GETTING YOUR POETRY PUBLISHED – Page 5 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

THE THICKNESS OF THE THICKET

The window is the widest it’s ever been. More envelopes have flown in than ever before.

I think I’m at the zenith. (I love words beginning with Z.) I don’t think I can ever do this thing again because I can’t read all the poems and still have time to publish anything. How on earth is it possible to keep a balance?

But it has been, as always, fascinating. I’m now just over halfway through the mountain of envelopes (122 so far), and since Boxing Day I’ve stepped up the pace. Why? There are no more parcels to wrap, no more Christmas cards to send, and few orders for books coming in.

I have forgotten what a poem is, if I ever knew. I only know now whether (or not) I seem to be following the piece of text in front of me clearly.

When it works, it’s no longer a piece of text. It’s a whole experience. I can step into it and, when I get to the end, I can step out again. And I can repeat this any number of times.

When it doesn’t (as it seems to me) work, the reasons are usually the same reasons that apply to prose that doesn’t work, but exacerbated by tricky line and stanza breaks. Sometimes reading a poem is like fighting through a thorny thicket.

This might be fitting if the poem was about fighting through a thicket. If it’s about a childhood photograph (as many are), this is less desirable.

I’ll add one or two points to the bugbears I rehearsed last week, because they come up so often I’m starting to think I’m suffering from some rare neurosis. And indeed I am probably excessively sensitive to features that, in another context, wouldn’t bother me at all. But it does no harm, I think, to flag them. I promise not to mention ‘leaning verbs’, though everywhere they are still leaning.

Visual elements
Prose poems are here to stay. Most of them arrive formatted for an A4 page, which is what they’re printed on. They are usually fully justified or blocked (the occasional one is left-hand justified with a ragged right hand margin, which I find interesting, because I’m interested in the shapes of poems).

There’s some dispute among typographers about the optimal line length for readability (and it is different on a paper page from a web page). When lines are too long for my eyes to cope with, the focus goes weird. I feel antsy. And it’s easy for the poet to adjust this! Use a size 12 font and count the characters! I have seen lines 84 characters long, and I know this is Too Long. But I think poets, whether writing in verse or prose, should think about both shape and accessibility on the page. It’s part of the poem, isn’t it? Am I going completely daft? If the poem is ever published in a book or pamphlet, the page will be smaller than A4. So it’s sensible to set margins that take account of that. Unless the whole point is to make it as difficult to read as possible. Cue, thicket.

Double spacing
Many poems arrive formatted with double spacing. I wonder whether some literary courses, MLitts or whatever, are requesting poets to submit all work double spaced? It used to be the norm for university essays. Maybe the submission requirement has filtered through to verse where it’s not appropriate. Or perhaps some websites have influenced formatting conventions? Frequently you see poems double-spaced online, and I suspect it’s because the person putting them there doesn’t know how to adjust the formatting. (A hard return on a keyboard will create double spacing in a web page. You have to hold the shift key down at the same time to do a soft return and get the spacing single.)

Back to the shape of the poem on the page. I don’t mind if line spacing’s slightly wider than single. That doesn’t get in the way of seeing the shape of the whole poem. But full double spacing has an odd effect. It stretches a poem that should fit on one page onto two. It makes stanza breaks enormous (because they are quadruple spaces). It makes poems with single line stanzas (they do exist) look exceptionally weird, as though the lines are floating in egg white.

Habitual past
It’s not just the shape of the poem, it’s the sound and motion.

Okay. Poets are fond of writing poems about something that used to happen regularly. They used to make daisy-chains in the garden. They’d see the old lady next door cutting the grass with kitchen scissors. They’d giggle about how funny she was. And all the while they’re telling you about this, the ‘d’ sounds start to stack up. Not only this. The actions they’re describing are increasingly generalised. A single action in the past (the time you trimmed your uncle’s moustache) is more compelling than the fact you used to do it often. And you can use a simple past tense for something that happened often. You just need to tinker a little.

There is a sort of poem that begins with a sequence of habitual past statements. It is building up to something that happened once – we know that immediately. However, it’s building in the same way that a thousand other poems build. Like this:

It seemed as though I’d always known him.
We’d walk together in the park
and comment on the state of the grass.
We’d talk about dogs and joggers,
our missing relatives. He’d tell me about
the day his hat turned into an elephant.
I’d say, Don’t be daft. He’d tell me
there were more things in the world, Horatio.
One day [ . . . ]

This caveat is just as true for prose. The lines above sound like the typical opening to a short story. But nobody wants to write typical openings. What we want is an opening that is arresting.

For the same reason, you might not want your anecdote to follow the typical construction of ‘I’d always known . . . Then one day . . . . Suddenly . . . Finally’. It’s all too familiar. Besides, that little word ‘then’ is deceptively easy to slip in. Many poets find themselves using it two or three times in one short poem. They don’t see it because it’s so small and unobtrusive (except to a person stuck in a thicket). I am now so sensitized to ‘then’ that I tend to underline it and watch it, just to stop the wee thing getting out of hand.

Intensifiers and qualifiers
Mark Halliday once pointed out to me that few statements were not improved by removing the word ‘very’. He was right. I’ve been now withholding ‘very’ for a merry long time. A long time (in a poem) sounds longer than a very long time. I don’t know why. ‘Really’ is just the same. But ‘really’ is not really a problem in poems (please note, none of this applies if writing in direct speech or monologue).

The one that is a newish problem for me is ‘so’. I don’t mind ‘so’ in “the Christmas pudding was so rich that we all threw up in the afternoon”. And I quite like using ‘so’ to mean ‘because’ (though I have rationed myself since one blog when I noticed I had used it at the start of five different paragraphs).

No, the problem is ‘so’ as intensifier. So sweet. So charming. So nice. So small. So sad. ‘So’ before an adjective contributes to the awwwww effect. Which in poems is generally to be avoided, unless you’re being funny. Find one good adjective and use it. Or better still – as Mark Twain said of the noble Adjective in Pudd’nhead Wilson, “When in doubt, strike it out.”

