GETTING YOUR POETRY PUBLISHED – Page 4 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

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.

ON WRITING TOO MUCH

‘People shouldn’t write so many poems,’ said one of the publishers.

It was at the Ledbury Festival and it was a panel event well over a decade ago. One of the issues under discussion was the quantity of poetry produced relative to the publishing outlets available. But what I remember most is Michael Mackmin’s immediate response to that statement. ‘Yes, they should,’ he said with feeling. ‘They should write as many poems as they want!’

And I agree. Even though I sigh when poets approach me with their work and tell me they’ve written over 400 poems in the last three months. But that’s not because I think they shouldn’t. It’s because more is not better, and I’m biassed in favour of slow work.

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me the act of writing is a wonderful thing, an almost holy thing. It is completely separate from the issue of publication, which is far less holy (though sometimes lovely).

It’s a communication, isn’t it, writing? And mysteriously and marvellously, its act of communication can continue after the writer is gone.

I’m working at the moment on the pieces of writing my mother left after her death, collecting them as a set. Mostly they’re stories and anecdotes, based on memory. Her brain, because of her illness, had become like a bucket with a hole in it. As fast as she filled it with stories, her ability to remember trickled out of the bottom. At first the hole was tiny and the loss was imperceptible. Then it got bigger, and bigger.

But for more than ten years, she was a member of a writing group, and this encouraged her to keep putting things down. Each week the group met, and each person read out something he or she had written during the week. To begin with, she loved this. As time went on, she used to moan and groan. ‘What on earth can I write about this week?’

There was always something. Some scrap of the past could be brought along. Some amusing thing would happen and it could be shared, and it was – with triumph and delight.

In this way, parts of her life were described for an audience, and saved. Her illness advanced, and even when her memory betrayed her utterly, those stories and rhymes could be read back to her, to her delight (‘Did I really write that?’). For family and carers, it was a way to learn things about her (and sometimes ourselves) that we would never otherwise have known.

My mother loved to write. All her life she loved it, and it was good for her. Sometimes people criticise the idea that poetry may be ‘mere’ therapy. What nonsense! Of course it’s therapeutic. All writing is.

It was important for my mother to put things into words that other people would understand, and in so doing make them clearer. Because writing does that: it clarifies.

I think of it like clarifying butter in a saucepan, where you heat the butter gently until the fat and the whey separate and the clear gold rises to the top and the milk solids sink to the bottom. But if you get over-excited and apply too much heat, the milk solids start to burn and the whole process falls apart.

Careful writing clarifies. Helps you see things. It’s a beautiful thing.

In Stephen King’s book On Writing, he says ‘Do not come lightly to the blank page’. Another way, I think, of remarking on the holiness of the act. And though I agree that the writer should not come lightly to the task, writing imparts lightness to the writer and, when the clarification process works, light to the reader.

Even here. Even in a blog, of which people write too many, too lightly.

But they should write as many as they want.

READING WINDOW: WHAT ON EARTH IS IT ALL ABOUT?

Why do I do it?

In the last month I read well over 700 poems, and gave detailed feedback on at least 500. By December 31^st, I felt as though I’d trudged through several miles of snow and ice. Poetried out? Absolutely.

It doesn’t make sense, in that month of parcels, cards and reindeer, to invite all these poems in. But when was I ever truly sensible? And what month would be better?

I am aware of giving out mixed messages about submissions. I both welcome poems and, at the same time, suggest I’m hardly likely to offer to publish any of the work that arrives. This is true. I am hoping to read the poems, take an interest, find or rediscover some interesting people, and also not offer to publish any of it.

Why? Because I permanently have too many publications on the go. Because I’d really like to write some poems myself.

But obviously I do continue to publish pamphlets, and a small number of books. I continue to take an interest in what does get published, and by whom. I continue to want HappenStance publications to be the best.

So I when reading the poems, I have half an eye on a possible future prospect, at the same time as thinking: no, no, you have too much already!

