GETTING YOUR POETRY PUBLISHED – Page 6 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

WHEN TIME STOPS

At StAnza this year, time stopped (for me) more than once in St John’s Undercroft, one of my most favourite venues in the world. Click on this sentence to see a picture.

The undercroft is an unexpected offshoot on South Street, not far from the fish shop. You just suddenly turn left into what seems like a doorway, shuffle down a few steps and find yourself in a medieval barrel vaulted cellar, which forms the cellar of a younger, but still ancient building. The stone ceiling arches over you, light streams in gently from windows on one side, and birds in the garden on the window side can be heard, as a backdrop, through every reading.

You can’t fit many people into the undercroft – perhaps 50? The small audiences intensify the listening experience, and it’s as though the words, released from the poets at one end, circle and embrace the listening human beings. A magical sort of space.

You would think the sound of the birds outside might distract. Somehow it does the opposite. I have never been more caught up in the sound of human voices than I have in the Undercroft.

You can be caught up there in meanings you like or dislike. You can be fascinated by verbal pictures that attract you or repel you. Whatever the experience, when you come out, blinking, into the shopping street outside, you are slightly changed. Occasionally, profoundly changed.

I sat in the Undercroft yesterday, listening to the remarkable Diana Hendry, one of our national treasures. She delivers her poems so beautifully that I found tears running down my cheeks not once, but twice. She read with SMSteele, whose poetry on the subject of soldiering, delivered with astonishing verve and charisma, filled me with unease in so many ways I was even more grateful for the birds. What was it Edward Thomas said somewhere – ‘Verse is the natural speech of men, as singing is of birds’?

War is a theme this year at StAnza, because it’s a hundred years since one started. And the first World War is the war for studying through literature at school. I have always been interested in (and slightly alarmed by) the relish young people have for the ghastly details in Wilfrid Owen. One of my former colleagues was a specialist on concentration camps. She went on holiday to visit them. Please don’t think I make light of this. I only remember it was so.

How to react to it all? How to process the meaning of wars that go on always somewhere? How to make sense of what we human beings are? Verse may be our natural speech. But we make weapons too. We maim and kill and hate. I once thought women might stop it all. Now I don’t think that.

In the Undercroft, both J.O. Morgan and Tomica Bajsić read about war too. Tomica is Croatian. He seemed incredibly young to me, but he is a war veteran. He spoke about the friends he lost in the war: his five dead friends. He read in English, his accent wrestling the English words slightly out of shape. Something in his process of mastering the language made it even more moving. I think it was his vulnerability, offered in language, as in content – his truth, his absolute honesty. If you are reading this now, at this minute, Sunday morning 9 March, 2014 ten past ten in the morning, you can hear him live streamed from a poetry breakfast. If time has elapsed, that chance will have been missed. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/stanza-2014

After Tomica, there was J O Morgan, about whom I have written before, delivered a long sequence from At Maldon. This time he had it by heart. I have never heard anything like it. I had heard him read before but I have never heard anything like this. For the first time in my life I grasped the living concept of the epic — I inhabited it. J O Morgan took us inside that terrible, beautiful, ancient story of what men do, and held us there. Time stopped. If I had only heard him when I was reading Virgil at school, or later when I feebly attempted Homer, how different things might have been. But I’ve heard him now. I have heard him now.

IN THE BLEAK MID

It’s better when it’s frosty, and it’s frosty today.

Better, that is, if you have a log burning stove and some logs, both of which are available here. The log pile is diminishing fast though.

Meanwhile, I am still working my way through the submissions, with about 450 poems still to read. Generally my time for doing this is between 5pm and 8pm, after the stove’s been lit. I worry that the last poems of the evening get a lower level of concentration than the others. Fortunately none of the poets will know they were the one I picked up at 7.45.

Interesting how different the submissions look – one compared with another, I mean. You wouldn’t think there could be such a wide variety of ways of presenting a poem on a piece of A4 paper. They are mainly A4. Occasionally one arrives on a weird size. For example, one submission had all the bottoms sliced off the A4 pages so they were nearly, but not quite, square.

The mail treats them very differently too. Some arrive in pristine condition. Some look as though they’ve been through a washing machine and then a tumble dryer. Occasionally one arrives neatly opened, as though with a paper knife, though with nothing missing.

Last night I found myself writing (not for the first time) ‘don’t underline your titles’ which, when you think about it, is an impertinent comment. I think it’s because I know the subconscious effects of presentation that I sometimes follow my impulse and comment. It’s also because it’s 7.30 and I’ve read a lot of poems.

Sometimes I sit down to work on the submissions and I feel pretty alert. I’ll do it quicker tonight, I think. It can’t take long to read 12 poems.

