GETTING YOUR POETRY PUBLISHED – Page 7 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

TOO MANY POETS, BUT NIL DESPERANDUM!

An extraordinary week (for me) concluded with The Poet’s Compass yesterday at the CCA in Glasgow.

It was a splendid day with a buzz about it. The fiendish organization and planning carried out by Philippa Johnston paid off. All sorts of interesting and information and ideas were in the air. It was as friendly as StAnza, with people hobnobbing in corners, conspiring over coffee, and revelling in the wonderful, entirely vegetarian lunch.

There was quite a bit about spoken word which, to quiet poetry-in-the-backroom people, can sound scary. But Ali Moloney, Harry Giles (‘all poets should know their way round hip-hop’) and Michael Pedersen could not have been more welcoming and enthused (Michael’s first collection, endorsed by Stephen Fry, is imminent). Open mike sessions began to sound inviting, even for fogeys. Fun was mentioned more than once.

Jennifer Williams did a wonderful job of co-ordinating and linking all platform events with imperturbable delight. Herself a Shearsman author (though she now looks nothing like her author photo), she was a part of the incredible range of poetry backgrounds and experience. There was a feeling of sharing and breaking down boundaries.

Elspeth Murray was charismatic with luggage labels, having fun with poetry in all sorts of ways without even hankering after book publication! Wonderful. It was a day of alternatives. Chris McCabe was there from the Poetry Library in the Southbank: great to put a face to a name, and even hear him talking about Chrissy Williams – yeay! HappenStance poet! – as an example of how to do things differently.

Kona McPhee dealt with the pain: ‘ambition for success is the way you make yourself pay for the gift of creativity . . . Ambition isn’t about the gap; it’s about the void.’ A book, she said, (her third has just been published) doesn’t make the need for validation go away. I read What Long Miles in the train on the way back, on the long way home, and the beautiful, heart-breaking little poem ‘dog’ is still with me, as is ‘How to Fail’.

How shall I tell thee? So many ways. . . Gerry Cambridge was inspiring on the prospect of self-publication and doing it well. He was also extremely funny about the editorial side of things with The Dark Horse.

Main speaker was Neil Astley who somehow tackled the current state of poetry publishing without being depressing. How did he do that? The day was so buoyant that reality simply floated up there unthreateningly. It is thirty-five years since he started Bloodaxe. Good grief! Thirty-five!

He spoke about the huge volume of submissions, the tiny number of Bloodaxe new-author publications per year (between one and three), the reasons why 95% of those submissions stood no chance. There were four reasons, he said:

The ‘poet’ does not read poetry (or is just possibly a member of a group who only read each other).
The ‘premature ejaculation’ phenomenon i.e. doing it all too eagerly and too soon, with little experience in the field, or insufficient track record of magazine publication.
The poet had chosen the wrong publisher/editor/ or imprint for what he or she wanted to do. (Research the imprint! Read what it says on the website. Read the books!)
The poet needs help, not publication.

A really good tip was this: send six of your best poems with a covering letter briefly listing previous credits and sounding out the publisher (they are almost all men still – he mentioned Michael Schmidt, John Lucas, Andy Croft, Mike Mackmin, Charles Boyle and Peter Sansom – only Amy Wack and Jane Commane were there for the wimmin, though the remarkable Robyn Marsack did get a mention as one of the Carcanet Oxford Poets editors). Neil said he was more likely a) to read and b) to turn the enquiry round quickly if it was brief and to the point.

He reminded us that only 1 in 10 of any books was ‘successful’, that 0.6% of all book sales are poetry, and that ‘poetry readers are notoriously resistant to e-books’ – so far.

And he described what he has always looked for and continues to value: a poet who nurtures the talent before taking it out into the world. He spoke of the way the ‘individual voice can only be achieved in private’ though it is moving towards a public self. He spoke of the way a set of good poems is not enough. There are too many poets for the opportunities, too many sets of good poems. What is required is a voice ‘unlike anyone else’s’, a set of poems ‘consistently strong’ and not a collection that could be a ‘one-trick horse’ (which, by the way, suddenly struck me as a great collection title), but a talent that promises something that can be sustained, a writer who can go on to complete ‘even stronger second and third collections’.

