. Of course it won’t last long, though you never quite know.

Sleep is very good for people. Sleeping beside an old river is extra good – waking to the rush of water doing what it has done for a very long time. And we went to see the Fortingall Yew, which is enough to give anyone pause for thought. That ancient tree is not a just a bit old. It is mega-ancient. It’s reckoned to have been there at least five thousand years. Some people think a lot longer.

Anyway, when you’re feeling a little old and weary, it makes you think. I spent a lot of the week reading the poems of Willie Soutar, the Perth poet. He fitted very well into Killin. I’ve been circling around him for years and I got closer this time than I’ve been. Poor chap didn’t live to be old, and his final thirteen years were spent in bed, because the spondylitis affecting his spine rendered him immobile. To add insult to injury, tuberculosis finished him off a good ten years younger than I am now. He remained remarkably cheerful, almost sinisterly positive.

One of the things that appeals to me about him is the odd mixture of poems he felt bound to produce. Lots of them were thoroughly unsuitable for a career poet. Many are what he called ‘Bairnrhymes’ – children’s poems in Scots. Lots of them are marvellous. Then there are the ‘Whigmaleeries’ – oddities, anecdotes, humorous stories about people, again in Scots. There are serious lyrics, in English. And some in Scots. I think he writes best in Scots: at his best in that tongue he is superb. If you didn’t already love the sound of Scots lilt and language, you would after getting a little Soutar by heart. He is not like anybody else.

Then I lost a tooth. Well, half of it. All I did was bite into a small tomato and out it came. The other half is waiting for my dentist. It was a rotten-looking thing. That tooth was over fifty years old though. I guess it has done its time, done good work for me. I fell to thinking of all the bits of my body that have gone over the years – teeth, the odd fallopian tube, a bit of height, the vivid colour of my hair which I hated so much when I was young. Willie Soutar reflected on the fact that at least he would die with his teeth in good shape. I’d rather outlive mine, on balance.

Anyway, he also wrote a lot of riddles, and here is one of them. The answer (I like them better when I know the answer) is Age. (Oh ‘stecher and boo” is stagger and bow. You should be able to get the rest okay.)

You’ll gang monie a mile wi it
And it’s licht upon your back:
But whan you’ve haik’d a while wi it
You’ll ken ye carry a pack.

The folks wha travel far wi it
Begin to stecher and boo; 
Sin the langer that ye are wi it
The wechtier it maun grow.

Sphinx is finally committed to print. Two proof copies this time, because I can never finalise anything properly. It will have its chickens in yellow this time round – splashing out – and a daffodil yellow cover. Tying up the last po-ratings today and double-checking my arithmetic.

Meanwhile, I still haven’t got back to some of the poets from my December reading ‘window’. That should happen in the next two weeks, since it’s college holidays. There’s some good stuff sitting in my box.

Away tomorrow to visit the splishy splashy Falls of Dochart for a few days. If it rains, they will be superb. If it doesn’t, walks will occur. A large box of books is packed, though since 90% of it is poetry, I may not get far. Sometimes, it’s like having eaten too much chocolate – you can’t face the sight of any of any more. Oh, but better not admit that. The Muse might hear…

Only books to pack, no laptop (my other half says he will leave me if I get one). Holidays, so far as he is concerned, don’t have computers on them. I think he’s right. I was always a letter-writer by nature, and on holiday with pen and paper, I’m happy as Larry. Who was Larry?

Hours spent today tidying up piles of publications and clearing the bed and the floor in the spare room, both of which were practically invisible… That means there is now room for the next volumes, which will materialise quite soon.

Gotta read Gill McEvoy on Paula Jennings.

Her blog link is on the blogroll but also http://redbotinki.blogspot.com/. For some reason WordPress won’t let me add this as a live link today. That’s technology for you… H

Those of you who’ve read Sphinx 10 will know all about the pilot po-rating system which now manifests itself at the end of some of the pamphlet reviews in the archive in the shape of a little Sphinx with a certain number of stripes. Ten stripes is super-great and if anybody ever gets that kind of rating from three reviewers I would want to read that publication. I would probably want to read a nine too. Seven is pretty damn good. Five is not half bad. One stripe is oh dear oh dear oh dear.

But it’s more complicated than that. And better, too. What I intend to do in future is to secure three reviews for each poetry pamphlet featured on the website. Each of the three reviewers will also rate the publication and from their rating a ‘stripe’ aggregate will be derived.