But it can. There is no way to do this properly and do it quickly. And often there are more than 12 poems because it’s a second or third or fourth sending.

All the same, nobody who had read The Mac is Not a Typewriter would underline headings, or type two spaces after a full stop. (You don’t have to have a Mac to read this book, and I recommend it.)

Still seeing a lot of couplets. There was a time when couplets were always rhyming couplets. There’s a strong case for a two-line stanza when the two lines rhyme. Here’s my favourite Winter poem in couplets, and it’s by Robert Nye. It borrows, and intensifies, one of Christina Rossetti’s best phrases. Many years ago, this poem was included in a pamphlet anthology I did, now long sold out, called Winter Gifts. I glued a silver star onto the cover of each and every one. That was sweetly painstaking but also a result of my not having realised at that time that a dark blue cover would not look great with a black design. You live and learn.

Winter More

When it was Winter what I saw
Was not enough for my heart’s claw.

I wanted the North Wind to blow
Like God the Father shouting No.

My heart was greedy for pure cold;
I wanted icicles of gold.

I wanted Taj Mahals of ice
And no mere Arctic could suffice.

Winter extreme, Winter complete
Was what I longed for in my heat

To reach an absolute North Pole
And know in body and in soul

Some more-than-polar vertigo,
The truth of snow on snow on snow.

This was my secret lust and lore:
I always wanted Winter more.

Robert Nye

SEND ME YOUR POEMS (IV): THE RELATIONSHIP

It’s personal.

If you send poems to someone you hope might publish them, it’s not a business transaction. It’s not professional, no matter how professionally you go about the task.

It’s

personal.

There may be no response. Manuscripts are returned (though not by me) with nothing but a standard slip. Even that feels (though it is not) personal.

Your poems matter. If you write something and you call it a ‘poem’, that’s tantamount to saying the words matter to you more than ordinarily.

So if the person you send it to, reads the poem and replies, it’s a relationship. The reader has responded to a communication you didn’t make lightly. And whatever poems are, they are communications, and a communication is incomplete without a response, preferably while the writer is still alive.

But hell, it’s a difficult relationship. The response is delayed, and it’s probably not what the writer hoped for. It often shows the communication didn’t ‘work’.

Or the response may be heart-warming. A sense of something understood at least partially. An echo in the darkness.

And yet (although I regularly tell poets to be wary of the word ‘yet’, especially towards the end of poems) all this is muddied by the business of publishing. The publishing thing gets in the way. The person on the other end, the publishing person who is in this case me, has a kind of power they have taken on themselves. They can say, ‘yes I would like to publish some of your poems’ or ‘no, I am really too busy just now.’

When I was a child, and then a young person, and wrote poems readily, I always took my creations to my mother. The writing, when I was in its thrall, was all-consuming. But once that intensity had passed and I thought the poem was finished, I was absolutely desperate for her to read it.

I would rush to her with my poem, which seemed to me more important than anything else in the world. She was invariably too busy. She was up to the elbows in flour, or pinning washing on the line, or writing an important letter, or drawing up a shopping list. She would put it away for later. Sometimes ‘later’ was days away.

I wonder whether she was really all that busy. Perhaps my demand was too intense. It’s hard to read and respond when a little face is scrutinizing you and waiting, waiting, waiting for the reaction.

She did always read them in the end, bless her, though sometimes she must have been sorely taxed by their contents. But her gentle response, when it came, couldn’t match the intensity with which I’d brought my offering.

Poems are intense. They turn on themselves like endless circles. When you get to the end, you’re directed right back to the beginning. They are the inside of a person opened out, whether or not that’s what they look like. I know this, even when I write comments about syntax and semi-colons, and metaphors that might be pruned.

When I read yours, a lot hinges on one particular thing. Does the poem bite? The ones I like do. They get their little teeth in and won’t let go.

If I think there’s an energy in the poem that could be better harnessed, I try to explain how that might happen. But I’m not your mother, and I don’t know, not really.

And the relationship is not how it seems. It is more equal than you think. I am on your side. Most of the time, I am just another poet waiting for a poem worth writing. All the power I have as a publisher is notional. Anyone can start publishing.

We are both weaklings in the face of this thing we call poetry. I’m reading your submissions in the hope you’ll explain it to me.

But only till Tuesday, when the window shuts. If it doesn’t shut, I don’t have time to do any of the other things, and the washing, the baking, the cleaning and the ironing are waiting. And I have a few dozen letters to write.

Now dear, as my mother would have said, do go and read Anthony Wilson on why and how poetry is good for you. This impulse to write it isn’t anything to do with getting published. It’s about the truth and insight and energy and healing in the process. And taking part in that is a marvellous thing.

Stuff publishing.

SEND ME YOUR POEMS LOOKING LIKE THIS . . .