And finally (yeeha!):
Complicated sentences (with a multiple clauses and difficult line breaks and commas and semicolons) that go on for two inches or more. Like this:

I looked into the trees, into the myriad branches
where the leaves, drifting past in yellows, reds, browns,
golds, flaunted their transitory selves; knowing they
were products of the mind, my own cold
consciousness; and not even, no matter how I looked at
it now or then, or at any time
since, leaves – in the sense of chlorophyll and foliage –
futile and fearful – and real.

This is poem as thicket. If the poet were writing prose, I doubt they could achieve such impenetrability. I have created the example, of course, but I have not exaggerated.

I am going off dashes too, by the way, not just semi-colons, but I’m not going to mention that here. Except that dashes are dashing all over the place lately, in various shapes and forms and inconsistencies, and some of them are hyphens. So in order to be less slap dash, it would be good to take a look at Punctuation Matters. Once in a while.

Now to the rest of the mountain. I may eventually be back. Did I mention I’ve also encountered some terrific poems?

No?

Well, I have.

AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WINDOW or THE HIPPOPOTA MUSE

The shortest day. Losing the plotamus.

No, not really. That was just to get your attention. Well, it was the shortest day yesterday – but also an absolute beauty in this neck of the woods. Bright, brilliant sunshine and December gleaming for all it was worth.

But someone probably noticed I didn’t blog last week. This was because I had disappeared under the mountain of tasks, partly a result of Christmas, and partly Other Things.

Meanwhile, the submission envelopes were stacking up alarmingly, and arriving faster than I could open them. In the middle of all the December mayhem, it’s calming to sit and read poems from real people. But it’s been hard getting proper time to do that. I’m one of those people who slows down if pressure builds up. I slow down and go on longer, and dream about hippopotami (at least I did last night).

And although – yes – I do love poetry and language and all that stuff, I’m also endlessly analytical. I’ve never understood why I write what I call ‘poems’, let alone anyone else. So I constantly try to work out what’s going on and how it’s happening in the here and now, which is different from any other time as well as similar to every other time.

In last year’s December window, 77 sets of poems arrived. This year, so far, there have been 115 by post and 7 electronically, because the new online sub allows people to send up to 5 by email.

However, the online sub is now in a dodgy situation because of a new European Union VAT rule that comes into place in January. This requires the seller (me) to apply the VAT of the home country of the buyer to any digital sale. And then, obviously, to pay the appropriate sum to the tax revenue agents of the requisite country, thus making the small amount of income even smaller, and the time required to do it even greater. Insane.

But that’s just more plodding for the hippopotamiss. Meanwhile, I’m reading the poems people have sent. I was a bit worried that the online people would try to discuss the feedback with me – by email. I can’t do that because I don’t have time, even though if I were the poet, I know I would feel I wanted to explain what the sixteenth stanza meant too. But most of the poets have been admirably restrained.

Back to the postal ones, which are still arriving. And the reading.

I’m interested in the forms and shapes. It’s what I see first. What shape the poem is on the page. I flick through the set. If they’re all similar in appearance, I wonder if the poet writes all her poems that shape. To me, the shape of the poem is part of the form of the poem, which is (if the thing is a humdinger) inextricably tied up with what the poem is saying/meaning. This indefinable business of it all coming together is part of the magic. If it works, it’s astounding. And rare.

When poems are divided up into neat chunks: couplets or triplets or quatrains, that’s okay. It looks nice. It looks like a pattern, and I like patterns. If I get to the third stanza and find myself wondering why the poem’s in quatrains, it usually means it hasn’t ‘hooked’ me. Because although I am, self-confessedly, analytical, I know I’m not supposed to be analysing the stanza format while reading.

Similarly, I hate the way I go on about sentence structure or syntax. I really do. But often I get lost in the opening sentence by line three. This can happen for all sorts of reasons, not least using a sequence of words in which each one could, for a moment, be either a noun or a verb or an adjective. Something like this:

Frost walks break, cooling, and again

seasons hope open before the wheelbarrow
that peril jacks here catching all the attention! Oh I know
confusion purposes this.

Of course that was an extreme example because anyone would find it confusing. But you see my point. When you read ‘Frost walks break’, you’re not sure whether ‘walks’ or ‘break’ is the verb. Same with ‘hope’ and ‘open’.

I often draw attention to a difficulty in finding a finite verb. Oh hopping hippopotami – what is this, an English lesson? Using the term ‘finite verb’ is a short cut. I mean the bit of the verb that’s clearly attached to the subject of the sentence, the bit that completes a statement. Verb = doing/being word, right? With a finite verb, the doing/being gets done. With bits of verbs, like participles, the doing isn’t finished so you get a sentence fragment, or non-grammatical sentence. Like this:

Moving into the sun again, and coming
back and not knowing, even then, which
way the sun, the
setting sun, the falling sun.

There’s no finite verb in that group of lines. This doesn’t mean the lines are wrong. It means there’s an interesting, displaced, floating effect. No finite verb means no position in time. I could put a finite verb in, of course, and everything would change, though not necessarily for the better:

Moving into the sun again, and coming
back and not knowing, even then, which
way the sun, the
setting sun, the falling sun was going.

All the same, when reading the second version, you feel you (sort of) know where you are. You’re in the past, for a start, even though the action is fluid. But in that first sentence, the lack of a finite verb is more taxing for the reader. And that’s without even mentioning the line breaks.

Line breaks are just another poetry trick. They can accomplish all sorts of things and this is part of the fun. But they’re also little barriers, positioned deliberately. They create tiny hitches in the rhythm, or the sense, or the flow of meaning. If those tiny hitches become major snags – because you can’t see where the central thread’s going – that’s a problem, unless the poem is (in some sense or other) about confusion. Which, just to confuse the hippopotamuse further, it might be.