I will also link to any other reviews on the net, provided publishers, readers or poets alert me to those.

This is a very comprehensive review option — the best I’ve heard of. It will work in the interests of good quality work, I think. However, it will probably do the reverse for some of the weaker publications, at which point I shall get hate mail. Sigh.

Some worthy publications may not come out as top stars. But that’s not necessarily doom. Thankfully we don’t all want (or need) to win Britain’s (or any other country) Got Talent. Poetry doesn’t (or shouldn’t) work like that. It is an art.

The stripe rating, though a bit alarming in some ways, is not the be-all and end-all either. I’ve often found a single poem I love in a pamphlet which I don’t rate highly as a whole, and in that case, it will be possible to draw attention to that in the review.

Ok. Here’s how it will work.

If you want a publication reviewed on the Sphinx site, you will need – obviously – to send three copies. If you can spare four, I will get the Common Reader or Young Reader to take a look too and throw in their tuppence worth. This sounds demanding, but it is demanding at this end too. It means lots of posting copies to reviewers, lots of hard work from reviewers, lots of collating, editing, website organisation and so on.

I need to limit the material we handle to some extent. So here are some ‘rules’ defining what, for the purposes of this site, will be considered as ‘pamphlets’ or ‘chapbooks’ eligible for review:

• single-author publications of between 20 and 36 pages (excluding preliminaries);
• saddle-stitched, stapled or sewn publications (perfect bound publications are unlikely to fit the category);
• publications must be ISBN numbered, though self-publications are not excluded;
• pamphlets must be in print, available for purchase and published within twelve months of being submitted for review.

Each rating is out of ten. The reviewers return their rating to me. I add them up and divide by four. Bingo. I may (haven’t decided yet) also publish the rating (not as a logo but as a number, like ice-skating) for each category, since that’s also quite interesting. The review system will itself be reviewed as we go along.

Please pass on the word that things have changed if you know anyone sending in pamphlets for review or thinking about it. Otherwise, I may feel morally bound to post them back, which may create another rant about stamps.

The pdf files have gone to the printers! It will be late but this magazine WILL appear.

Watch this space.

April will be the kindest month…

Sarah Hymas posted a lovely response to Paula Jennings’ pamphlet Out of the Body of the Green Girl on Tuesday 17th, February – for some reason I’m not able to insert a hyperlink into this message today, but the link to her blog is on the blogroll list to the right of this post. Nice blog too. She describes herself as ‘poet, editor and anti-hoovering campaigner’…

Then later today The Frogmore Papers 73 arrives. Here Louisa Michel says Frances Corkey Thompson’s The Long Acre “draws careful attention to the effortless and yet vital teachings of nature. With poetic grace she is able to examine the simple lives of birds and beetles, and use these explorations to identify how and what it is we humans keep on missing.” I like the reference to care and grace, both words that feel completely right for Frances.

She calls Slug Language (Anne Caldwell) “an intimate collection”, “words of desire, domesticity and death, and with a ceaseless vitality”. Yeay! That’s good.

And of From the Body of the GG, (see above and picture) she says:

“Delightfully uplifting, Jennings celebrates the numerous pleasures, small though they may be, which life grants. Scorning another for being: ‘…always one step ahead, your tight track ribboning behind you‘ she expresses her intent to take heart in every waking moment, ‘Here it is,’ she writes, just as ‘life says‘.

Reviews in Frogmore Papers are often very brief but they have a lovely sparkle to them. And of course it is a characterful publication, one of the stalwarts. It has been going for ages and preserved its own modestly irrepressible character all this time in true small-magazine tradition. May its shadow never grow shorter!

Still plugging away at getting issue 10 of Sphinx together. The po-rating is SO complicated.

Bluechrome interview tied up though – really interesting. And I’ve been interviewing George Simmers in heroic couplets. Could that be a first? Oh probably not. Could be the best though.

Back to the grindstone. I feel like I’ll never ever get to the end, because of the other work I’ve been trying to do at the same time. Not HappenStance. Just day-job STUFF.

And I’ve joined Twitter. Now that is an odd phenomenon. Nell_Nelson is my twittering nomenclature. However, I can resist the impulse to tweet incessantly. I’m quite proud of my inner strength in that regard. Tweet.