About eighty have arrived so far. The postie is no longer surprised by the weight of our mail.

Cue nostalgia trip. Do you remember when students did the Christmas post?

In December our regular postman disappeared (there were no postwomen in our town, if anywhere). Students were back from University and they staggered down the streets (in the snow) bearing huge sacks of Christmas mail. We would lie in wait for them, eye them up, wonder how they managed to carry the huge load. We heard they were highly paid, they couldn’t wait to get home to take on the job, from which they quickly became rich. They were people’s older brothers or sons of friends of my mother’s: exotic strangers, former children who had shot into the glory of paid adulthood.

There wasn’t just one delivery a day either. There were at least two as standard. Parcels came tied up with string. You needed scissors to open them. But in any case you weren’t allowed to open them, and you didn’t.

On the Sunday before Christmas there was an extra delivery. We were supposed to offer the postman a mince pie. Those students must have had to trudge back to the sorting office for each load because none of them then had cars and the load was too heavy for a bike. That was when work was work and a letter never arrived lightly.

Back to the submissions, which slide through the door with never a whimper, except the ones that are sent recorded delivery or signed for, a horrible thing when you’re in the shower and the postman knows you’re there because the downstairs light is on.

Three kinds of mail arrive here at the moment. Submissions, Christmas cards, and orders (yeay!). Just occasionally there is a letter – I mean a personal letter. I like letters and although it’s getting increasingly difficult to do it, I like replying to them.

So I log the submissions in my big book, and number them and, as you know, read the covering letter. I read at least one set of poems a day but I’m behind now because Christmas is getting more insistent. Last week, someone (she knows who she is) sent me a letter in the form of my own checklist from last week, with answers on each of the points. It made me laugh for joy. Someone reads this! The loneliness of the long-distance blogger is exaggerated.

So yes, there’s another internal checklist for the poems themselves. And many of them arrive beautifully and clearly wordprocessed and a pleasure to read. Name and address on every sheet. Sometimes on gloriously expensive paper too (this is absolutely not necessary but nice all the same). Such arrivals tick, as they say, every box. But others . . .

On the submission page on the website, it suggests “A4 envelopes are best, so the poems don’t have a deep fold down the middle”. Also “please don’t staple or bind”.

People do staple, bind and fold. I invariably take the staples out and if, in the process, I bleed, it is not good for the poems.

In my list of Do’s and Don’ts, I suggest people word-process poems in a plain font – Calibri or Arial, or Garamond, or Palatino Linotype. Even Times Roman. Something that doesn’t draw attention to itself rather than to the poems”. As for the size of the print, I suggest you “use the size of font you’d expect to find in a book, probably a 12 and on no account bigger than 14.” Size 10 is too small.

Often poets vary the sizes of the fonts from poem to poem. If it’s a long poem, they shrink the font to make it fit inside the page. Some poems shrink so small I have to squint to read them. Others suddenly become huge and I’m disoriented.

Line spacing? Poems in books are usually somewhere between single-spacing and 1.5, depending on the editor/typesetter. There’s enough space between the lines to look nice. But poems are not double spaced, unless the poet is writing in one-line stanzas (this does happen). Prose submissions are traditionally double-spaced but not poems. They need to look like they’re going to look in the book, or roughly. And when some poems are single-spaced and others double, oh oh oh!

Most people send poems on A4 paper, of course, and quite right. It’s what I prefer. However, it does mean the author tends to ‘see’ the poem surrounded by the kind of space A4 allows for. In this context, a lengthy line looks loopingly graceful. You can fit a lot of poem onto an A4 page and still have space to breathe.

But HappenStance pamphlets are A5, and most books are similar. (It’s sometimes worth thinking about this when sending to magazines too – some are A4 in size and can accommodate wide poems beautifully; others are too small to do it easily.) It doesn’t mean you should never send me poems with long lines: it simply means be aware of the difference it makes. Very long lines will end up dog-legged on my pages, and therefore the poem will look different. (When we did Chrissy Williams’ Flying Into The Bear we had to think about this a lot.)

What should you do if your poem runs over more than one page? Of course poems are allowed to do that – they can do just what they like. But often people end the first page at the close of a stanza or line that could represent an actual ending. In this case, I spend ages thinking long and hard about the poem, which has (I think) ended. Only to find, when I’ve written some thoughts and comments, there’s more on the next page. It’s amazing how often, in such a situation, the first ending seems preferable, even though it was never meant to be one.

When I print pamphlets, one of my house rules is to make a two-page poem start on a left hand page so you can see at a glance that it hasn’t ended at the bottom of the page. If it’s a three page poem, so it’s still continuing after page two, I try to finish the page on a line that couldn’t possibly be the end – no full stop – so the reader will naturally turn over to see what happens next.