There are poems that manage one single sentence across three six-line stanzas. Gerry Cambridge has just sent a beauty on his Christmas card. When this works (as it did in Gerry’s case) it is a joy. In such an instance the reader glides securely through the poem like a skier in perfect snow, and then goes back and does the whole thing again. And again. Just for the pleasure of it.

But so often it doesn’t work. Many poets seem afraid to write short sentences. I suspect there’s an unconscious sense that poems shouldn’t seem easy. If they were easy to understand at first reading, would they be poems?

Well, yes. They might well be poems. Poems can do anything. Short, long, convoluted, crazy.

On balance, though, I think it’s good to keep the reader with you, at least until she gets to the end. If she falls off her skis in the middle, she may never get back on. Or she may get onto a different poem.

In my perilous feedback to poets, I’ve been doing the usual thing of drawing attention to ‘leaning verbs’, because their proliferation is still astonishing. I was amused to see the ‘Blind Criticism’ example in this month’s issue of The North has one at the very end, which puts the author (I won’t give her away) smartly into the contemp-po box. And you can see it isn’t a bad thing. But there’s something familiar about it. It’s not, to my mind, the best thing. Because the best thing is not quite like anything you’ve read before.

It’s also possible that I’m losing it. Yes, plot lost. Hippoplotamus lostus. If you read a huge quantity of poems, you can’t miss the recurring trends. You can’t fail to see how often the word ‘heft’ pops up. Poor ‘heft’. Used as a verb, it was once singular and different. Not now. Lottaheftamus.

And the number of poems that follow the ‘then’ and ‘but now’ format! And the number of lines beginning with my least favourite word,‘as’. Not to mention the ubiquity of ‘we were stood’ or ‘we were satamus’, which causes me physical pain.

Sometimes I think it’s a good thing to be exquisitely sensitive to language and phrasing. Sometimes I know it’s not.

Here’s the list of contemp-po features that have been smacking me in the eye over the last ten days. I’ve modified a little since the last time round, where there was more illustration of the last two, so if you want to know more about what I meant, follow the link:

lots of‘I’ plus present tense: ‘I see’ and ‘I watch’ and ‘I think’
disappearing subjects (verb with no ‘I’ or ‘he’ or ‘you’)
poems in couplets
entire poem based on one metaphor (sometimes it works)
over-mixed metaphor (crossed logics)
death by adjectives
a lot of cross-stanza enjambment
colons, semi-colons and dashes that don’t (for me) do much
long sentences that lose the reader
multiple statements lacking finite verbs
sentences or stanzas starting ‘And’ and ‘But’
first few lines dead (no bite) or hard to follow
titles with a witty (?) double meaning
title steals thunder of the best (last?) line or phrase
numerous ‘as’ sentences (see blog 26.05.2011)
anaphora structure (eg each line begins ‘because’)
the last word of the last line is ‘love’
the word ‘yet’ flags an epiphany (resist! resist!)
the word ‘for’ meaning ‘because’
then, followed a few lines later by suddenly (regrettable in prose, let alone poetry)
perplexing line breaks, which is nearly but not quite as bad as
line breaks on ‘significant’ word like ‘break’ or ‘turn’ or ‘over’
a rhyme at, or very near, the end, but none anywhere else
no punctuation, and then some suddenly arrives
the ‘leaning verb thing’
the ‘how’ and ‘the way’ clause repetition
line breaks sometimes serves as a pause (no comma) but other line breaks are enjambed so the line break isn’t a pause at all and it all gets . . . difficult
poems that only fit comfortably on a page at least A4 in size
‘I was sat under a tree’; ‘we were stood by the bar’—contemporary usage that works conversationally but sits uneasily in formal writing (so sez Nellie and see OxfordWords blog on this)
scant awareness of assonance – one of the best tricks in the book. Maybe even the best.

Back to the envelopes now. Oh, one last word. Some nice people have deferred sending poems, they tell me, because they don’t want me to be overburdened. But theirs could be the ones I would like most. I know I can’t keep this up forever. By next December, there may not be a window at all. So send them now while the hippo muse is still (relatively) amusing and before the postamus crumbles. Hip, hip, hurrotamus!

2B or not 2B

Who invented the term ‘reading window’?

This space is more like the other side of the letter-box, sitting on the floor surrounded by envelopes. More keep falling on my head.

So far fifty-eight sets of poems have arrived with stamps both franked and unfranked, and five smaller sets by email (from online only subscribers). Two are at the sorting office because they were understamped (at least I assume the two notifications are for submissions envelopes). I am working my way through and replying one by one, but I’m only up to 22.

The task is absorbing and educative. But I don’t feel confident about it. Who could? Who really knows what’s what when it comes to poetry? Who can be sure she is not missing the whole point?

But one can analyse things too much. So I just start reading, and I try to read each poem as though I’ve never read one before, though this gets more difficult over the month. It’s also more difficult if the poems resemble one another. That is to say if a poet has eight poems all in three-line stanzas. (I like to think each poem has its own shape or form.)

Still, I put my anxiousness to one side, and set about suggesting this, that and the other with my new pencil.

When you bought a 2B pencil in the olden days, you had a good idea how it would write. How soft, not hard. How legible, not faint. These days decent pencils cost serious money and at Rymans (where I bought mine last week) they mainly come in packets of three.

But one brand of 2B pencil is not like another. My new pencil is not as soft as I’d like it to be, or as soft as the last three types of pencil I’ve been using. To me, it’s somewhere between HB and B. However, it has a good eraser that fits on the end, which is useful on the bus.

Because the space behind the letter-box sometimes finds its way onto a bus or train, where the process continues. But it has to come back in the end to the table in the sitting room because the laptop’s there where I log the ms and try to write some comments that’ll help me remember what feedback I gave to the poet. After the first 50, you have no idea what you said to whom, or which Peter or Janet was which (Peter, Janet – please don’t take this personally).