Already I see in my paragraph above that the words look chilly and easily criticized. But it was a warm speech from a man beleaguered by the logjam, but also a central part of keeping it electrically alive. He was cheerful and funny.

And then there was me being HappenStance and about to go into the July month which is the submissions period. When I got home two more envelopes were already waiting. And the awful thing is that I, too, am now part of the impossible poetry logjam, because really I can only do a few publications a year, and I too have more submissions from poets worthy of publication than I can possibly take forward.

However, I can and do offer other things. I can, for example, give feedback. It is only one person’s point of view, of course, but still a fairly detailed response is worth something, it is a huge investment of time on this side of the equation, and it’s something you don’t get from competition entries. I often make suggestions, and these sometimes include self-publication, co-operative developments or alternative formats.

Neil Astley said ‘poetry only reaches readers through enlightened subsidy’.

I immediately thought ‘that’s not necessarily true’. HappenStance has no public funding. It has to wash its face through sales.

But ‘enlightened subsidy’ manifests in many ways. With HappenStance, the financial support is in the subscribers who choose to support the press by buying pamphlets, following the story of the press, engaging in dialogue, and giving feedback on the publications – they are the people who make this possible. A year ago there were about 250. Now it’s more like 350. This means that a new pamphlet publication usually finds at least 60 readers amongst the subscribers alone. 60 copies may not sound like much in terms of Harry Potter, but it makes a HUGE difference in terms of keeping things going, and it’s one reason why Fiona Moore’s recent pamphlet, The Only Reason for Time, has already sold out of its initial print run of 280 copies (the author still has a few).

Most people who send in poetry submissions to HappenStance from the UK either subscribe before they send, or after. None of the cash benefits accrued could be realistically be described as ‘profit’, but in fact almost everything depends on the subscriber scheme. The HappenStance subscribers are marvellous readers. Writing is a two-way process, and reading is a creative act.

Watch for more on the current state of po over the next few weeks, though there may be asides on the grandbaby (another startling event here this week), and other poetry plans now I have officially ceased to be a college teacher after 25 years in harness. I was awarded ‘voluntary severance’, which means they pay you not to work for a whole year, so long as you promise not to go back.

No problem. Off to read some poetry now.

ARE YOUR POEMS RANK AMATEURS, OR TRUE PROFESSIONALS?

It’s a trouble-making question.

And no, I don’t look at it in that way. But others do — and it is so very tempting to find some way of ruling on what makes a good (or even ‘great’) poem. Michael Dalvean in ‘Ranking Contemporary American Poems’ (thanks to Tim Love for sending the link) claims ‘By using computational linguistics it is possible to objectively identify the characteristics of professional poems and amateur poems’.

What he says sounds perfectly reasonable: ‘Placing poems on a continuum that is based on the extent to which poems possess the craftsmanship of a professional may be a step towards explaining why some poets are “greater” than others’.

Dalvean refers to two previous studies using computational linguistics to crack poetry. The first of these (Forsythe, 2000) compared the features of regularly anthologised poems with ‘obscure’ (un-anthologised) ones. It concluded that:

successful poems had fewer syllables per word in their first lines and were more likely to have an initial line consisting of monosyllables. It was also found that successful poems had a lower number of letters per word, used more common words, and had simpler syntax. Thus, contrary to what we might expect, the more successful poems used simpler language. In essence, poems that use language that is simple and direct are more likely to be reproduced in anthologies.

A second study, ‘Kao and Jurafsky, 2012) compared 100 poems from a reputable anthology with another 100 from (oh dear) www.amateurwriting.com found that ‘professional poets used words that were more concrete’ and the amateurs ‘ more likely to use perfect rhymes . . . more alliteration and more emotional words . . . .’ The ‘professional poets’ also used more words. Period. Not cleverer words – a wider variety of simple ones.

Dalvean has built on these studies but added ‘a broader range of linguistic variables’, namely 68 linguistic variables derived from Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001) and 32 psycholinguistic variables from the Paivio, Yuille and Madigan (1968) word norms’.