When it comes to long poems, the easiest thing is just to write at the bottom of the page ‘cont. over’ or ‘page 1 of 2’, or something that makes it dead obvious the end is not nigh.

Should all this matter? No, of course not. The poems should speak for themselves.

It’s just a matter of helping them along.

SEND ME YOUR POEMS? (2)

Well, it’s working. Ten sets arrived yesterday. In for a penny, in for a pound.

That’s 63 in total so far, and we’re only just half way through the month. I log them as they come in and read the covering letters – an interesting process in itself. I work through every tenth submission in detail (at random), and return some comments immediately. That makes me feel I’m making head road.

Because this week, at the same time, I had the personal Christmas cards to do (and some gifts to post), a book launch to organise at the Scottish Poetry library, lots of books to dispatch and some writing (non-poetic) to do as part of a paid task. (Paid tasks are crucial round here, for obvious reasons.)

The older I get, the more I realise how analytical I am. I’m one of these people who watches a film and then has to discuss the way the story was handled.

As I look at the December submissions, each of them sent by people doing what I myself once did, I’m analysing my own response. Unlike the reaction to films, this particular analysis results partly from my unease with the role. I’m not keen on being in a position to inflict joy or woe, though it seems somewhat unavoidable.

What I most want to do is share understanding of this poetry business and how it works. And in order to do that I need to understand it myself. Frequently I’m scratching my head.

But on Friday, I thought I should draw up another checklist. People talk about ‘ticking the boxes’. It’s a common metaphor these days because checkboxes are literally all over the place. I had survey from the Health Board this week. Boxes. And on Ebay, the feedback is checkboxes. When we go to the doctor, she is checking symptom boxes.

I have a number of internalised poetry-letter boxes. Maybe it’s helpful to share them externally. So here are my checkboxes for when I read the covering letter. In the end, the poems speak for themselves, but it would be foolish to pretend that anybody comes to poetry wholly uninfluenced by its trappings, even though the proof of the pudding is in the reading.

For a start, I write this blog every week – firing words into the web and hoping some of them land somewhere. So yes, I wonder whether people sending poems have read this. That’s not my first checkbox but it’s one of them, and it has sub-boxes to it, as well. If the sender hasn’t read this blog ever, could that mean they’re not a web user? Could it mean they’ve never visited the HappenStance website, are not signed up for the newsletter, haven’t read the Do’s and Don’ts and the Guidelines and so on? And if this is true, does that mean this is a poet who doesn’t interact on the web?

If so, that’s significant to me. It is not true that all good poetry readers are active on the internet – far from it – but many of them are. And this medium, these days, is where much poetry is read. When I worked as a college lecturer, if any of my students were asked to find a poem, the web was where they started. Author, title and where is it? They were appalled if it turned out their poem couldn’t be turned up by googling it. I was even more appalled when they could find the poem by googling it. But that’s a topic for another day.

If the person who has sent the poems has read this blog – if that person is reading it at this minute – I’m also aware that what I write here could make them totally neurotic. It shouldn’t. People do stuff ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – so what? It’s a learning process. This is all a learning process. For me, too.

So here goes. Checkbox alert.

Is this a first submission? ☐

(Lots of them are third, or fourth approaches, but now that I’m getting so many, sometimes I get names confused, and it’s good to remind me.)

Is the poet’s name familiar to me? ☐

(Ideally, any publisher you approach will have heard of your name before you write to them. They will have seen it in magazines, at least, or met the person at an event. Of course, ideals are one thing and realities are another.)

Is this one of my subscribers? ☐

(These people are important to me. They are the HappenStance support network.)

Do they sound like a real person? ☐

(Some people get terribly self-conscious and send paragraphs of ‘bio’ or blurb or quotes from people who know them. This doesn’t work for me.)

Have they read this blog? ☐

Have they read (and followed) submission guidelines etc on the website? ☐

Is this personal already active in promoting poetry? ☐

(Could be a member of a reading group, or a volunteer at a festival, or a regular festival attender, or even just a regular buyer and reader of poetry books.)

Have they chosen HappenStance for a reason? ☐

(as opposed to because HappenStance is just another attempt to get into print).

Have they read any HappenStance publications? ☐

(If so, I’m expecting them to say something about that.)

Is the letter written in good, clear English? ☐

(If the poet writes mangled prose, what will the poetry be like?)

Do they mention publication in magazines I know and like? ☐

(I have a list of reputable magazines on this site, though I don’t take them all, and I’d better not say which I do subscribe to currently because the others will get upset.)

If the poet is in Scotland, are they placing poems only in Scotland, or across the borders as well? ☐

Has this poet already had a pamphlet or book published? ☐

(The majority of HappenStance pamphlets are first publications.)