I hate the whole business of Many are Called but Few are Chosen. I hate the idea of poetry as a gigantic competition. I hate that people get up their hopes, tick all my boxes, and still I don’t say Yes, I love your work, let’s do it.

I’m far more likely to say, I think you’re using too many semi-colons or Why are so many of your poems in two-line stanzas? I don’t even like being the sort of person who says these sorts of things.

I am a people-person. I comfort myself in various ways. One of these is to read the poems properly, or try to. I give feedback, in pencil, on the work. Sometimes, I know, such feedback is useful. Sometimes, over time, people who have valued such responses have gone on either to win pamphlet competitions or to be published by other worthy imprints.

At other times, people feel rejected whatever I do. And there are people whose work I would never publish, although I rarely say that explicitly. But one of the privileges of any publisher is to choose whom and what they publish. I need to feel strongly interested both in the work and the person behind it. I need to feel I can get on well with them, that the relationship would be mutually enjoyable and educative. Why else would one publish poetry at all?

So I read covering letters carefully too, and if someone sends poems to me over two or three years, I start to have a sense of that individual in a context. I keep brief notes. And sometimes I can offer some suggestions about how a set of poems might get published (assuming I don’t offer to do this myself) or even some ideas about new ways the author might write or structure a set of poems. I’d like to think it’s not so much about ‘yes/no’ as about multiple possibilities of each person arriving at what’s best for them. If the work is good, ultimately it will be published somewhere. It’s a matter of persistence, compromise and intelligence.

When it comes to offering to publish, I have a subscriber base, too, to consider. Most (but not all) of the people who send me poems are HappenStance subscribers, so they will already know the key role of the subscribers in terms of decisions and preferences. When I do choose to publish, I want the work to be something I can warmly recommend to those subscriber-readers who regularly send feedback about my publications. The HappenStance subscribers are a human network based on a relationship, not just people to sell things to. They are almost all poets. They send me letters and emails and cards and jokes. They are discriminating, good readers and I want to keep them. In order to do that, I need to publish work they’ll find compelling and worthy of respect. They’re far more important to me than the Forward Prize selectors.

Unofficially, I am studying the state of contemporary UK poetry, and the poetry publishing business. I’m studying it through its participants. Mainly I study participants at the relatively early stages of the game. Such people will tell me what they’ve already tried, how and why. So those people who send me poems are unwitting contributors to my research. I like to know about them. I like to know what they write, how they write, and why (especially why); where they think it’s taking them; why they approached me in the first place. I’ve been doing this for ten years now. I want to work out what’s going on. No, I have no aspirations to undertake a PhD in poetic practice. I’m simply trying to understand a public situation which often seems to make little sense.

Cynicism is something to contend with, yes. More often than you might think, however, I meet a poem that lights up this whole room. For a moment I glimpse what it’s all about, for all of us.

Then January takes over, the lights dim, and it’s time to tackle the accounts.

A LAMENT FOR RHYME

On the absence of rhyme during the reading window

Page after page I read, and then
    another page I turn
and lovely things are popping up
    but I confess I yearn
for rhymes sustained and intricate
    and not just at the end
but in between and profligate
    and bursting to transcend
the free-ish verse and couplets
    (which can be very nice
but there are such a lot of them)
    and rhyme’s a sort of spice
that’s still employed by lyricists –
    they put it in their songs
and people seem to like it
    as if it still belongs.
I don’t want rhyme in every text
    but I’d like to see it more
and when Professors, sorely vexed,
    say English is ‘rhyme poor’,
that’s why we don’t write well with it,
    that’s why it’s out of use,
I hereby say To hell with it –
    that’s merely an excuse!

[This post is in honour of George Simmers
who has now been running Snakeskin webzine
for no fewer than twenty years, and is himself
a rhymester sans pareil.]

HOW TO READ A POEM

Perhaps you do it differently. I can’t know. I only know what I do.