It gets complicated here (you can read the original paper if you follow the link above). The bit that grabbed me was the idea that there might be an

algorithm that is able to correctly classify poems as professional/amateur with an accuracy of 80% using linguistic variables. There are several applications for such an algorithm. For example, a publisher who needs a quick way of sorting through the voluminous submissions received on a weekly basis could first select a filtered list by running poems though such an algorithm.

Yessss! Though not yet July (my reading window) the early can’t-waiters have begun to trickle through the box. Is this the answer? There is a machine to put the poems through. It might be possible not to read them at all, but just to process them for value, like holding a £20 note up to the light to check it’s not a forgery.

Here is the link http://www.poetryassessor.com/poetry/. Go here to test your own poems. Alas, I put some of mine through the mangle (of course). Most of them were horribly amateur but yours might fare better.

Meanwhile, back to peeling (see below). Others peel after sitting outside in the sunshine. I peel inside (peeling stamps off envelopes) ready for an onslaught of poems in July, some of which will forget to include SAEs. The Royal Mail continues to assist, though not on purpose. . . .

Next Saturday’s NAWE event at CCA in Glasgow promises to help poets get onto the ‘professional’ spectrum, though in a more strategic manner. I’m not sure whether it’s fully booked yet, but if in Scotland, worth a look. I will be there.

Can you write a good poem FAST?

‘Your car is never parked,’ my loved-one is fond of saying. ‘It’s merely abandoned.’

Whether or not his observation is justified, he’s unaware that his words bring another matter to mind (apart from revenge).

What he reminds me of is this: ‘Un poème n’est jamais fini, seulement abandonné. A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’ The words are Paul Valéry’s, though I first came across them elsewhere – quoted by Philip Larkin, I think.

Where parking is concerned, I don’t care much, though I want to make it clear I never cross the white line or make direct contact with another vehicle. With poetry, it’s another matter.

During the HappenStance submissions month, it’s not uncommon to receive a set of poems ‘all written in the last six months’. It is never a good idea to tell me this. I am more inclined to think good poetry was written ages ago. Gerry Cambridge, editor of The Dark Horse, once told me in no uncertain terms: ‘Do not send out fresh poems’. In my case, he was right. Time and time again, I am sure a poem is ‘finished’, only to find out three months (or three years) later I was horribly wrong.

Often, I find myself scribbling on someone else’s work: ‘I don’t think this is fully cooked.’ Isn’t a poem closer to a biscuit than a cake? – first baked, then dried out in a slow oven?

It depends. There are circumstances in which poems arrive fast and finished. Re-reading some of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s darkest sonnets, and in particular ‘ I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’, I see James Reeves’ note at the back of my edition: ‘This and the three following sonnets are probably among those referred to in a letter to Bridges in which Hopkins says, Four of these came like inspirations unbidden and against my will.’ That sounds fast to me, although the final sonnets may be some way from their original manifestations.

I am fond of quoting the late Anna Adams on this. Island Chapters (1991) records the experiences of the poet and her painter husband (the book is beautifully illustrated with colour plates of paintings) on the remote Hebridean island of Scarp. Here she is:

There is a game that one person can play with the sea. I invented it. There is really only one rule, and that is very simple. The water should be fairly rough, and the tide rising. The player sits down on the shore line like King Canute, using a boulder for a throne, and must not move until he does so without making any conscious decision about it. He (or she) may rise and run only when to do so is an inevitable and involuntary act.

Perhaps poems should be written in these conditions – only when they are inevitable. Much ink might be saved, and every poem would have the necessary ingredient of desperation in it. It would be something found, not something sought. True poems come into being at the top of an experience chain, as people and birds of prey are at the top of the food chain. But some links of the experience chain may be the writing of manufactured poems, or a poem hunt, and the dark night of the doggerel. Rubbish-writing and despair. It is necessary to work, providing one’s own waves of energy, until, suddenly, the poem is given. It may be a line or a word only, but it slots into place like a keystone, locking words together.

So there is a case for poems written fast, hurriedly, uncooked. They may be the necessary experiences in a chain.