Where is the poet located? ☐

(If it’s outside the UK, a little frown. I can give feedback but publication is honestly unlikely. I’ll want to know about their connections inside the UK. Do you know what it costs now to post a pamphlet to Australia?)

After the launch at the Scottish Poetry Library yesterday – a lovely event at which C J (Jonty) Driver, Hamish Whyte and Gerry Cambridge read poems and there was much milling and chatting – it struck me that living poets are a human pyramid. We can be too inclined to think about moving up the pyramid, rather than strengthening our place in it. Poets support and are supported by other poets. Not all readers are poets but all poets are readers.

Sometimes, in my replies to submissions, I talk about building a readership – I point out that poets need a readership because otherwise published work won’t sell. But maybe I give a wrong impression. It’s not so much about building a readership for yourself as about building the readership for poetry. If you’re working at getting poetry out there, sharing your favourite writers and publications, your own work will slip neatly in behind that.

The poetry world is not as exclusive as it sometimes seems. Each poet can have a place in the pyramid, and you never know where it will lead. A lot of fun is to be had, supporting and being supported. Each person is vital. Reading and writing. Working and learning.

SEND ME YOUR POEMS!

You know there’s an ulterior motive, don’t you?

Yes, of course there is. Two, actually.

HappenStance specialises in debut collections, first pamphlets. So I want brilliant ones. That means I am looking, actively, for the best.
I want to build the readership for the poets I publish. There are many ways of doing that, but one is to read and give careful feedback on people’s poems twice a year. I don’t charge for this (no reading fees here) but I hope in return most of those people will either subscribe (and learn more about the press) or buy books.

There are reading ‘windows’ twice a year. One is July and the other is December (i.e. now).

To tell the truth, a bit of me dreads these months. The envelopes flop through the door and look at me reproachfully. I hate disappointing expectations (and some people’s expectations are high). The relationship between a poet and the person they hope might publish their poems is a delicate one. If I make them an offer, I know they will really really like me (and I rarely use the word ‘really’). If I criticise their darlings, they will probably experience the opposite emotion. It is so much nicer to make people happy!

The dread goes away when I start reading the poems. I love reading people’s poems. It’s fascinating. I’m not making this up! These aren’t just any old bits of paper. Poems are bits of text that matter to the person who made them, matter a lot. How can that not be interesting?

I think reading and responding to poems is a creative act. I believe it uses the same bit of my brain that makes poems. So it’s an art I practise, and I do it as well as I can.

For first collections, I like to work with the poet over a period of time (up to three years in some cases, less in others) to arrive at the best possible set. That means batting poems back and forth. The thing I can do (I think), and care about most, is help people make poems, or sets of poems, stronger. At least some people.

If you’re not sure whether my feedback would be useful to you, there’s one way to find out. Read the guidelines. Send up to twelve poems. Some people only send six, which is nice (for me) because I can spend longer on them.

Chances of publication? Oh hell. Truth is I can’t make most people happy by publishing their work. I plan to publish eight pamphlets in 2014 and their slots are all spoken for. Again 6-8 in 2015. There are still two tiny possibilities there. I start drawing up the schedule for 2016 in January.

I do spend ages. I am mad. Yesterday morning, while the men were finishing harling our gable end, hurling wee stones at the walls and pinging them off the conservatory roof, I was reading a set of poems. It took me three hours. You see? Crazy? Did I offer to publish them? No.

I sent back a couple of ticks and two smileys.

What does that mean?

If I like a poem, whether or not I think it’s flawed, I put a little pencil tick (or check) among my pencilled comments. I wouldn’t want to publish all the poems I like because it has to be more than just ‘like’.

So the other option is the smiley. If I like it and think, in the right circumstances, I would publish that poem, I put a smiley face.

I confuse things somewhat, by throwing in smileys against marvellous bits of poems, but you don’t need to know that.

The poet gets the poems back with my pencilled remarks, suggestions, thoughts. They take a look at the feedback. They decide whether it is, or isn’t, useful. Maybe they send me more poems next July. If they do, I hope they’ll include the smileys again but without the smiles. I like to come across poems I’ve met before with a sense of surprised familiarity. If they strongly work for me twice, they must be good.

Meanwhile, I hope, if they haven’t already done so, that the poets whose work I’m reading will take out a subscription or buy a pamphlet or two. It throws a couple of quid into the kitty (not more because I price low) and this kitty needs all it can get.

If you’ve already got books or pamphlets in print, the chances that I would publish another are remote. However, it has happened several times. With the right set of poems in the right circumstance, there’s a maybe. And of course, the offer is still open. Happy to read up to twelve poems and send feedback.