Specific difficulties arise. In particular this: I have a system of ticks and smiley faces. If I like a poem, I put a pencil tick on the page. If I like it so much I would publish it (if I could), I put a smiley. But this system is starting to break down. Sometimes I like poems but still think they’re not fully cooked. Sometimes I like them with a big tick and sometimes a tiny, weeny tick. Sometimes I like them and don’t remember to tick them. And sometimes the poet, bless her cotton socks, only gets two smileys over three years no matter how many poems she sends.

But there’s a more serious issue. The quality of many of these submission envelopes is high. It really is. I now see a good number of sets of poems I would like to publish. Far more than I can publish. It’s easier to say a thing should happen than make it happen.

So I’m sitting behind the letter-box looking at an increasing number of poets who have sent me several sets of work, all of which has had a warm response from me, but not quite so warm that I’ve said ‘Yes, let’s make a pamphlet of your poems.’ They are in my ‘maybe’ list, and the list is getting longer by the day. Oh but this is a difficult one! It’s like that editorial response to poems sent to a magazine that goes ‘Liked these but not quite enough.’ Meanwhile, the poems are all jostling and stiffening their collars, desperate to be loved.

How do I decide which to offer to publish? There are too many elements to mention. Sometimes it’s one individual poem. Sometimes it’s a sense of the sheer talent of the writer. Sometimes it’s knowing a set of poems is nothing like anything I’ve ever published before. Sometimes, it’s feeling the publication would blend well, or contrast well, with the others I have lined up for a certain year. Sometimes it’s having an idea about how the set of poems might be presented. Sometimes it’s the sheer energy of the poems – an energy great enough to counteract my own tiredness.

This is not a moan. Please don’t start feeling sorry for me. I like doing this reading. It’s meaningful and worthwhile, and it teaches me something. Each time, I learn new things. It is a great thing that there’s lots of good poetry happening. There cannot be ‘too much’ good poetry.

Also, I invited the poems and chose the space in which I sit. Nevertheless, there’s something else I want to say.

There are quite a number of small presses these days. But not enough. We need more small publishers. There are sets of poems that – for hugely varied reasons – don’t lend themselves to winning competitions but that can and should be published and shared.

We need more co-operatives – small groups of writers looking at this together. More people who want to learn about ways of supporting other poets, through publications and associated activities. More people with the skills of editing and typesetting (or the determination to buy them in), who can work with others to make interesting, varied, provocative, dynamic publications. More people like Emma Wright, at the Emma Press, and Duncan at Tapsalteerie. More people who, perhaps fed up with their poems being liked (but not quite enough), move into supporting other poets in the same situation. More unincorporated Rebel Incs.

Poacher can turn game-keeper. Poets can take the power into their own hands and more of them should. I don’t mean self-publishing. I mean publishing other people. People you know and like. People you don’t know but should. People whose work deserves it. It’s an extraordinary learning experience.

I could recommend a number of good poets to you. Just drop me a line.

COURAGE!

So you line them up. Three here, four there. Two of them are holding hands.

They’re spruced up and looking at their best. They are absolutely clean. They’ve never been out before. Well, that’s not quite true. Two of them went on a trip when they were young. But since then they’ve matured. They’re different now.

You feel proud. The tall thin one sprang from practically nowhere and Jack says he’s amazing. You have the little fat one by heart.

It’s time.

You have no intention of folding them. You ease them one by one into an A4 manila envelope.

Which is ‘manila’ because of manila hemp. Manila folders were once made of ‘manila hemp’. But manila hemp isn’t even hemp. It’s a fibre made from musa textilis, a type of banana plant. At one time they used it mainly for rope. Manila rope. They called the envelopes after the rope.

Envelope. Rope. Musa textilis. This strengthens everything.

You queue in the Post Office but the queue is very long. So you buy large-letter Christmas stamps in the paper shop instead. First class. You get more for your money with a Christmas stamp. You get a seasonal picture. This year it’s a cute cartoon of three children posting mail in a big red postbox topped with snow.

It’s 12 degrees and no sign of snow. Still – one large stamp for the boys in their musa textilis. Another one for the return envelope with your own address on.

You slip the (folded) return envelope inside the other envelope with the poems. You remove the self-sealing strip. You seal the musa textilis carefully.

You pop your darlings into the red post box. It’s good that post boxes are still red (apart from the one in Dunblane they painted gold after Andy Murray won at Wimbledon) because it means you trust them more. You have to have trust.

Only after you walk away, do you realise

a) you’ve been feeling nervous all morning

b) you’re lighter. They’ve gone. They’re away. They’re out on their own, cock-a-whoop and crazy.

But what about when they come back? They’ll be slightly creased round the edges, won’t they? The paper will be limp. Most of them will be sheepish.

Still, they have to do their best without you. That’s what you made them for.

They’re a communication and they need a reply. So send them.

The HappenStance reading window starts tomorrow. Between December 1 and December 30 your poems are welcome, and will get a reply. But do read the guidelines first.

PANSY PIFFLEDUNK’S FIRST POEM

I’ve never thought about them so carefully before.

That sounds daft. I work with people putting first pamphlet collections together all the time. Which poem comes first is important, and the choice is never accidental.

But this was different. Last week, I was at Lumb Bank (I have never been before) with a group of poets thinking about how they might put together a first pamphlet or book. (I was tutoring for the Arvon Foundation with Helen Tookey, poet and managing editor for Carcanet Press).

You know that bit you see on people’s bio at the back of magazines: Pansy Piffledunk is working towards her first collection?

I’ve always wondered about ‘working towards’. It’s not the same as ‘walking towards’ or ‘wandering towards’. It has a sense of determination and direction. Pansy Piffledunk knows where she’s going. These days Pansy Piffledunk also has an ‘overarching theme’. She is working towards a first collection based around an imaginary group of miners’ mothers in the lost Goose Egg Gold Mine of El Dorado County.