James Reeves would not have agreed. He thought the hardest (but most important) thing for a poet was to know when not to write. In ‘What is it to be a poet?’ (in Commitment to Poetry, 1969), he says: ‘It is up to every poet to know his creative power, and not force it. I know mine to be small and I say this without complacency. I never cease to wish it were greater.’ And he goes on ‘One must accept the gift one has; one must accept the necessity for silence, for doing nothing; it is the hardest thing to be a poet and be unable to write poems.’

Perhaps one role of the editor or publisher is to help identify the work at the end of the chain: to suggest that not all the poems – which may at times seem inevitable – have fully ‘arrived’ – though the experience of writing them may prove invaluable. Sometimes writing nothing is an excellent idea. Sometimes reading is the richest road.

Fast or slow, it’s hard to see a poem properly when you’re close to it. They need a little time and emotional distance. Although fresh rolls are the only rolls worth eating, this analogy doesn’t work for la poésie. The incorrigible Cambridge was correct: do not send out fresh poems. Put them in a drawer. Read them again when you can read them like a reader, not a poet. Then see how the little bastards shape up.

POETS – EMERGING, EMERGED OR EMERGENCY?

I think of them as dragon-flies, some of the fastest flying insects in the world.

Let’s not even mention the egg stage. When writing early poems they’re more like nymphs. In fact, most of a poet’s life may well be spent in nymph form, beneath the water’s surface (submerged), using extendable jaws for nefarious purposes. The larval stage is short for some, lengthy for others. Some remain nymphs for decades. Some tend to merge, rather than emerging. But most achieve metamorphosis. The nymph climbs up some kind of stalk and is exposed to AIR. It starts to breathe, its skin splits, and out staggers . . . a flully-fledged poet, ready to feast on midges and propel itself in at least six directions.

Or perhaps it’s not quite like that. Tim Love sent me a link to a discussion paper from Devolved Voices, a 3-year research project based at Aberystwyth University. It commenced in September 2012 and they’re mapping stuff. I like ‘mapping’. It sounds like it will help you find your way (as indeed is the intention). You may recall another well-publicised document of this kind: Mapping Contemporary Poetry, released by the Arts Council England in 2010.

Poetry world is desperately confusing to anyone starting out as a writer. So how useful is this discussion document from Aberystwyth?

I liked it a lot. You could argue that it is a little retro – not enough about spoken word routes, or social networking, or new forms of publication, but it is easier to describe what has, until recently, been true than to write about a kind of emerging that is . . . still emerging. If you’re not sure whether you’ve emerged or not, a common concern, I recommend this document.

Aberystwyth propose stages of emergency. Stage 1 you get a poem, and then a couple more, published in a magazine, possibly a local publication. The nymph is just out of the egg.

Stage 2, you start to use the extendable jaws and penetrate other magazines, “probably moving beyong the confines of an immediate locale”.

Stage 3, you get poems in much better magazines: the most widely read publications. You may even get a pamphlet published (most first-collection HappenStance poets are somewhere around stage 3). You’re climbing the stalk and you have abandoned your gills.

By Stage 4, you’re doing readings here and there, you’ve got a book collection out, you might be doing a residency or teaching creative writing. You are dining on more than just midges.

At Stage 5, you’ve got a “well-established profile over a wide national/geographic area”. You might be an “established reviewer or essayist”. You could be an important predator, consuming flies, bees, ants, wasps and very occasionally (and remorsefully) butterflies. You may be fulfilling “significant cultural roles”.

(Fulfilling roles is a phrase I’ve always had difficulty with. It’s the aural pun that causes me a problem: I have an image of people filling bread rolls. Significant ones. But I digress.)

Stage 6 is the final stage. At stage 6 you have emerged. You have self-actualised. You are probably on the literature syllabus in schools and most ‘well-read’ people, even people who aren’t into poetry, have heard of you. However, you are still subject to predation by birds, lizards, frogs, spiders, fish, waterbugs, and even other large dragonflies disguised as mentors.

The writers of the Aberystwyth paper point out that “poetic emergence is distinct from poetic development: it is entirely to do with becoming prominent as a poet, rather than becoming a poet of better quality or worth.” They also observe that “poets sometimes jump stages, and sometimes go into reverse, but most reach what is called her a ‘plateau’ and remain thereafter at more or less the same point”. (I am writing this blog from a pleasant plateau partway through stage 5.)

