GETTING YOUR POETRY PUBLISHED – Page 3 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

Blogging about Snagging

How long does it take to snag a poem?

Or even just read one. I read an awful lot of them, in book, fast. But that’s not reading properly.

But during the reading window (which is now shut and bolted, though various envelopes are still hurtling themselves against it) I read properly, and I snag as I go.

Ok – in any set, I admit I start with the shortest. I look at the shape on the page, and sometimes at the shapes of the rest in the group. Already there’s a personal aesthetic. I like the look of some better than others. Some look easy to read. Some look like hard work. I have never much liked long and thin, and I worry about centred.

But I try not to let personal taste get in the way – even though it can’t be denied. I read slowly, from beginning to end. This is the snagging stage. The poet has built the poem – often in neat chunks and short lines. I am moving slowly through to see whether there’s a clear run; to see whether I can make my way from start to finish without falling over an obstruction.

Often I do meet obstructions. It’s usually something like a noun that could be a verb – such as the words ‘shock’ or ‘fall’, for example. And the line break may create uncertainty what the word’s function could be. The poet knows, of course, where the sentence is going, but the reader doesn’t.

And there’s the business of punctuation. If it’s present, and it’s working correctly, you shouldn’t even notice it. If you start to notice it – if I start to put pencil rings round the semi-colons – it’s a snag.

Using line-breaks to substitute for commas can be an issue. If you have a lot of enjambment – lines where the sense runs smoothly right over the line end and into the next – you rely on the reader sensing that easily. But if you mix those lovely enjambed lines with lines where the line end represents a pause (but you miss out the comma), you create confusion.

Some people miss all the punctuation out. If you do this, your structure on the page – line breaks and indents and gaps, or whatever you do to organise the sense – has to work smoothly. And it can. But it doesn’t always.

Sometimes a snag – for me – is a word I don’t know – though I count this as a Good Snag. ‘Parkour’ was a new word I learned in July. So I stop reading and go online to Merriam Webster. It’s the same with references to paintings, music, or famous people. I have to look them up, and usually I do, unless it’s the fifth reference in an hour, in which case I just note what I don’t know.

I get tied up with imagery too. Decades of reading poetry has made me into a literalist. So I get the metaphorical application pretty well, but at the same time I log it literally. If you tell me love is like riding a bicycle, I’m ok, I can see you rolling merrily down the street. But if I find you, on the next line, washed up on the shores of a stormy river, I’m wondering what happened to the bike.

I am adjective-averse, and it’s getting worse. Sometimes there are a lot. Sometimes every single noun has an adjective (or two) to help it on its way. But – trust me – they start to cancel each other out.

It’s the poet’s job to sort out the snags, but often we can’t see our own. It takes another reader. So that’s all I am really. A snagging expert. Or that’s what I am at first.

If the snags are serious, I limit my feedback to snags alone. Because until they’re sorted out, the real work of the poem can’t begin.

If there are no snags, I read the poem two or three times more. I decide what I’m picking up at a literal and intuitive level. And then I write a response. Sometimes I just think it works. Some poems do what they set out to do. A pleasure to read – and it doesn’t always have to be deep stuff. It can be small. It can be ephemeral.

But I read poetry in a peculiar way. I can only describe it as like swimming breast-stroke while wearing goggles, where I’m seeing both above and below the water as I progress. The above and below views don’t quite match but that’s as it should be. I’m picking up on stuff. Trying to get the feel, and the tone, and the possible symbols. Whether it’s personal or theoretical, funny or tragic.

Some poems are strong writing. You know it when you hit it. You don’t even have to like it. You just know you’ve read something that works on its own terms. Often these poems will have a detail that you remember for the rest of the day. A reflection in a polished plate. A view of three ships through a window.

Most poems are a mixture: good bits, best bits, weak bits, straggly bits. An awful lot of poems have a poem inside them trying to get out.

How long does it take to read a poem? It takes me at least five minutes for a short one, and up to 15 if it’s more complicated. I probably average 8-10 minutes per poem when I’m giving some feedback, and then I write each person a note too – and some of the notes are long.