But I don’t want to mock her. Not really. We all aspire to a degree of Piffledunk. It’s not unreasonable to feel one should be ‘working’ rather than ‘wandering’, even if the reality is different. And looking closely at first poems was fascinating, especially for someone like me who usually opens the book at the back.

We looked together at the opening poem of Niall Campbell’s new book Moontide. People loved its setting and atmosphere – the image of lighting a match in a grain store. A couple of them went away to buy the book. Lots of opening poems seem to be in some way or other about the act of writing poems (buried in metaphor).

I found an original 1992 volume of Simon Armitage’s Kid, in the Lumb Bank library, with its weird opening narrative about a man who comes to stay (alive) and leaves very much dead. And what about the haunting opener to Tara Bergins’ This is Yarrow? I won’t forget it. Another book I have to read the rest of.

During the week, although we did discuss opening poems and (briefly) structure of first collections, we mainly agreed (though we didn’t put it quite like this) that ‘wandering towards’ was okay. Wandering via the best possible poems you can write. Themes might turn out to have been arching over. Or not. Doesn’t matter really.

What does matter, if one has publication in mind, is understanding how publisher/editors think and feel. (They do have feelings.)

Writing poems is one thing. (A privilege and a joy.) Getting them published (if that’s the right choice) is another.

But poetry publishing is not a mystery. It’s not hard to find out how it works, and then plot a route towards a destination. Not half as hard as writing poems.

Pansy believes a publisher will take an interest in her work – such a keen interest that said publisher will invest time and money in making her book available to The World. She may not have noticed that the publisher’s also engaged in a creative task. She or he is working towards (and never ever arriving at) making a whole imprint come together. If Pansy isn’t interested in what the publisher is creating (except in so far as it concerns herself), why will the publisher (who doesn’t need any more poets anyway) be interested in her?

(Because my poems are so good, of course, says Pansy.)

I know I’ve used far too many brackets in this blog entry. Half of what I think these days is in parenthesis. (I don’t care.)

(I have been away for nine days. In my absence, the Christmas cactus has gone berserk. Things bloom when I am not here.

)

WHAT DO PAMPHLET PUBLISHERS LOOK FOR?

This was one of the questions at the Poetry Book Fair last Saturday.

The Book Fair was exceptionally good. The atmosphere was hustling and bustling but absolutely friendly and unhierarchical. Faces you know well from the backs of prize-winning bookjackets rubbed shoulders with faces you’d never seen before. Hang on—faces can’t rub shoulders with faces. But you know what I mean.

Apart from selling books at a stall, and launching D A Prince’s new book Common Ground, and the choc-lit anthology, Blame Montezuma! (with lashings of chocolate tasting buttons), I took part in a panel event, together with Peter Hughes of Oystercatcher Press and Emma Wright of the Emma Press. Joey Connolly (Kaffeeklatsch and Poetry Book Fair manager) asked the questions. Peter, Emma and I all publish poetry pamphlets, but the way we do it, and what we look for, is (and isn’t) different.

The truth is: each poetry imprint is highly individual. It must be. It’s just like writing poems. Making a publishing enterprise is a creative act, and each person who does it does it differently. What we have in common is that we are all making this same thing, a thing that produces and sells little papery publications with poems in them. We’re probably all mad (in a good way). We are all (I think) stubborn and determined.

Anyway, one of the questions was about submissions. What were we looking for?

There wasn’t a lot of time. I answered the question truthfully, but my answer wasn’t the whole answer. So much so that I travelled back on the train thinking hard about what the answer really was.

What did I say on the day? Something like this: that I couldn’t define what I was looking for because I didn’t know what it was. If I knew what it was, I said, I would write it myself. I hoped to be open to poetry that defied all my expectations. Oh, and I also said I looked for work that could be accommodated within an A5 pamphlet format, because that’s what I make. Mundane, but true.

And yet not the whole story. When I read poetry submissions it is exciting to think I might come across something like nothing I’ve ever read before but still instantly recognisable as ‘poetry’ (whatever’s meant by that elusive term). And sometimes I think it happens. Generally it’s in the shape of individual poems, though, rather than poets. That is to say, someone sends a set of poems and one or two of them strike me as remarkable. The rest may not engage me at all, or only to varying degrees.

So, yes, I do look for the unexpected, the thing I can’t define.

But there’s more to it than that.

I look for the expected. I look for the expected but done well. I like mainstream as well as sidestream and substream.

I like traditional forms (except villanelles, sestinas and pantoums). I’m tough on form though: it has to have passed its MOT.

I like personal poems. I like love poems. I like poems that make sense. I like poems I don’t understand. I like poems that make me think hard. I like poems that make me work. I like lyrical poems. I like prosy poems.

But the Book Fair question was really about publishing. What did we look for with a view to publishing it?

It’s not just a matter of publishing. There’s the issue of selling. I have to sell the pamphlets to get the money to publish more. My most important sales outlet is the HappenStance subscriber group. Many of these people regularly buy pamphlets, and they tell me what they like (or don’t like). This feedback influences my subsequent choices. I might publish something I thought most of them wouldn’t like, but I certainly wouldn’t do that often. If I did, I’d lose them.

Some of my publications sell faster and get better feedback than others. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are the best (or the ones I personally like the best either) but it does mean they’ve gone down well with the people I sell to. So I make a mental note – like a colour in a colour chart – of where that poet fitted in, and what might either contrast well, or harmonise. I try to learn, all the time, about the readers as well as the poets. I want to offer them a range. I want to challenge them but I also want to please them.

Then there’s the fact that I publish two different kinds of poetry pamphlet. One set is from ‘established’ poets with an idea that demands pamphlet form. By the end of 2014 (If all goes according to plan) I will have published nine pamphlets, three of them in this category. I don’t actively go round looking for them at all, because I’m permanently over-committed. But if something turns up that I can’t resist . . .