Stages 1-3 are “emerging”. Stages 4-6 are “emerged”.

There are bands too (not the musical kind: bands as in categories). Band A: pre-collection. Band B: first collection. Band C: multi-collection. Publishers like these kind of bands.

Devolved voices also touches on factors that can affect the emergency (I know I am wilfully mis-using this term: it keeps me sane). These include prizes, fellowships, creative writing degrees, courses, mentorships etc. They talk about “tipping the publication see-saw” (another neat image if tipped up) and “premature anointing” (to be avoided at all costs).

This is a ‘discussion’ document – so do join the discussion, whether you are submerged, emerging or emerged. Facetiousness aside, it is interesting, well-written and easy to digest.

But I said it was a somewhat retro. What about the new ways? Regrettably, I think I am part of the old: most of what I do is nurture an editorial relationship with a few nymphs to help them move from stage 3 to stage 4 (the sort of thing Rialto Bridge pamphlets also mention and that the Mapping Contemporary Poetry authors approve – but then, they would.)

Things are changing. Poetry used to be literary, intellectual and dusty (though it was discussed in pubs, by men, with beer or whisky). Now the slams, the performance, the spoken word, the fun – these things are bubbling, and not only with the young. Some of the nymphs read the notices on publishers’ websites about ‘no unsolicited submissions’; they get fed up because what they write is nothing like what wins competitions; they set up their own presses; they do the business. Some of these enterprises will prove their mettle and will draw in participants of talent, ingenuity and new types of jaws and wings. They will be impatient (and why not?). They will be unreasonable.

As George Bernard Shaw said (the world consisted entirely of men in his day): “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

I am never very sure about the word ‘progress’. It suggests things get better. I suspect they simply get different. Human beings develop hierarchies, and people find ways to ascend. When daunted by the survival of the fittest and fastest, it’s useful to remember all this is “entirely to do with becoming prominent as a poet, rather than becoming a poet of better quality or worth.”

Given the devious dragon-fly trafficking, I’m strongly reminded of a poem by James Reeves who, despite mentoring from Robert Graves, spent most of his life at stage 5 and worked very hard to stay there. I may well have quoted this before, in some other context (blog entries proliferate on this plateau) but I don’t care. Here it is.

Important Insects

Important insects clamber to the top
Of stalks; look round with uninquiring eyes
And find the world incomprehensible;
Then totter back to earth and circumscribe
Irregular territories pointlessly.
Some insects narcissistically assume
Patterns of spots or stripes or burnished sheen
For purposes of sex or camouflage,
Some tweet or rasp, though most are without speech
Except a low, subliminal, mindless chatter.
Take heart: those scientists are wrong who find
Elements of the human in their systems,
Despite their busy, devious trafficking
Important insects simply do not matter.

THE AWFUL TRUTH

In December, there were 77 submissions or, in the end, 76, because one turned out to be the same one twice.

Reading and responding took all of January, between completing Chapter 7, designing new flyers and negotiating with the bank. The standard of the poetry inside the envelopes was horribly good. Horribly, because the likelihood of my offering to do a publication becomes more and more evanescent, even for good poets. I can only do so many.

Some poets make their first approach with little awareness of how it does (or doesn’t) work. It’s not their fault. A well-known poet has recommended they approach me (they will tell me who this person is) and they hope the endorsement will make a difference. It doesn’t make a difference.

I read each submission carefully and write things in pencil on and around the poems. As time goes on, I get less polite. I know I’m dispensing liberal doses of disappointment. Who wants to be a professional disappointer? The awful truth is that what I really want them to do is buy the poetry I have already published, not give me more of the stuff to market and sell. (It is so hard selling poetry. They have no idea.)

And yet, I love the poetry I have published. I really do. My enthusiasm isn’t feigned. Who would not want more things to love?

So I read the poems. Do I love what’s in front of me? How much do I love it? Do I love it enough to add it to the already impossible challenge in front of me?

Probably not. It’s the same for everyone who reads poetry. For every poem you love and copy out, there are hundreds you can live without.