There are times when you wonder about your own sanity in starting something that is really hard.

The Po-Rating Pilot (currently underway) is a bit like that.

Sphinx only reviews chapbooks/pamphlets. That’s because most magazines only review books, so it’s an attempt to restore the balance in favour of the flimsies. However, it is a very feeble attempt because for many pamphlets, the Sphinx review is the only one they will get. There might be the odd mini-reference or two-line review here and there, but chapbooks don’t get much attention generally.

That means the sole review can sound like the last word on the subject. Which, of course, it is not. It is just one reviewer’s opinion. And even Sphinx reviews are relatively short (about 300 words usually). Who writes an in-depth consideration of a 32-page booklet?

The Poetry Book Society, however, does select a pamphlet choice every quarter. It seems likely that the Chosen One is

• more widely read
• more widely (and more fully) reviewed.

However, that selection – from all the pamphlets submitted in triplicate – is made by only two poets. Again, not many people’s opinions weigh in the balance in this situation and, as we all know, the response to poetry is subjective. Even though nearly every single poetry editor says the sole criterion for selection is ‘quality’, nobody can agree (where poetry is concerned) how quality should be defined.

So I thought it would be interesting to see what happened if a pamphlet was run past a good number of readers, and in an attempt to make the judgement process a little less subjective and a little more transparent, those readers should have rating criteria — just like ice skating.  This would arrive at a rating result based on the feedback from all of them. I thought I’d try to get 10 because statistically speaking that makes it easy. I even thought a pamphlet might get a certain number of stripes, according to the readers’ reactions – so you could be rather proud of having published a five-stripe pamphlet but a lot less pleased about a two-striper. A one-striper will probably send me hate-mail.

So far, so theoretically reasonable. I drew up 10 criteria and restricted the readers to a maximum of twenty minutes with the publication (because in that time, I reckon, most people have either decided whether they find the chapbook interesting and would recommend it, or they have dumped it in the recycling bin. Besides, longer than that is asking too much of people who have another nine pamphlets to consider).

For each of the ten criteria (e.g. Typography, Cost, Overall Design, Quality of Writing, Originality etc), the reader had to award a rating between 1 and 5, with 1 as Ugh! and 5 as Yeay!

Each rating was done anonymously, but I asked for personal feedback on the process, and already some fascinating comments have come back. I’ve had time to reflect, too, and already I can see several things are quite wrong.

Out of my ten criteria, for example, four related to production quality and only three to the poetry itself. That can’t be right. The poems must be the most important thing – although in twenty minutes…?

So there should probably be five criteria, not ten (though definitely ten readers). And I wonder whether I should have suggested picking two poems and reading carefully – forming a judgement on that basis. The first and the last, maybe? Or simply the first two that caught the eye?

It’s already clear too that some of my raters are very sparing with their fives, while others are much more generous. But hey – isn’t that typical of any set of judges in any competitive set-up? It is the group assessment in this case that restores the overall balance. Maybe.

Think about it. How do you read a poetry publication – not as a reviewer, I mean, but as an ordinary reader. Don’t you pick it up, weigh it in your hand, decide whether you like the look and feel of it, flick through, look at a couple of poems and think either — ‘Oh yes, quite like the look of this…’ or ‘Oh no, life is too short’? This is complicated by other factors like whether you know the author, whether the pamphlet was a gift or a purchase, whether you have bought the pamphlet after a reading, whether you’re thinking of submitting your own poetry to the publisher and are comparing yours and theirs, whether you’re having a Bad Day or a Good Day, whether you really need to be somewhere else etc.

Anyway, the Po-Rating Pilot is in progress. Already I see other problems (not listed above) and also some very interesting results. I haven’t given up on this yet, despite the guddle and cost of posting things all over the place to people who post them back to me to post them, in haste, to someone else. The organisation is less than ideal because I am so busy. But eventually Sphinx 10 WILL be finished, and I’ll write more about this there.

[Re. being busy: the attempt to change my teaching from full-time to part-time has not only not worked yet, but has been complicated by another educational job that I’m also engaged in and also haven’t got time to do properly. So everything here is behind and I’m struggling more than somewhat. By April, things will be better. However, apologies if you are reading this and also waiting for a letter from me; sorry for being behind on Sphinx and behind on this year’s publications in general. I am not a person who defaults on deadlines, so I’m finding this painful. But it can’t be helped.]