I’m interested in how people approach puzzles, and a poem’s a sort of puzzle. When I was a college teacher, and working on learning skills, I used sometimes to give students a thinking challenge, a question. ‘What’s 5 x 13?’ for example. They had to work out the answer and write it down without conferring. Then they had to say how they got their answer.

A lot of people (I’m in this group) did 5 x 12 (which they remembered from learned-by-heart tables) and then added 5.

Some did 5 x 10 (50), then 5 x 3 (15) and added the two results.

Some had a picture in their head that looked like this:

13
13
13
13
13 +
____

They would add up the 3s in the units column one by one (15), write down 5, carry 1 over to the tens column, then add all the 1s.

Somebody would reach for their phone and use the calculator.

Sometimes there would be a person who knew the answer instantly but didn’t know how they knew.

And so on. Usually there was at least one method that would never have occurred to me in a month of Sundays. But the interesting thing was the way we assumed, without saying as much, that we were all doing the same thing. Actually we were doing a whole range of different things.

So it occurs to me, in this reading window when I’m reading a lot of poems, that it may be the same with poems. Tom Duddy once said to me he didn’t read poems like a poet reads poems, he came to them as an ordinary reader with a need.

The ‘ordinary reader with a need’ makes a lot of sense. Think about funeral poems. You go to a funeral, and someone who never normally reads poems, will read one aloud, and that poem, in that situation, will answer a need for more than just that one person.

But I was immediately interested in how a poet reads poems. How does a poet read poems? I think perhaps Tom meant looking at how the poem is made and what it’s up to, like a person who builds bicycles immediately looking at the construction not just the performance.

Frankly, I don’t often think about what I do. Like most people, I just do it. But I thought it would be interesting to perform my own class exercise on myself, to see what happens, and share it.

If I were doing the 5 x 13 exercise, I would also talk to the class (after they’d done the sum) about the role fear plays in the whole problem-solving thing. If people were nervous about coming up with the wrong answer to 5 x 13, it would affect the process. So the person who reached for her phone might be scared she’d get it wrong (or too lazy to work it out). But some people would know they would get it right and that would affect not only the thinking method but their entire feeling about juggling with numbers.

When I come to a poem, I’m not scared of it. I’ve read a lot of poems, and I like doing it. So I think that probably makes me quite relaxed in my approach. I come to it as a communication and I want to know what the poem’s telling me. Simply from the fact it calls itself ‘poem’, I assume it’s telling me something un-casual, something I might want or need to know.

So here’s how I read a poem (assuming the poem fits inside one side of A4 paper, which most these days do. If it’s a long poem, the process is different).

******

Right! I’m working with a real poem. I haven’t read it before, ever. (I picked it at random from this month’s submissions, but I shan’t tell you who wrote it or what it’s about.)

I glance at the shape and how the text fits into the white space. Is it in stanzas and if so, are they the same size and shape. Do I like the look of it, or find it interesting? This is a sort of ‘Are-you-sitting-comfortably-then-I’ll-begin’ stage. I note, mentally, whether there’s an odd or even number of stanzas.

This poem has 5 x 4-line stanzas. Five is a good number. For me, odd is nicer than even.

Then I look at the title. And mentally process it. Is it one of those titles that could be a play on words? Or a title I don’t get? Or a first line title? Whatever. The title may be a clue. But this one seems entirely straightforward, so I relax a little, and start.

I’m reading right through the poem from start to finish. If I hit a snag, I’ll stop. A snag is a place where I’m not sure what the poet means, at the simplest level. That could be because there’s ambiguity, or the sentence doesn’t seem to make sense, or the punctuation’s confusing and I get lost.

But this poem’s easy. Immediately I see a pattern. Each of the five stanzas starts with a question. All but one has the question mark at the end of the second line.

So yes – even from the start, I am looking for patterns in poems, and if I see one right away I feel quite chipper because I’ve spotted something the poet put there for me, like the sixpence in a Christmas pudding. (NB: I don’t think poems have to have patterns.)