Even as I scribble insults about the poem’s punctuation, sentence structure, mixed metaphor and line breaks, I know my view is just one view. But it’s a very particular one. Out of all the new submissions, I may offer to do a publication for one. I can’t afford, in time or money, more than that. (I can’t even afford that.) It has to be one that’s not only strong, but also as different as possible from anything I’ve done before.

And still there are a whole set of people here with individual poems I like very much. I’m glad to read them. In response to some of them, I could write pages, although lack of time prevents that. I hope some of my responses may prove useful to these people and perhaps win them opportunities elsewhere (the pamphlet competitions are useful in developing sets of strong work, I think, irrespective of winning).

The breakdown this year was as follows:

Already HappenStance subscribers, so know at least a bit about the press	Non-subscribers	First submission	Currently working on a promised publication, so sending poems towards that	Second, third or more approach (this normally means I have been encouraging)	Men	Women
45 (c 60%)	31	48	10	18	35	41

Number of new firm offers made: 1.

Not everyone makes an approach hoping I’ll do a pamphlet (it helps to know people’s ambitions). Some just send a dozen poems for feedback, which is fine. Many of them are now wonderfully professional: they have read the submission guidelines and followed them, and the dos and don’ts, so there are no immediate barriers.

So far, I’ve published more men than women, and I would like to change that. However, I getmore poems from women than men. I don’t know what conclusion to draw about this.

I don’t make publication offers on first submission. I might express an interest or a strong interest. Sometimes I tell poets they’re so good they don’t need me: they should be winning a competition outright. Some of them go on to do just that. It helps if people know my antipathy for villanelles, sestinas, pantoums, ekphrastic poems, ‘after’ poems, and dedications.

I am presentation-sensitive. I prefer single spacing (it’s in the guidelines). I prefer a size of font similar to what I would put in a pamphlet (roughly a 12 in Word) so I can visualize the poem on a page. I like the name and address of the author on each sheet. I expect the font to be consistent: all 12 poems same font and same size. (Often poets present their work dramatically differently from page to page.)

Some poets have interestingly graphical pieces with elaborate spacing patterns and designs. Mainly they present these on an A4 sheet, forgetting that books or pamphlets work to A5 (some presses use a larger format; this one doesn’t).

Increasingly, I have submissions from poets who have just finished, or are in process of finishing, MLitts or PhDs, for which they have completed a set of poems. These have been praised and now they want to publish them. Oh dear. I would look at a set of poems differently were I assessing the achievement for that particular person than I would when considering them for publication. Getting things published is not the same as writing them well. Writing them well comes first – of course it does – but after that, there’s more. Have any of the poems appeared in good quality magazines? (I expect this.) Has the poet started to build a readership? (I don’t mean their tutors or fellow students.) Has the person thought carefully about pamphlet publications and how they work? Why does the person want to be published at all?

And so I go on to dispense various kinds of disappointment. I am increasingly nervous of the phenomenon I call ‘Contemp Po’ and so I flag it when I see it. Every age has its own Contemp Po features, tricks that seem innovative at the time but quickly become passé. We absorb these features unconsciously. (Every age also has poetry that is timeless: it could work in any age and for any reader.)

When we write poetry, we instinctively reach for something that makes it not prose, a register or a method that confirms for us: This is a Poem. Some people find it in formal conventions (rhyme and metre); others find it in a particular rhythmic vernacular (writing in Scots, or a local dialect). There are many ways.

The ‘line break’ is the major indicator of ‘poem’ for those writing free-ish verse, but line break alone is unlikely to suffice. Sensitivity to sound patterns is just as important. By this I mean assonance (vowel sounds echoing each other), and also the sound trail through vowels and consonants. I don’t want to make this technical, but in the simplest sense, the lines don’t always sound ‘right’, whatever ‘right’ is for that particular poem.

Sound is not everything. There are deaf poets who write beautifully. But they become attuned to something else, some other features that make the text ‘poem’ and not ‘prose’. And besides, deaf people hear through their feet, fingers and toes: rhythm patterns apply.