I don’t know of anybody else who does this. I may not be able to keep it up much longer, because when I’m reading poems, I’m certainly not making publications, or writing Christmas cards. But at least the harling is finished. 🙂

ps Yes, I publish book length collections but no need to ask me about them. There won’t be many, and I’ll ask you.

WHAT GOES RIGHT WITH POEMS (AND PIGS)

The same things make them go right as make them go wrong.

Maybe the poem is in couplets and it has to be couplets. Maybe the prose rhythms are essential. Maybe the plod of iambic pentameter is just right. Maybe the leaning verbs lean like no others. Maybe the line breaks are all broken and that’s the point. Maybe it’s like Keats and still not like Keats. Maybe the poem jumps all over the page and I don’t even notice because I’m too involved. Maybe the poet is simply having fun.

I don’t know what makes them go right. I only know how it feels. Which is as follows:

I am inside the poem and I don’t know how I got there.

The poet vanishes.

The form (which I haven’t noticed anyway) fuses with mood, matter and meaning.

Whether or not I understand the poem, the poem understands me.

I am unreasonably excited.

I want to read it again. Now.

I want to copy it out and carry it round with me.

I want to share it.

I’m nearly at the end of the HappenStance July ‘window’. I’ve read 75 sets of poems, 47 by women and 28 by men, and I have come across a handful of wholly magical texts in that time.

There are never many poems that create the experience I describe above, though there are some that could, I think, and others that do it in little patches. And there may be a few I miss. I know from experience that some quiet (but vital) poems can slip past when you’re tired.

Much of the time, I am thinking ‘oh, another villanelle’, or ‘oh what a pity she spoiled her effect there’. Or ‘duh?’

But thankfully (or I would have to stop ), I like doing all this. It appeals to my analytical self. I’ve been trying to write poetry all my life. I keep thinking that if I can fathom what other people are doing, especially when it works, I’ll learn something I can use.

There is a mystery at the heart of it though and all the analysis in the world will not solve it. Poetry, whatever it is, rises from the roots of language itself, and language is a mind-boggling phenomenon.

Anyway, there’s nothing unusual about me as a reader of poetry (except possibly in my relentless analysis). My experience of reading poetry is the same as yours. When you read a book (or a magazine or anthology) full of poems, it’s rare to find one that does the full-on, magical thing, isn’t it? In fact, often there aren’t any.

But there are some.

This week, thanks to Andy Philip’s guest blogging feature about poems to take on holiday, and in particular John Glenday’s introduction to Heidy Steidlmayer, I read Fowling Piece – a whole book of poems on top of the others.

But it is a fabulous book, with all sorts of intrigue, fun, design, contraption and inspiration. And several times I found all the things on my list happening. She even has a poem in one of my favourite genres – the ironing poem – a beaut. Here it is:

Circles

Because it is late
and a man’s white shirts
gleam as if frozen,
the woman ironing
dreams of skating in circles,
on edge, leaning in.
Always there are more shirts
before her skating away.
If she is not careful, she will
scorch them as she glides the quiet
length of an untouched lake.

See? It even has an as in its final sentence and it didn’t impede me in any way. In fact, I didn’t notice it till this very moment.

And then there is Hilary Menos’s new book Red Devon. I first met a Menos poem at an Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (2003, I think) where an unpretentious little sonnet got the full treatment in a master class. I think the Master was Paul Muldoon. It was a bloody good poem. When it appeared later in a Smiths/Doorstop pamphlet, I was delighted to see she hadn’t made any changes. She doesn’t finish a poem easily, or lightly.

In fact, my money is on Hilary Menos. Sometimes I forget how good she is, and then I start to read one of her poems, like I did earlier today – when I wasn’t supposed to be reading poems at all – with a shock of recognition, and a little shiver of delight. The magical thing can still be done, and there are people doing it.

And to demonstrate that truth, here’s Hilary Menos’s ‘Long Pig’, particularly good poem for a Sunday:

We eat the flesh only in wartime, when enraged,
and in a few legal instances. Theft. Treason.

Adultery. When the elders deem fit, revenge.
When a captured prisoner cannot pay ransom

in coin or woman or pig. And we find nothing
animates missionaries like being eaten.

When we introduce you to the village elders,
you men, with your degrees from Oxford or Eton,

must squat at the far end of the hut from our king
due to your woeful lack of pigs. Still, be at ease.

But when our women gather salt, and limes, and rice,
hanging coconuts like sucked skulls from the palm trees,

it might be prudent to invoke the Lord’s Prayer twice,
or whatever prayer, to whatever God you please.

WHAT GOES WRONG WITH POEMS (III)

July is a long month. There are ten days still to go. I’ve read 56 sets of poems now, and I’m getting tired.

Also I may have become completely neurotic. This leaning verb thing, for example. I keep falling over them. And the ‘as’ construction keeps popping up (you know I hate that word) at the end of what is otherwise a nice poem.