In July I read around 1000 poems. It took a long time. If I include the notes and finding of envelopes for those who forgot them, I reckon around 130 hours. I like doing it, and I think it’s important. For me, it isn’t about looking for new poets to publish. It’s about being part of this thing we do, whatever it is, this poetry writing thing.

By the end of the month, I was tired. It’s like the opposite of PoWriMo – what I do is PoReadMo, twice a year.

But after July ended, envelopes kept arriving. Another one yesterday. Please don’t send any more!

I have moved over to a different kind of work now. It’s upstairs, not downstairs like the window weeks, and it involves writing and typesetting and publicity for books (watch this space). So there’s no time for reading more poems, except the ones I’m putting in books – which takes even longer.

The next window opens in December. Brrrrrrr.

Closing the Window

I thought at first I was getting fewer submissions this time round. I was managing to open the envelopes, read and write back. I was managing quite well.

But then I went away for four days and in that time another twenty or so arrived, and some more electronically.

I am still sitting with a large pile, so I haven’t time for bloggery or comment on the world of Po.

Eventually I may have some thoughts about sentences, especially those poems were the poet decides to run a long sentence over three or four stanzas, or even extend from beginning to end of the poem. It’s a lovely thing when it works. Mainly it doesn’t.

And description. I might have something to say about description and how too much of it can be a killer.

But I might not.

I think I’ve had far more submissions from women than men this time round but I haven’t actually counted yet. I wonder whether my no-holds-barred feedback is more crushing for men than women. Or perhaps I’m gender stereotyping already.

I was going to put in a picture of a closed window but didn’t get around to finding my camera. So here is a picture of me taken through a window (you’ll have to take my word for that) by Gerry Cambridge. It was in a Costa cafe in Glasgow, and the manuscript in front of me is Charlotte Gann’s Noir, of which more very soon.

Halfway through the reading window

There is a pile of envelopes on the stairs, ready to post back to their owners, and another pile on the sofa unread.

The poems that were sent by email are on the dining room table – my task for this afternoon. I was going to read them on the screen but then I decided not to, and printed them all out in a font that suits me. I can read on screen but I don’t do it so well.

The letters people have sent (I love the letters) are in a clear plastic folder. I keep them all, though not in any meticulous fashion. It doesn’t seem right to shred them. Each is unique.

Sometimes the poems seem less unique than the letters, which is a peculiar thing to say when you think about it. Nor can it be true. But given the infinite possibilities in which poems might be written, it’s surprising how similar some of them look at first glance.

From age to age, we share ideas of what poems are meant to look like and, perhaps more importantly, what they’re not supposed to look like. Our common understanding starts to be a convention.

Art, in general, both observes and resists convention.

Resistance is great: it has its own energy. Give me a rebel any day. But you don’t get poet rebels unless there’s something to rebel against. Rebellion is only convention in reverse – unless you rebel against yourself, which I think is useful. First you would need to recognise your habits. Habits make you feel safe, and safety is risky for poets.

There’s safety in neatness, for example. Neatness is a widely shared habit. People like to divide poems up into even-sized chunks, and then sometimes add a little decoration like Master Chef.

Sometimes I like this. Sometimes there’s a sense of fun about it.

Sometimes I find neatness wearisome.

Sometimes I suggest that the ‘form’ of the poem – whether it’s neat or sprawly – doesn’t convince me.

Sometimes I suggest dividing a sprawly poem into two-line stanzas.

Sometimes I suggest the poet is using too many two-line stanzas with no organic rationale.

I shouldn’t use the word ‘organic’. It’s starting to be a habit. But what I mean by it is this: each poem has a driving impulse. Some phrase or idea or feeling that drove it into existence. That central impulse looks for a form that suits it. Out of the innumerable ways of expression open to us, what will that be? It could be anything.

But for some writers it can’t be anything. It can be four-line stanzas (left justified), three-line stanzas (left-justified) or the long thin left-justified block that stops about two-thirds of the way down the page. It’s a habit.