The other six poetry pamphlets for 2014 are debuts, i.e. the poet’s first step into publication. These are the HappenStance bread and butter. Obviously I am looking for poets I think are ‘ready’. Or nearly ready. It does take time but, as Hamlet pointed out in somewhat different circumstances, the readiness is all.

Sometimes I see a set of poems I think are fabulous. No editing required. Just as they are. In this case, the debut poet doesn’t need me. He or she should win one of the competitions, thereby gaining both cash and kudos. So I suggest they go away and enter. If they don’t win (for reasons I can’t fathom) they come back to me.

At other times, I think a set of poems is amazing, and I also think, for a variety of reasons, they won’t win a pamphlet competition. They are too off the wall, or too emotional, or too retro, or too understated, or too something else. How hard it is to put this kind of thing into words!

But mostly I look (when it comes to debuts) for poets I can work with. Not just in a personal sense (though this is important too) but in a way that can make the work stronger, that can move the poet along a little.

In order to be a good editor, you need not just a sensible head in terms of meaning and impact and presentation and form, but also an intuitive grasp of what each poet is doing and how their method works. For some people, I feel I have that. This means I can be a good sounding bell. For others, even though I may like them—and their poems—I don’t.

The poet needs to be looking for something too, something more than just a publisher. He or she needs to feel an editor’s method and response to the work is ‘right’ for them. It takes a little while to establish this, which I why I encourage people to send small sets of poems during reading windows, and why I rarely offer to publish a pamphlet on first submission.

I used to be a college teacher, but I don’t want to be a ‘teacher’ now. I can’t teach anybody how to write poems. I can, however, work with them on poems. And for a few people I can be the sort of editor I need myself.

So that’s what I look for. All of it.

And at the same time, during each and every reading ‘window’, I hope I won’t find it, so I can have a bit of a rest. . . .

CURTAINS

The submissions window is shut. Here’s what came through it.

There were 117 submissions in all (ten more than the previous window).

The envelopes of poems included between 6 and 70 poems, but about three quarters of them held 12, as requested on the submissions page.

I read and responded to around 1500 poems, and to their authors. It got more difficult as the month went on and my brain got fuller.

77 of those sending poems had never sent to HappenStance before.

40 were on their second, third or fourth submission. (That doesn’t mean they were making a fourth desperate bid to get a pamphlet published. For a good number of people, it’s just about getting thoughtful feedback on work in progress.)

14 were not ‘new’ poets. They had been previously published in book or pamphlet form, 6 of them by HappenStance.

4 people warmly invited to send poems didn’t send any. They know who they are!

77 were women, 40 men. Ages, so far as I could tell, varied from early twenties to eighties (people don’t always say – and why should they?). Ethnic minority poets could be numbered on one hand (I would like to see more).

30 were from Scotland (most ever)

16 were from London.

8 were from Wales (most ever)

2 from the Irish Republic.

61 from the rest of the UK (a couple of these have addresses both in the UK and France).

About 80% were HappenStance subscribers, or took out a subscription just before they sent in the poems.

I made offers to 7 people for slots in 2015, 2016 and 2017.

3 of these were to poets I had been working with for some time, so I already had them in my book as ‘maybes’.
2 were to established poets with more than one previous book-length publication.
1 was to a HappenStance poet for a second pamphlet (rare but occasionally happens).
5 were women, 2 were men. (All were too old for a Gregory Award.)
2 of them live in Scotland. Both men.

Publishing schedule

2015 is now full to the brim.
2016 is full.
2017 is beginning to fill up.

There were many good and memorable poems and poets. In my notebook (apart from the offers) I marked 22 as long-term ‘maybes’, although (with a couple of exceptions) I didn’t tell them this because it’s miserable to get up hopes if in the long-term they aren’t realised. In any case, I couldn’t publish all 22, whatever happened.

There was a problem this month, in that the reading was too intense and voluminous (if all the poems were haiku or tanka it would be fine). In some cases, I didn’t read all the poems people sent because I ran out of juice, especially where the poems were lengthy or dense. By ‘dense’ I mean long lines and filling most of an A4 page. I always read poems three times and think hard. So those kind of poems take me at least 20 minutes to process and respond to. If there are 12 of them . . .

The other problem was that I ceased to be able to do anything else but read submissions. The days were not long enough. And so I have to make some changes.

Because it is impossible to read a large number of people’s work with a possible view to publication and at the same time keep a publishing business going. There isn’t any life left to do the publishing bit. That’s why most publishers have that little notice that says ‘no unsolicited submissions’ (though they get them anyway).

I was supposed to be finishing work on two new pamphlets in July – by Tom Cleary and Ruth Marden. Both ground to a halt as I disappeared under a tide of poetry submissions.

Even now I am wabbit, and this week 16 boxes of books arrived to be packaged and promoted and all the associated activities therewith (the Choc-Lit Anthology and D A Prince’s second collection, Common Ground).

So in December, I know I can’t read 117 submissions again, or not in the same way. Besides, I have reason to suppose, if things increase as the way they have over recent years, there will be 127. When I started this, there were 30 – one a day for about a month. Please don’t think I am moaning. I invited people – nay urged them to send me poems. But I always knew my capacity had limits, and this summer I reached them.

I intend to continue an open submissions policy, but I can’t read so many poems at once again.

I am really operating two separate services.

The first of these invites people, if they feel they’re ready, to make a pamphlet proposal and include a few poems. (I hardly ever make an offer on this basis. I have only done it once in the last three years, for example, with a debut poet.)

The second (and this is the one I prefer) invites people to send me a few of their poems simply for feedback, with a personal letter giving a bit of background. The second option avoids the accept/reject situation. I hardly ever find myself in an accept/reject position, though it does occasionally happen. It is more a case of how interested I am, and over time, how much more interested I get.