Last night I was constructing verse in my sleep, stanzas that would exemplify the recurring patterns.

The long day is longer, hotter than ever before
and the leaning verb thing leans in-
to my consciousness as I read. It’s
familiar as conscience, seductive
as silk. It feels like poetry, aches
like an old grudge. As I move out of the sun
it leans over to me, reaches my ankles,
whispers reassurance, and burns.

One day a poet will take revenge on me. It will be easy. The person will trawl through my two full collections to find examples of Helena Nelson doing exactly the same thing. I know, I know. The semi-colon in my own eye is what makes me see it in others.

Here are two more things that go wrong though. First, there’s the poem that makes complete sense to the poet but less sense to the reader.

Here’s what Ruth Pitter has to say about obscurity:

[ . . . ] I think a real poem, however simple its immediate content, begins and ends in mystery. It begins in that secret movement of the poet’s being in response to the secret dynamism of life. It continues as a structure made of and evolved from and clothed in the legal tender and common currency of language; perhaps the simpler the better, so that the crowning wonder, if it comes, may emerge clear of hocus-pocus. (I think it is important to make the plain meaning of the words as clear as possible, but it cannot always be made entirely clear. Our only obscurities, I feel, should be those we are driven into; then a sort of blessing may descend, making such obscurity magical.)

I agree. There’s a kind of necessary obscurity. It arises when you write about something you don’t fully understand. The poem may be an attempt to grasp an idea bigger than itself. But it is “important to make the plain meaning of the words as clear as possible” and that’s where things can go amiss. It can start when the poet chooses an obscure title, and then goes on to other layers of obscurity.

Imagine, for example, that the title is ‘Miasma’ and the poem is about the day the poet learned she was at risk of losing her sight. The verb ‘to see’ is a wonderful one to play with, because it means see with the eyes and understand with the brain. “I could not see what he meant” in the context of this imagined poem, therefore, is pregnant with irony.

However, the unknown reader may not see what the poet is talking about, or only with difficulty. Perhaps the poet has introduced her poem to a group of friends – a workshop group perhaps – and the group already knows (or she tells them) about the experience underpinning the text. Nothing is obscure to them.

But often it’s more difficult for a general reader. I often get to the end of a poem and feel unsure what it was about. I assume the deficiency is in me. I read the text again. I think it might be about a) or it might be about b). It could even be about c). I feel wary of making a comment in case I reveal my own idiocy.

Should all poems be immediately comprehensible? Obviously not. The delight may reside in the mystery. I can think of poems I love that I’ve never fully understood. But I think this is the obscurity Ruth Pitter calls “magical”. It’s a mysteriousness the poet is driven into unavoidably.

I once shared a little poem in a workshop group – a poem by me, I mean. It was about an innocent childhood memory and yes, it was a bit obscure. To my horror, my friends were convinced it was an experience of sexual abuse. I couldn’t see any way to save it. The poem went to the bottom of the ragbag.

One last thing. I like narrative poems, by which I mean poems with a story at their heart. But I notice the heaviness when they involve a backstory with past perfect or habitual tenses.

The same difficulty often afflicts short stories:

“I had often seen Mr Parr on a Tuesday morning. He’d be shouldering his purple and green backpack. He would wave to me as he marched past my garden. He’d almost certainly be wearing his mauve hat with a white pompom. But today was different.”

If you can avoid the past perfects, with their heavy ‘d’ sounds, I would do it. In a poem you can almost always swing straight into the simple past, without having to explain (through your verb tenses) which action came before which. For example:

On Tuesdays Mr Parr waved as he marched past
with his purple and green backpack, and
his mauve hat with a white pompom. But today
was different.

The reason for avoiding the he’ds and you’ds and we’ds is two fold. First, the mechanism is unimaginative – such an obvious way of filling in background. Second, if you fill your poem full of ‘d’ sounds, it’s like a bag of stones. It sinks straight to the bottom of the river.

WHAT GOES WRONG WITH POEMS (II)

The force that through the green fuse drives the poem . . . doesn’t.

Real, true poems have a surge of energy from start to finish, don’t they? It’s hard to be absolute about such things. But I think it’s true.

Sometimes it’s dead obvious from line one. Here’s W H Davies in ‘The Power of Silence’:

And will she never hold her tongue,
About that feather in her hat

Suddenly you’re right in there, and it’s a situation, and the fuse is lit. And after that the syntax is important and the rhythm and the meaning – the whole thing is driven and the reader is compelled onwards. That feeling of compulsion is something I need and look for. I know I must be looking for it because I know when I haven’t found it.