I was at the launch of Magma 65 on Friday. It was in the LRB Bookshop in London. There were about 16 readers, every single one distinctive in her or his method of projection. I didn’t hear any stanza breaks, though it’s likely there were some. I couldn’t hear the justification (in terms of page format) either.

There was a lovely variety of accent and intonation (people had come from many different parts of the UK, and one from Germany). Some readers stood very still to read. One strode about joyfully and put the microphone behind him. A couple held the paper in one hand but delivered by heart. Some wore a little smile when reading. Others were extremely grave. Some delivered the words as though there was a push of air behind them. Others let them float out over our heads like bubbles.

When you hear poetry – poetry you haven’t read before – you don’t get it all. You get some of it. Our ears aren’t very good at making sense at first hearing, unless the words themselves incorporate significant repetition. One of the Magma poets deliberately exploited that technique, and the audience responded with delight. Repetition is very enjoyable because (ironically) it allows you to listen for difference. It’s one of the great oral conventions.

Repetition in neat chunking is one of the less great print techniques. But it does allow the reader to pace herself and see the white-space ‘rests’ coming up. These appear to divide the poem into a journey with stations (though it’s a new habit to enjamb every one and thus undermine this idea).

Sometimes, in my reading window, I get poems that are word-dense, with lines that extend right to the right-hand margin, and hardly any stanza breaks. Before I start, I take a deep breath. In fact, I invariably flick through the pages and choose the shortest one first. It looks like it might be hard going. And indeed it may turn out to be. Or it may not. In which case, you can start to love that poem quickly.

Have you noticed, at poetry readings, how often the reader tells the audience, as a sort of placation, ‘it’s only a short one’? As though we all agree that short is better because it means we won’t have to concentrate for very long.

During the reading window, I am concentrating for long periods on poetic text. I like it very much. It’s sustaining for the spirit to concentrate wholly on only one thing, one piece of human expression. Reading is an art too. We know this, but we forget it all too easily. There is no arts funding – that I know of – for poetry readers, though (done well) it takes a long time, quality time. The reward is what you get out of the experience. And what do you get? You learn. These words are what human beings have made of their lives. I am trying to make something of mine too, and it’s hard. It sustains and heartens me to see the attempts of fellow travellers.

Usually when you read poetry, you read but you can’t reply. You have a response but you can’t give it back. So although poetry is a communication, generally that communication goes only one way. In my reading window, it goes two ways.

Though only for a little while..

Because the window is only half open now.

Photo credit: the inimitable Ron King

Opening the Windows

Remember the joke about windows?

It’s the one with four experts in a car that breaks down in the middle of the desert, and they all try different methods to get it started – a physicist and a geologist, I seem to remember. and even a priest (no prizes for guessing his solution). All of their fixes fail. But the last one is a Microsoft engineer who suggests they close all the windows, turn the engine off, wait a couple of minutes, and then start it again. Which obviously works.

But that’s a kind of Windows I’m not thinking about. I’m thinking about submissions windows. I have no idea who invented this term. Still I picked it up and have used it ever since. It seemed to make sense at the time, though it was the idea of closing the windows that attracted me. Accepting submissions all year doesn’t mix with actually producing publications – not when there’s only one of you – so if you open a window and let everything in, you have to close it again before it gets out of hand. So I do.

Sending poems between July 4 and July 26 is best.

Sending them on July 30^th is not good, and you know what happened to Peter Pan when the window was shut.

For me, the reading months are also a matter of upstairs and downstairs. Upstairs, the literal and metaphorical window is usually closed (though the door is open). I sit at this desk and batter away at a keyboard and pore over a screen that increasingly drives me demented because there is so MUCH to do up here and so many emails flying hither and thither in the middle of everything else, and so many CAUSES and BLOGs and private messages and THUNDERCLAPs and things to buy and see and do and read and change on the website, and write and amend and proofread and typeset and complain about and fix and PAY for. And I have to get people to BUY the CURRENT set of books, let alone produce more. I am prone to headaches. The upstairs world is not good for headaches.