This poem has five questions. The second half of each stanza gives the answer. So the structure’s a bit like the story of the Three Little Pigs, except here there are five pigs (I mean stanzas), not three.

In the story of the Three Little Pigs, the first pig builds his house of straw, the second a house of wood, the third (as you know) a house of bricks. So we know a climax is imminent because bricks present the hungry wolf with a big problem. But by this time, we also know the score. We know the wolf will say, ‘Little pig, little pig, can I come in?” and we know how the pig will reply. The tension builds because we know some of what will happen, but not all of it.

This poem does that same thing. It draws me into a pattern of familiarity. Each stanza has a question and an answer. And as I go through, I see the answers are rhetorical – that is to say, not true answers. The poet simply considers a possibility in response to each question. This means that by the final stanza, the reader (me) REALLY wants to know what the ACTUAL answer might be. This poem has structured itself towards a punchline and a pay-off.

Actually, there’s a pay-off in most poems, namely the feeling of satisfaction (or at intensified interest) that takes you back to the start. Because if you really like a poem, you want to read it several times, and if it’s a good poem, each reading adds to your pleasure.

So back to this poem. My interest intensified as I went through the stanzas. But when I got to the very last line (at this point, I’ve only read it once, remember), the pay-off didn’t work for me. It didn’t match my expectation.

Why not? I need to go back now. I’m glancing back up the poem, like someone looking up a high rise building from the street.

I can easily see a rhyme thing going on. The ends of the second and fourth lines of each stanza roughly mirror each other. And there’s metre. I picked that up even on first reading. This poem has a ballad-type shape and sound, and ballads are folky poems. They don’t intimidate by being difficult, intellectual and full of complex metaphors.

I still like the feeling of this poem, despite my sense of disappointment at the end. So now I’m going back to read it again. This time, I’ll track the pattern more closely.

Right. This time I notice immediately how the first word in each line’s capitalised, even when the sentence runs over. So either this poet always writes in a slightly old-fashioned way, or she is deliberately calling in an old-style format. I’m inclined to think the latter, but I don’t know, because I don’t know the work of this writer. At this point I notice (this is a confession because it’s not a particularly honorable observation) that the poem is set in Times Roman, the default font of Microsoft Word up to 2007, so either they’re using an old version of Word, or they deliberately selected a slightly retro typeface.)

Second time through, I notice why I dived into the poem so willingly. It’s because the opening question’s really interesting. I do want to know the answer. And although very little information is given about the context, there’s enough for me to imagine myself fully into this situation. And even in the very first stanza I’ve begun to create a scenario. I’m already fearful that the answer to the question will be the one I dread, the one we all dread.

But I know a thing or two about poems because I’ve read a lot of them. One of the things I know is they set up expectations – but then they have a little wriggle and a twist. So your expectations are satisfied (if the poem works) but not in the way you thought they were going to be. Jokes work like this too; it’s part of the fun.

Now I’m up to stanza three of my second reading, and I like the way the question stays unanswered but each stanza gives a tiny bit more information about the context. Lots of poems use lots of repetition and sometimes it can get annoying and wearisome (I often find this is true in villanelles and sestinas, for example) but here I like it. And I like that none of the language is complicated, and none of the sentences either. Question. Suggested answer. Question. Suggested answer. I know precisely where I am at each stage.

And the rhyme isn’t perfect rhyme, it’s a rhyme echo. The words at the end of the first and third lines in each stanza end in ‘ing’. That’s all. But it’s enough.

In the fourth stanza, one line now strikes me as slightly clunky, and it’s because of a ‘that’ which doesn’t quite sound like natural speech here, though the poem has invoked a speaking voice from line one. Also, now I think about it, there are other ‘thats’ in the poem and one earlier in the same stanza. Probably another reason why this line struck me as clunky.