Some revised details are on the submissions page. Interestingly, one thing seems to have clicked in my head lately: when it comes to approaching a publisher about a publication, six poems really is enough. (I have, nevertheless, changed my guidelines to suggest a maximum of 8 for a first submission, because I think it useful for people to get feedback on more than half a dozen, and I think I can still manage that. At least I’m going to try.)

I know poets must think, when it comes to considering a pamphlet proposal, that one would need more – more of their range or their styles or their thematic idea and so on. But it isn’t so. You can sense your own quickening of interest almost instantly, and in that case, it’s easy to send compliments and a request to see a larger set. Some people’s poems welcome you in; others don’t. It’s not just about quality; it’s about whether the reader and the poems get on. The covering letter, to me, is also important. Publishing is about a relationship, and that’s where it often begins. I always reply personally too, and that won’t change.

Thank you to all the people who trusted me with their poems in July. I know some of them found the feedback useful because they’ve written and said so. Some found the reverse, and I apologise for heavy-handedness in some cases.

And now it’s back to the business of trying to create and sell the books! And the two latest are not even in the shop yet so nobody can buy them!.

CLEANSING THE POETRY PALATE

Reading poetry in fathoms has a weird effect.

One of our garden birds sometimes flies into the window (birds can’t see glass). Thunk. It sits on the path stunned for half an hour, unable to articulate a plea. Gradually it hops into the undergrowth and from there, eventually, away. That’s how it is with me after five hours of poetry.

In bed, at night, I’ve been reading The Chocolate Connoisseur by Chloé Doutre-Roussel. The author of this book was once the chocolate buyer for Fortnum and Mason. She’s now a ‘freelance chocolate consultant’. She eats about 450g of chocolate a day and gets up at 6.00 a.m. to start tasting. According to Chloé ‘a successful tasting needs exam conditions: no smoking, no drinking (except water), silence, paper, pen, an organised table. . . no smell or noise to distract you . . . and your body and mind should be calm and comfortable’. She drinks water or eat bread as a palate cleanser after each different chocolate. And when she’s finished tasting, she swims for an hour. Every day.

Perfume samplers take the business no less seriously. They talk about ‘the nasal palate’ (a nice one for oxymoron spotters) and they cleanse it between different scents with coffee. Coffee’s an olfactory palate cleanser, unless the thing you have to smell is . . . coffee. In this case, you sort out your nose between coffee beans by sniffing your own skin.

So – you guessed this was coming – how do you cleanse the palate between the poetry?

Because I have been dwelling on this matter. So much so, that I looked up ‘cleanse’ (as opposed to clean). You clean the bathroom (at least you would if you weren’t reading poetry all day) but you cleanse your palate. ‘Cleanse’ comes from the Middle English clensen, from Old English clǣnsian ‘to purify’, which in turn derives from clǣne (‘clean’). Cleanse sounds intense. I feel my elbow leaning into the word, with a scrubbing brush in my hand.

So how do you purify your poetry palate? I don’t think I do it properly. I wish I did. Like Chloé, I prefer to read first thing, though not quite as early as six a.m. My brain is clearest in the morning. If I had time, I’d go for a short walk between each set of poems. Instead, I sniff some coffee, and sometimes drink water and/or eat bread. I have tried sniffing my own skin but it doesn’t work.

Prose is a pretty a good poetry palate cleanser though. So I write to each poet, by hand, after reading their submission and scribble a few notes in my record book.

Sometimes I start to feel impossibly full. I can override this feeling because of years of practice – but I don’t recommend it. The impossibly full feeling should, whenever possible, be attended to.

But reading all the submissions is also not like tasting chocolate or cheese or whisky or wine. The poetry submissions are not, with notable exceptions, work from master artisans at the top of their craft, although the work is single-origin and organic. The source is human beans.

Each bean is clearly different from the next. Each has unique features as well as sharing aspects with her/his fellows. It’s easier to pick out common practice than identify what is, or could be, distinctive.

Still, I start with the shape of the poem on the page. It helps if the shapes of the poems vary from one to the next – a kind of palate cleanser in itself. If a poet favours long lines and dense layout as the norm, I flag fairly soon. I feel bad about this.

It’s good if the first poem is short. It eases you in. It’s also good if several of the poems are not long. I don’t think poems should be short – not at all. But if you’re reading a lot and mean to read each one three times before articulating a response, you manage the short ones more easily and thoroughly. Unless there are only three lengthy poems in the envelope, which is fine, and never happens.

I try to come to each poet without preconception, even though there are many obvious similarities between them. Because you can get distracted by recurring features. I am over-sensitised to what I see most often. For example, the business of laying poems out in couplets. (When I say ‘couplets’, these are not couplets in the traditional sense. They are two-line stanzas.)

Two-line stanzas, yes. We like two-line stanzas these days. Most poets choose to run the sentences across the stanza break frequently. Lots of space. Easy to read (unless the enjambed syntax is fearsome). So I welcome a couple of poems set out in this way. They look friendly and familiar.

But when they start to stack up, I get irritable. I turn the page. Not another poem in couplets! Yes, another.

My irritation with two-line stanzas is the unease of the professional choc-lit consultant and it is obviously unreasonable. In The National Poetry Competition earlier this year the first three prizes went to poems by Linda France, Paula Bohince and Josephine Abbott. Guess how their poems were presented? In groups of two lines. And in the commended section, two of the seven poems were . . . in couplets. Couplets are uncontestably ‘in’.

I must stop calling them couplets, since often the two lines only belong together by virtue of positioning. The poems are more like solid blocks, in which a line-space has been inserted where every third line might otherwise be. They have been aerated, like shaking out a duvet.

For several centuries ‘couplets’ rhymed and were metrically matched. Poetry has to react against itself regularly and break with the traditions – any art form does. So couplets got themselves half-rhymed, then unrhymed, then unmetrical (though even now the lines tend to match lengthwise). Poets broke the unit by enjambing fearlessly. They rampaged down the sheet, revelling unrepentantly in space and counter-space.