It’s better downstairs if I can just get there. That’s where the pile of books and pamphlets on the sofa is getting higher and higher (like the clothes in the ironing basket). I read some of them, or bits of them, in the late evening, and intend, next day, to write some OPOI upstairs, though latterly this hasn’t happened because of the maelstrom. (But please note there are two new Alan Buckley OPOIs, written by other people, which may be of interest to those of you who have read The Long Haul, or are thinking about it.)

It makes me happy to get downstairs during the reading windows. That’s one of the very good things about those times of year. I start the day on the sofa, or at the dining table, or sometimes even in the garden, and I read all morning, and usually some of the afternoon as well. I have to do it this way, because the noise of messages flying in at me off of the internet upstairs is not good for reading poems. It’s another reason why I prefer poetry on paper to poetry on a screen. Paper is quieter. I get fewer headaches with paper.

Anyway, I’m getting ready to go downstairs. The reading window opens at the start of July, though I shan’t actually start doing anything until July 5th, because I am away for a couple of days before that. This is not a call for pamphlet submissions, though if you’re burning to suggest one, you can. Remember (you will know this if you’ve read my book) that publishers have too many publications waiting to be tackled all the time. They are really looking for reasons to say NO to getting any more. Until something so tempting arrives that – sometimes against their better judgement – they commit.

So is how it will work at HappenStance from next Friday for approximately four weeks.

If you want to send an idea for a pamphlet publication (like you might with other publishers), then send up to four poems by snail with SAE, an outline of the idea for the whole publication and a bit of information about yourself and your background. A pitch. I’ll let you know if I want to see more poems. Mainly I deal in first pamphlets.

Alternatively, you may not be thinking about a whole publication. You might want to send four poems just to get some feedback. This is mainly what my reading windows are for. I like to read and respond to individual poems and individual poets. I get interested in many of them. Over time, if those poets keep sending stuff, I get to know them better. Sometimes I end up publishing a set of poems by one of those poets. Mainly I don’t.

If you’re a HappenStance subscriber, you get a slightly better deal. You can send up to six poems by snail or three by electronic means. I prefer snail, but I understand completely that for those subscribers outside the UK, email is the logical medium (I will come upstairs to read those poems) and nell at happenstancepress.com, formatted in the usual way, will find me. Remind me that you are a subscriber, please.

Before sending anything, please check out the guidelines for formatting and so on. If you generally fit in with my preferences, it will mean I read your work in a much calmer and nicer window-frame of mind. You know it makes sense. There are fuller details about everything on the submissions page.

Right. I have one hand on the latch and I’m looking at the stairs. Five . . . days . . . to . . . go.

Dreams and Rejection

So I’m dreaming and in the dream, I’m thinking, this dream wouldn’t make a good poem because it’s stuck.

Dreams like stuckness. They take it and put it in a giant symbol.

In this dream I’m on a train. This train is luxurious and very fast and packed with passengers. Among them, there’s me and my sister Louise. Louise has pushed my heavy suitcase into a luggage space somewhere and we’ve moved up the busy train to find a seat. But actually we’re not sitting, we’re standing and chatting.

Before I expect it, I see the train’s approaching my station and I don’t know where the suitcase is. Louise goes off to find it. She doesn’t come back.

I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where my suitcase is. I have my handbag but NOT THE SUITCASE. I can’t get off the train without my suitcase.

The guard’s slamming the doors shut again – bang, bang, bang – and the train moves off with me still on it. Louise hasn’t come back.

The train’s carrying me in the wrong direction. It’s carrying me south and I want to be in the north.

Somehow I’ll have to get back. I go in search of my suitcase. There’s a small child following me who wants to play, so I have to hide in one of the toilets while the child disappears, and then creep out again.

Finally, I find my suitcase! It’s a dirty-white colour, and even heavier and larger than I thought. I can hardly drag it out of its space. How my little sister ever manage to stow it?

Louise reappears. We’re very glad to see each other though she doesn’t say where she’s been. My huge suitcase is blocking the aisle. We’re chatting and I realise the train has stopped. It’s sitting beside a platform and I should get off and wait there – wherever it is – for a train going the other way to take me back to my own station.