Ah, I’m into stanza five, and now I see the first two lines of the last stanza are exactly the same as the first two of the first stanza. So the poem’s come full circle – back to the question first asked. This puts huge weight on the last two lines, doesn’t it? Finally, the reader has got to what might be the answer.

So I read the last two lines again. Maybe they’ll work for me this time. Nope. I’d say the poet’s created a lovely situation here, and done it well, but hasn’t decided where the poem was going, or hasn’t let the poem have its own head. Because the end is flat.

I go back to the title. It now seems too plain and straightforward. It doesn’t add anything; it simply repeats a phrase that already occurs twice in the poem, and it seems to me now that there is much unexplored possibility here. The title could have changed the whole poem, or perhaps lifted it into an extra level of meaning.

But what possibilities are here! This could be quite something. So easy to make it into a cracking little poem. And the question doesn’t have to be answered, of course. But if it’s left open, it has to be left satisfyingly unanswered. The mystery has to deepen, like Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’, that marvellous poem of un-answeredness.

Now all I have to do, though the ordinary reader does not, is articulate my feedback. My pencil’s in my hand. But before I do this, I’ll take a sneaky look at the next poem because I do want to see whether the method in this text is unusual for the poet, or typical. Does she capitalise the first word in every line of every poem, or just this one? Do all her poems have regular stanzas? etc

Reading poems takes an age ( ‘An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze’). So very much to think about in each one. A delicious way to spend a Sunday morning.

How do you do it?

ON AN EVEN KEEL, BUT LISTING

Read submissions up to date.

2. Respond to submissions.

3. MyHermes to go.

4. Legal deposits etc for ICO.

5. Take decisions.

6. Register new titles.

7. Get cover designs sorted for Cursive.

8. Go to the dentist (don’t be late).

9. Clean teeth properly (do this before 8)

10. Try to be less subversive.

11. Filing for accounts & more.

12. Organise Michael Marks entry.

13. Sort out last month’s competition.

14. Weed garden (gently).

15. Meet Helen: Cocoa Tree REMEMBER.

16. Update events page, August, September.

17. Think about Xmas event at SPL: another decision.

18. Do A.I. for Stephen’s book.

19. Cook.

20. Continue writing new enlarged even more useful version of How Not To.

21. Visit Matt’s mum.

22. Got to get to the egg lady, got to!

23. Write July newsletter & print flyers (a lot).

24. Make flyers to go in with mailshot.

25. Book train to Lumb.

26. Order more logs.

27. [Do not buy more buttons on Ebay: you don’t NEED them.]

28. Get birdseed for goldfinches & bullfinches & feed them.

29. Write blog.

30. Think about starting another list.

31. Resist.

TEN REASONS FOR SENDING YOUR POEMS TO MAGAZINES

So I’m flicking through poetry magazines, old and new.

A pile of them on the floor at my right and I’m dipping in and out, out and in. I’m half interested, half bored.

I’ve read this one before at least twice. How come I don’t remember this page? How come I don’t remember this poem, the one I’m reading over and over, startled into absolute attention? Good grief – what a poem, what an astonishing thing in 15 lines! And it stays with me all day, that experience made of words, while all the other poems settle back into a blur, like the grounds in a cafetière after the coffee’s been poured out.

If I go back to that magazine another day (I may or may not, the pile’s still there on the floor) I’ll go straight to that poem, go back for a fix. But maybe there’ll be another one I didn’t see before. There probably will. It happens like that. Poetry magazines are odd things. They don’t read logically. They never do what I expect. Often not what I want either, but that’s okay. They’re stubborn creatures, made by editors who are poets. They’re meant to wake me up, not calm me down.

But I’m thinking in particular about magazines after reading Jo Bell on her method of sending poems out. Which I admired and shared, not least because as a publisher I’m always telling poets to get on with the business, send the poems out, get them into the best magazines they can. Why? That’s the thing. Why?

There are many reasons and they accumulate. There are poets who leap into publication without a previous ‘track record’, but it’s rare. I like the magazine (and sometimes ezine) route. Here are ten (which are not all) of the reasons.