Over time, two-line units that were neither rhyming, nor metrical became commonplace. But poetry reacts creatively in response to constraint. Art doesn’t like a ‘norm’.

And I am manifesting all the symptoms of a person who needs to have her poetry palate cleansed. A bit of rebellion, you see, does help. But equally, a poem that follows common practice but does it exceptionally well – that’s just as good.

Meanwhile, there is another method. Yesterday I wrote a poem myself. I felt guilty but I did it anyway.

In some sense, all poems are in dialogue with all other poems. They respond and react to each other, as well as to the world. Some of them react by getting more like the poems they admire; others react against common practice, though soon the rebellions are popularised, and so it goes. My own poem is not in couplets. Or two-line stanzas. It cleansed my palate because I felt bold and rebellious writing it.

Today I can welcome a good number of poems that go into the ark in twos. And threes. And other neat arrangements.

p.s. ‘Poetry does not like to be up to date. She refuses to be neat.’ Stevie Smith, in My Muse, 1960.

LIVING ON CAKE IN THE READING WINDOW

So this is what it’s like.

We perk up in the mornings when there are unfranked stamps to peel off envelopes.

Dinner happens late.

A glass of red wine may be spilled over poems, but only in the evening.

Much pencil sharpening goes on.

Punctuation, and sentences (especially short ones) feel like old friends.

Good poems cause excitement.

We scrutinise interesting poems like other people do crosswords.

We wonder why everyone doing a Creative Writing MA includes at least one prose poem.

There are no days off, though there are days when everything is off.

Sometimes one of us walks round the house muttering bloody poets bloody poets bloody poets or what the f***!

Sometimes that same person says, ‘Aren’t there any orders today? Why don’t they BUY something?’

Sometimes he also says, ‘There’s a roomful of pamphlets upstairs already. Shouldn’t you sell them before you print any more?’

We don’t care how old you are. Or young.

We worry a lot. About upsetting people. And about metaphors.

Poetry is our bread and butter. Except poetry is more like cake, and you can’t live on cake. Well you can, but you wouldn’t want to, would you?

We think of poets as adjective-prone.

‘We’ is mainly ‘I’.

We are fallible.

THE READING WINDOW OPENS

So this is what I do during the reading window in July.

The envelopes arrive (about 35 so far). I open them, number them and log them. I take note of whether the person has sent me poems before and whether they’re HappenStance subscribers. I read the covering letters. I put them in my yellow box, which is in the conservatory downstairs, well away from this computer screen and its interruptions.

It’s nice in the conservatory at the back of the house because you see the thick green of the trees and the Russian vine over the fence, and the main interruption is birdsong.

Each day I read at least a couple of the submissions, if I can, and return them. I read with a pencil in my hand, and write on the pages. I write some notes in my green book on what I thought of them.

On some people’s poems I write a lot. I feel a little guilty about this because it makes a hell of a mess of the poem. But at least it shows I’ve read it carefully and had a response. Because that’s all I do really – respond to the poems as best I can. Often I find the techniques of a poem interesting, even when I don’t much like it. On the other hand, sometimes I like it but it seems to me the technique isn’t working.

There are poems where my response fails. I don’t write all over everything! But poems are enormously interesting. There’s so much one could say. There’s so much one could wreck. How on earth to get the balance right between a constructively critical response and encouragement?

In the end, I just do what I do.

I thought I’d illustrate this week by sharing a poem with my scribblings. But I can’t share one from my submissions box. I’d have to ask the author first. And in any case, it might be a poem they’d later publish somewhere. So I picked one at random, by a poet totally unfamiliar to me, in a somewhat uninspiring anthology titled Poetry of the Thirties – in which only three poems are by a female author, all three by Anne Ridler). The poem I chose is not by Anne Ridler.

Here’s it is with my mark-up. At least it will be if I can get the scanner to behave. Not sure how legible it is…

And now for the after-thoughts.

When you read a person’s poem – a person you don’t know at all – you have no idea what underpins it. You know nothing about the life out of which it’s grown. And this was true for me with the poem above.

The author was Philip O’Connor. That name may mean something to some of you. It it dropped into an empty white space for me. But now I’ve read something about him. What an astonishing person! As mad as birds, as his drinking companion Dylan Thomas might have put it. But what an extraordinary life! And other poems by him in the book are more interesting – each completely different from the next. I don’t know that I like them exactly, but I am fascinated by them. More, please.

In ‘Blue Bugs in Liquid Silk’ (yes, he is a surrealist, or started that way) he writes “and a purple sound purrs in basket-house / putting rubies on with red arms”. And ‘Useful Letter’ (great title) begins:

You mustn’t take in more idealism than you can usefully
digest.

And ends:

All in all, my fiend to whom I send this letter,
I think there is room for everything and that everything has a place,
BUT
You must not take on (be impregnated with)
more ideals than you can profitably digest. Nosir.

And ‘fiend’ is not a typing error. Blimey – and people these days think they’re being zany and innovative! He has a whole series called just ‘Poems’ (see my useless comment in the scanned page). They start at number 5. Here’s just one of them, number 6 (the right-hand margin should be justified but I can’t make that happen here:

Captain Busted Busby frowned hard at a passing ceiling and
     fixed his eye upon a pair of stationary taxis. Suddenly
     he went up to one of them and addressed himself
     to the driver. He discharged his socks and continued
     whistling. The taxi saluted but he put up with it, and
     puckered a resigned mouth and knitted a pair of
     thoughtful eyebrows.

Dear Philip,

You have a way of your own. I don’t always understand your poems but I find them more than ordinarily interesting. Do send more in the next reading window (no promises – see notes to poets enclosed). I thoroughly enjoyed reading you.

Yours sincerely

Helena Nelson