But the suitcase is too heavy. I can’t get it past the seats and into the corridor. The guard is already slamming the doors shut again – bang, bang, bang – and the train’s carrying me further and further away from where I need to be. The train is travelling south. I need to be travelling NORTH. Get me out. Get me out.

So that was last night’s dream, or part of it. The business of not being able to get off happened three or four times because I was trying to wake up and couldn’t manage it – and that’s why, in my sleep, I even began to think of dreams and poems, and what the symbols might mean, because I knew I needed to get up and WRITE THE BLOG.

In fact, I never did get off the train. I just, in the end, managed to wake up.

And what about the suitcase? You don’t need a psychoanalyst to work that one out. The symbol explains itself. It works at more than one level. I didn’t come up with it consciously. It sought me out.

Poems often do something not dissimilar, especially those poems that seem simultaneously obscure and easy to grasp. I like dream poems (though many editors don’t), and I’ve written a number. I’ve even blogged about them before, here.

But what makes a dream like a poem? I think it’s the combination of symbol and powerful feeling, so not just any dream will do. It has to be strongly felt.

Here’s the background to one of mine, written after a poem had been rejected by a worthy magazine. This poem popped up, of course, before ‘submittable’ was dreamed up.

I know I urge other people to send poems to magazines. I tell them not to be put off when they come back, it’s something you have to go through. But the truth is I hate it myself. I hate the brown envelopes coming through the letter-box. More than anything else, I hate the fact that I hate it! Grrrrrr. I hate picking up the envelopes and feeling how heavy they are. If pretty heavy, that means ALL the poems have come back. If a bit lighter, maybe the magazine has taken one. Or even two! And if very light – could it be, could it be. . . ? And why do I even care?

Anyway, in the past I have often managed it: the sending out of poems and the dealing with returns. But it used to take me 48 hours for the cold feeling associated with rejection to go away. I thought this feeling was completely ridiculous but I still felt it. And the feeling did go away. It would gradually fade over the first day and night, and disappear completely in 48 hours. (Only 24 these days for ‘submittable’.)

But once I had a more complicated rejection. One of the editors of a magazine had liked one of the poems in the brown envelope but suggested I change a line. So I changed the line and sent it back cheerfully. Alas, another of the editors opened the envelope and must also have seen the poem before. This person did not like it, and returned it immediately with a snippy comment about it being no use sending in the same poem twice, they did remember them.

I was not just rejected. I was enraged and wounded. I was so full of injured rejection that I wrote a letter explaining how truthful and honourable I was and sent it to the unjust editor. I dreamed about the whole thing that night, and also wrote down the dream as a poem. I’m going to include it here, because it’s in Unsuitable Poems, which has now been out of print for years. (I may have to do something about that, if I can just get time. But the suitcase is so heavy. . .)

And then I woke up. . . .

You were extremely red in the face
and when you opened your mouth to speak
you made no sense at all, you were obviously pissed
first thing in the morning and I told you so.
Did you care? No.
You said they’d slipped something into the soda water,
it wasn’t your fault
and in any case you were never drunk before nine,
I should know that, and then
I had to marry the man who picks up litter round here,
the one with the funny hat.
I didn’t particularly want to do this because
I didn’t think marriage was a great idea and in any case
he was already married and had six children
but he was still keen and it turned out he was
the editor of a poetry magazine called Trash
and he told me not to be so stupid because
I was only dreaming
and so I woke up except I was still dreaming and
in the dream I had woken up and was writing a poem
about the dream, another dream poem
for Kevin’s magazine Trash
and it was going to be wonderful, like no other
dream poem
had ever ever been, and then I woke up
and bugger me—is this a poem?

Three cheers for NOT embracing the internet!

There are still small magazines that don’t.

Don’t engage with the internet, that is. HQ Magazine (The Haiku Quarterly) has now lasted quarter of a century without so much as a website. Its editor, Kevin Bailey, has the most modest of Wikipedia pages.