1. Peer validation. If a prospective publisher suspects your poems are good, they do like to have this confirmed by other editors. (It sometimes happens that poems I think are brilliant don’t get into good magazines, but it’s rare). Also publishers do read magazines sometimes and notice the poets in them and nod and note down a name. But this is not the most important of the reasons.

2. Once printed in a magazine, the poems are out there finding readers, which is what poems are for. Someone, somewhere is sitting up in a chair astonished, and thinking ‘Good grief! What a poem!’ That’s one reader. Two readers thinking the same is a readership. Which is what poets need to sail in.

3. In magazines, the poet’s name is bobbing round the waters gathering momentum and recognition. We buy or borrow books (eventually) by people we’ve heard of, not people whose names mean nothing to us (I know there are exceptions, there are always exceptions).

4. The poet who works at getting the poems out there is a member of the community of jobbing poets. It’s part of the apprenticeship, if you like. It’s an honourable striving. If the poems aren’t accepted, the effort is no less praiseworthy. Besides, you’re going to stick at it. You’re going to send them somewhere else. There are many publications for your messages in a bottle to float away to.

5. When you do have a poem accepted, you find yourself between the covers with other poets. You read their work carefully then, especially the ones on pages near you. Most especially the one on the facing page. You feel almost as though you’ve met those poets in person. And sometimes you do. You go to a magazine launch and blimey – there you are sitting next to your facing-page poet. It’s a bond that can last, with luck, a lifetime. We need these bonds.

6. Most magazines (not all) have a bit of bio somewhere or other about authors. If a publisher has offered to do a pamphlet of your poems next year, you can flag the imminent publication in the bio, which is great. It’s another tiny cog in the great wheel of promotion. It may eventually sell a couple of copies.

7. Once your poems are published in book or pamphlet form, the publisher wants the book reviewed as widely as possible. Magazines that run reviews (not all of them do) will generally review poets they’ve published themselves. If they haven’t published your poems (unless your publication is prize-winning or PBS-recommended) you can forget being reviewed. And reviews are another cog in that promotional wheel.

8. Just as a magazine is a creative work made by the editor(s), so a publishing imprint is a creation, and the proud creator wants it to be well-regarded. Publishers work tirelessly for a good reputation, because a good reputation brings the best poets and the best poets strengthen the reputation. Recognition and momentum. Each time one of ‘my’ poets has work in a leading magazine and the bio mentions HappenStance, the imprint’s reputation is enhanced.

9. Your first collection is in print. You are still, aren’t you, the jobbing poet, stalwartly sending poems out to the magazines? Someone reads your latest sestina(!) in a magazine and loves it. They look up the bio. They see you have a book in print. They buy it! Yeay!

10. It’s hard graft, this regular sending out of poems, but it strengthens you. Yes, rejection of your favourites is demoralising. But there are at least three key aspects to the poetry business. One is the best bit – the making of poems, the joy and excitement and fun of that. Two is getting those poems as good as they can be, which means exposing them to strangers and learning from feedback (rejection makes you look hard at your loved-ones, and sometimes change them for the better). Three is determination. Stickability. Doing the boring business of getting the poems out there. Earning respect because you don’t give up. Paying your dues. Standing up and being counted. You wanna be a poet? This is your job.

SHUTTING UP

It was difficult getting the window to shut. Several envelopes were stuck in the hinges. But it has shut now.

Thank you! Thank-you to the writers who trusted me with their poems. It’s not an easy thing to expose your work to a critical reader, especially one who comments on verbs that are leaning, lines that are breaking and sonnets that are creaking. And towards the end that reader was very tired.

There are other thank-yous. If you spend a whole month reading like this, very little else can be done. So the ordinary functions of the press grind to a halt, which is risky. But many readers humbled me with their generosity before Christmas. They ordered publications, they sent donations, they sent stamps, they sent love. This secret fuel is amazing.