Because here’s my situation. I’ve just finished week two of the submissions month: 43 brown envelopes (ok, some were white) so far, which is at least 516 poems. Twenty-six women, 17 men. Twenty-four of the 43 were HappenStance subscribers, which is heart-warming. (Nearly all the packets falling through the letterbox were by women to start with, but now most are male.)

I’ve read a handful of remarkable pieces, quite a number of good ones, and lots that were good of their kind. These are the ones I feel most guilty about because I end up being so mean to the author. But how do you identify that sense that the poem is well-made – even laudable – but doesn’t quite lift off? Nobody wants to be damned with faint praise. But still there is a point at which a good poet needs a nudge. Like playing a computer game, it’s the business of pushing on to the next level.

I am aware I am talking in metaphors. It’s so hard to talk any other way about the process of writing.

I have also come across loads of poems that have poems in them.

Meaning . . . precisely what?

It’s that feeling you get when you come to a fabulous stanza or set of lines and yet – most of the poem is . . . just lines, or groups of well-meaning words. Though perhaps there’s another wonderful bit at the end, or just before the end.

It’s easier to say what doesn’t work than to explain what does. Except sometimes making it work is simpler than people think, and it is complexity and literariness that gets in the way.

Often I find myseIf penciling a little arrow and saying, ‘I think the poem starts here.’ By which I mean, this is the point from which I feel compelled. It’s the point where, for me, the fuse is lit, and that means, almost certainly, it wasn’t ignited in line one.

Tom Duddy, whose second (posthumous) collection HappenStance will publish later this year, once told me a poem had to capture his attention in the first four lines.

Or perhaps it wasn’t four. Perhaps it was within the first twenty words. Or perhaps I can’t remember precisely what he said and am wilfully recreating the memory. But I am sure he spoke about our shared expectation that poetry (Poetry), that finest form of writing, should do something dynamic early on.

I don’t think high drama is required. Sometimes it’s just an easy route in, a subtle way of involving the reader in a situation or a mood. The syntax (by which I mean the grammatical structure of the opening statement or sentence) is usually crucial. If it’s slightly confusing, or the line break is fiendish, the fuse splutters.

Often the old journalistic trick of cutting the first paragraph (in poetry, it’s the first stanza or two) accomplishes wonders. Or ending before people expect you to.

WHAT GOES WRONG WITH POEMS (1)

Week one of the July submissions window is over already.

I’ve read and returned 30 manuscripts. More will arrive tomorrow, and some are still sitting in my box.

So far the standard has been high. This both delights and alarms me: I can’t meet the demand. I can only work with a tiny number of these poets to make a publication.

However, many of them will find other routes to readers. Some, I am sure, will go on to win one of the pamphlet competitions.

I look for poems that connect instantly. I want the magical thing, the almost-impossible-to-describe visceral recognition, an intuitive grasp of meaning even where the surface is puzzling or obscure.

Sometimes, there’s a snag that interrupts the connection, a little thing easily fixed. (It’s easier to describe flaws in poems than put them right.)

One of these is the habit of opening a poem ‘I remember’. Sometimes it’s not the first line – but it finds its way in there, and often it’s repeated. (One poet this week wrote ‘I’ve not forgotten’ – much stronger.)

Most poems are, I think, made from memories. If they’re also written in the first person, the reader assumes the memory belongs to the poet.

So you can present the memory without ‘I remember’. It’s the difference between

I remember the sweet scent of honeysuckle in the rain

and

The scent of honeysuckle in the rain was sweet

Of course, the phrase ‘I remember’ evokes a number of older poems that we also remember (I remember ‘I remember’), as well that seductive emotion: nostalgia. The sound of the word ‘remember’ is as cosy as an old armchair.

For additional protection from the infection of ‘I remember’, vaccinate yourself by writing an instant ‘I remember’ poem with an online generator.

Then why not revisit the famous ‘remember’ poems which are subconsciously leading you to echo them?

For example, there’s good old Thomas Hood’s I remember, I remember? It’s a sweet but sentimental piece and I would probably weep over it after my third glass of wine.

Or Hilaire Belloc’s Tarantella – not at all sentimental: ‘Do you remember an Inn, Miranda, Do you remember an Inn?’ (While writing this blog I found the most extraordinary YouTube clip of Belloc singing this! I had no idea this existed, or that Belloc could sing. Some would say, of course, that he couldn’t.)

And of course, mistress of the ultimate emotive pang, there’s Christina Rossetti with the ‘funeral poem’: ‘Remember me when I am gone away’. Note that she goes for the imperative. Rossetti was no wimp.

The two words ‘I remember’ instantly summon love and loss, with the emphasis on the latter. But after using them to get the poem going, swiftly excise the phrase. Show no mercy. ‘I remember’ is scaffolding for a building that will stand stronger without it.