Its most recent issue arrived this week, with its buttercup yellow card covers, its neat A5 saddle-stitched format, its modest editorial and ‘short review’ pages at the back, its 35 pages of poems unfussily presented, each still placing its author (in neat italics under the name) in a location: David Allen ( Palermo, Sicily); Alexis Lykiard (Exeter); W.D. Jackson (Germany); William Hart (San Francisco), and so on. The seasoned poetry reader will recognise a number of the names inside. But by no means all.

Kevin Bailey says that over the years he has ‘tried to entertain the readers and give an audience to poets of merit, regardless of the supposed place in some kind of poetic hierarchy’. He has made ‘creative exchanges with poets’ a priority.

The magazine has not flown off the press four times a year, despite the ‘quarterly’ in the title. This is issue 46 and we’re 25 years in. But how delicious and typical of poetry’s essential rebellion that it should be called a quarterly and defy its seasons.

Here’s an extract from the current editorial:

‘I admit that I have not kept up with the times. HQ has not embraced the internet, and I treat communication via e-mail the same as I would ordinary letter writing. The economics of the magazine are pure 20^th century – an old-fashioned ‘Bursars’ account and reliance on cheques and cash. – but it seems to work, and will do so until it doesn’t. . . So there you have it – by all laws that decide the fate of a small press magazine, HQ should have vanished years ago – but for one thing – the sustaining passion of HQ’s subscribers and poets . . . I have an abiding loyalty to the wonderful subscribers who have put their faith in my much-repeated promise to get each issue out ‘eventually’ – and the poets who have trusted my literary judgement. How could I ever betray any of them? As I have said before, I see HQ as the manifestation of a Fellowship of writers and readers – it’s a hackneyed thing to say, but HQ really is your magazine – I simply manage it for you as best I can – and each issue arrives, I hope, like an unexpected letter from an old friend.’

This is the traditional, old-style, little-magazine way of doing things, with an un-famous editor working for neither profit nor fame. A shoestring operation with inexpensive printing. A labour of love. Needless to say, HQ has no state funding, which no doubt helps to explain why it has been able to continue in its own sweet way, refining the art of creative idiosyncrasy.

But surely everything has to be ‘new’ these days. If your breakfast cereal stops selling well, before you know it, it will be ‘new and improved’. A failing restaurant is soon flagged as ‘under new management’, almost as though the words ‘new’ and ‘better’ were synonymous. This is clearly pulling new wool over old eyes. Increasingly, I find the notion of innovation exhausting. There’s much to be said for doing one un-innovative thing well. Or even just doing something for long enough to get it right.

HQ Poetry Magazine is a publication of character and charm, doing its thing. It’s not too long to read with pleasure. It has a wide range of styles and forms (not just haiku): most readers will find something in it to savour. And it even has old prices: subscription £12.00 for four issues (how can he do it for this price?). Single copies £3.50. Cheques (if you still have a cheque book) payable to The Haiku Quarterly.

The address to write to (do you have paper still? Do you have envelopes? And stamps?) is

HQ Poetry Magazine
39 Exmouth Street
Swindon
SN1 3PU

The Editor is reading poems for the next issue at this very moment

‘There is no limit to the number of poems that can be submitted to HQ, but the editor requests that authors submit within the bounds of reason.’

No limit? Why not submit within the bounds of reason? Don’t expect a speedy reply (this is submission, not ‘Submittable’). At the same time send a cheque for a subscription with your poems, or if you’re chequeless, try banknotes. Just one five-pound note will buy you the issue I am still enjoying.

Join the fellowshop of a little, unfunded magazine while you still can. Forget Instagram and bloggers (even this one). Kevin Bailey is an editor who relishes letters on old-fashioned paper. Such editors won’t exist forever. Besides, these days it’s innovative to be retro.

Join the fellowshop of a little, unfunded magazine while you still can. This is an editor who welcomes letters on old-fashioned paper. Such publications won’t exist forever. Besides, these days it’s innovative to be retro.

The Bridge Over the River Po

In How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published I write about having a ‘strategy’. A plan for getting work into print, finding new readers for your poems.