The window won’t open again in the same way. This was the apex, the peak, the nirvana of poetry reading. In May 2015 (still difficult not writing 2014) HappenStance will be ten years old. I will be nearly 62. And I plan to change things. How? Not quite sure yet.

But poets mainly create themselves. There will be, and always have be, people to whom making poems is important. Creating readers of poetry is harder. That’s what I’m working on.

Watching my fiendish work over the last weeks, more than one friend has said, ‘Why don’t you charge?’ Of course I have thought about this. The money, if some people paid for feedback, could be reinvested in the press. If payment were required, it would reduce the numbers dramatically. I haven’t ruled it out.

Still, I’ve a deep fear of poetry that’s by the privileged for the privileged. I am on the side of the garret and the baked potato. I am on the side of it is more blessed to give than receive. I believe, ridiculously, enough money will always arrive. So far, it has. Though only just.

***********************

Now here’s the ‘window’ analysis. I love figures.

162 poets sent in work. More than twice as many as the previous December. They sent between 1 and 29 poems, but it would average about 10 each. Most of them remembered the stamped addressed envelope. About 1600 poems, then.

Of these poets 107 were female and 55 were male.

I can’t comment on age range because I don’t ask people about that, though they sometimes tell me, but my unstatistical impression is that three-quarters were over 50 and only about 4 were under 25.

Nearly all the poets who sent poems were (hooray!) HappenStance subscribers. 17 were not. But they might yet be. I am an optimist.

About 30 took out a subscription just before sending poems in. (This is good if they also go on to buy publications, because it suggests they’re active readers. If they don’t buy anything subsequently, the postal subscription makes a loss).

Geography

34 in Scotland
3 in Wales
2 in Ireland
115.5 in England (of which 23.5 were in or near London)

as well as

1 in Isle of Man
1 in Sweden
1 in Canada
1 in Spain
3.5 in France

I hope those numbers add up. This is me, not a spreadsheet talking.

I took 47 pages of (secret) notes. Most ever. These include notes on the bio, brief comments on the poems, and also comments on my comments and the experience of reading. Up to now I’ve done this by hand in large books, but this time I did it on the laptop because the books go back nine years and are hard to search. Many poets assume I’ll remember what they previously told me about themselves. I don’t. I get my Marys and Chris-es confused.

88 poets sent in poems for the first time, just over half. I rewrote the printed reply notes three times.

The level of guilt on my part was at 88% (I made that figure up. It means high). That’s because I made hardly any offers. I agreed to do two debut pamphlets in Spring 2016 (2015 was already ‘full’) but both authors already knew an offer was coming.

Normally I would have offered to do more in 2016. Two things stopped me.

First, it was the volume of poetry. It overwhelmed me. Second, I was astonished by how many possible debut poets, sending for the second, third or fourth time (so I was recognising poems I knew and loved), clearly merited publication in the next two years. I highlighted a group of 24 who fitted into this category. Twenty-four! If I did nothing else from now till 2017, I couldn’t manage that.

Fortunately, other things will happen for most of these poets. They’ll either win one of the competitions (as many who’ve send poems to me have done already) or find another publisher. I hope they’re all on the qui vive, spotting what’s going on in the sector, and which new imprints might be worth approaching. In the first three of four years of a new publishing business, a publisher is actively looking for new, good poets. After ten years, what she needs is not poets but readers. Or even better, poet-readers.

But also it’s important not to keep on doing the same thing in the same way, even if that thing has gone well up to now. Creativity thrives on change.

Also there’s Chapter Nine of the HappenStance Story to be written, three pamphlets urgently needing attention, StAnza tickets to buy, two new books nudging my collar, and the other 13 items on my list. And I had better get dressed.

Thank-you again. Huge thank-you. Thank you poets, blog readers and poetry buyers and supporters. You are not a vast community, in Harry Potter terms, but individually and en masse, you are . . . supercalifragelisticexpialidocious.