For ‘new’ poets, sometimes a pamphlet publication is one of the stages in the plan, a bridge that leads to a book. This immediately reminds me of The Three Billy-Goats Gruff who lived, appropriately, on a ‘bluff’, and soon encountered the troll (troll, troll, troll-de-roll) lurking just below the bridge that led to the ‘green, green grass’ and ‘red, red roses’ on the other side.

And indeed there are trolls a-plenty, though the green, green grass and red, red roses may not actually exist. For warnings and general advice, please see the new area of the website dedicated to How (Not) to with its own connected pages.

However, some pamphlet bridges work brilliantly for some poets. And although getting poetry published isn’t easy, a first pamphlet is easier to accomplish than a first book.

The Rialto (also, of course, a magazine) publishes a whole series of Bridge Pamphlets), ‘designed to cross the gap between magazine and book publication for new writers or, for established writers, that between collections’. It can work. Look how many writers published in that particular bridge series have gone on to do one or more full collections.

Lately I have been especially pleased to see three HappenStance pamphlet poets crossing the bridge. Each of these poets has done much work between the pamphlet they did with me and the book that has just appeared, and the time taken from pamphlet to bridge has varied between four years and eight (please note, those of you with five-year plans). The three first collections are from different publishers, two relatively new, one in business since 1992.

There are many routes into publication and the journeys for these three poets have been different: all have had poems published in a range of magazine, but there are only a few overlaps. When you work with a poet on a pamphlet and later see him or her appear in book form, it’s very like seeing your own children achieve something rather grand. It’s even better when you read the books and think YESSSSSssssss, as I did for all three. These are good, good books.

The first is Janet Loverseed’s The Shadow Shop, published by Oversteps Books. Janet is a witty, subtle, gentle poet. When she first sent me poems, there were so many I liked I didn’t know where to start. But The Under-Ripe Banana (long sold out) was a favourite, and its title poem (still a favourite) is in this book. Many of the poems capture moments out of lives, the sort of moments you can’t forget like ‘The Man in the Middle’, which can change your experience of travelling on the tube forever. Or ‘An Interviewer’s Story’, which could make you think twice about talking to cute small children. So much here is lovely. I wouldn’t know where to begin with quoting, and there’s the issue, too, that the poems are small completenesses. To take bits out of them doesn’t quite work. You just have to read ‘Old Pianist’ and ‘Another Year’, and keep them safe to cheer you on dark days.

Then there’s Marion Tracy’s Dreaming of Our Better Selves, published by Richard Skinner’s Vanguard Editions. Marion’s 2012 pamphlet Giant in the Doorway was one of the strangest and most arresting sets of poems HappenStance has published. Its central sequence told the story of a child’s struggle to make sense of her mother’s mental illness. It sold out quickly. Since then Marion has worked tirelessly at the art. She has developed an approach and unpredictable way with words that’s totally her. Often there’s an element of the surreal, combined with a sense that what’s she’s saying is absolutely REAL. Unflinching, even. Her poems are unpredictable shape-shifters, poems to return to, to talk about, to worry away at. You never quite know what she’s going to do next. But you know she’s on the move, alert, alive and challenging. These are poems that wake you up.

And the third new book is by Theresa Muñoz, whose 2012 pamphlet Close (no copies left) touched on her experience of moving to Scotland as a Canadian. But only touched on it. These were spare, emotive poems, using white space to suggest much more than they said. And in the years since she wrote them, she has, in every sense, come a long way. So the new book, Settle (from Vagabond Voices), takes the issue of immigration, one of the huge concerns of our age, and deals with it head-on. It’s divided into two halves: poems about crossing cultures (dealing with her parents’ experience as Canadian immigrants and then her own in moving to Scotland), and poems inspired by digital existence, where crossing continents is as easy as the click of a mouse. There’s an essay, too, about ‘Moving to Scotland’ that enriches the context of the poems themselves, fills in the gaps. This is an intensely readable book, more than ‘just’ a book of poems. It’s about all our lives.

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.

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

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.