Here are the recurring Contemp Po features I notice most. I flagged these in a last time round but I have added a couple, as well as an example at the end of the How and The Way feature (new!):

Features of Contemp Po

lots of ‘I see’ and ‘I watch’ and ‘I feel’ and, worst of all, ‘I think’
disappearing subjects (verb with no ‘I’)
lots of poems in couplets
‘arty’ layouts , space instead of punctuation
poems based on extended metaphor (sometimes it works)
over-mixed metaphor (over-wrought, crossed logics)
a lot of cross-stanza enjambment
numerous colons and semi-colons.
poem a single sentence which gets lost in the middle
poem based round clauses with no finite verbs
sentences starting ‘And’ and ‘But’
first few lines dead (no bite)
title steals thunder of the best (last?) line or phrase
disappearing articles (‘the’ and ‘a’)
many ‘as’ sentences (see blog 26.05.2011)
poems constructed round a set of imperatives
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’
lots of thens, followed by suddenly
weird line breaks
a rhyme at, or very near, the end
line breaks on ‘significant’ word like ‘break’—see above
no punctuation, and then some suddenly arrives
the ‘leaning verb thing’ (see below)
the ‘how’ and ‘the way’ clause repetition (see below)

The leaning verb thing:
There’s a tendency to write lines where two or more verb clauses are each appended to the same subject, often towards the high point. This is now as ubiquitous as scattered ampersands were in the sixties. For example:

She reaches for her pen, scribbles a few lines,
wonders why the world hasn’t colluded, hasn’t collapsed.

The ‘how’ and ‘the way’ thing
Here’s another regular pattern. In fact, the pattern can be useful until it starts to look mannered. It may one day look as mannered as ‘up and spak an eldern knicht’ and ‘o’er the wall the sun doth sink’:

He saw and took note. How she touched each leaf
on the trailing vine. How she stopped a second
beside the stair. How the light on her hair
glimmered. And later the way she paused
outside the greenhouse. The way she held
the key lightly, like a talisman. The way
she turned it slowly in the lock

SUBMISSION THERAPY

The window is about to shut.

That is to say, the ‘submissions window’, that delightful metaphor I acquired from somewhere. It sounds welcoming I think, up to the point where it closes and I am reminded of Peter Pan’s failed attempt to get back home.

The word ‘submissions’ worries me too because of the association with being submissive. Actually, I feel as though I am the submissive one. I submit to the pile of envelopes, to the task of reading and responding, humbled by the earnestness of the covering letters.

Before Christmas I had reached the point of not coping at all. I consequently developed a new method of managing the submissions, one that those who sent them would be unlikely to warm to. I numbered them as they arrived (some of the eager upstarts in November) but opened not a one. A small skyscraper of them is waiting downstairs until tomorrow when the window closes.

In January I will start the slow business of working through.

There are more submission envelopes than ever before in such a short period, approximately twice as many as this time last year. This is one sign of HappenStance’s success perhaps (though I mistrust and dislike the word ‘success’ in ways too numerous to mention), and it involves concomitant failure. As the number of submissions increases, the chance of acceptance decreases.

I hope, however, that not all the envelopes are from writers anticipating imminent publication because my ambition in life is not to dispense disappointment. The publications schedule for 2013 is already fuller than I am comfortable with. Nothing more will be added to 2014 unless a poet drops out, and I am looking at 2015 “in equal scale weighing delight and dole”, as King Claudius remarked.

In my stack of envelopes, there will be at least six or seven, and perhaps up to ten, from poets I have communicated with before. I will have invited some of them to send more poems, and the consequent familiarity will make those texts feel friendlier. However, the associated guilt will be greater if I can’t make any publication promises. There will be a few, I hope, from HappenStance subscribers who simply want some feedback on the work. Again, those are a pleasure to deal with.

The business of publication is difficult on both sides. I am not hoping to find poets to publish (it is rather the reverse), although it is true that I might come across one. So why open the window at all?

Good question. It interests me, this odd pursuit of writing poems. The people who do it interest me too. I like the window of insight into what goes on, not least because I write poems myself and have never quite understood why, though I think about it a lot. I have met some marvelous people over the last seven years, because they arrived in my life, as it were, through this window. I have made friendships with poets I haven’t published, as well as with those I have. I hope this will continue. There may be a single poem, somewhere in this pile, that will change my life. Poems do that sometimes.

For poets desperately keen to find a publisher, it may be worth noting that poetry publishers, once established, have a constant mental list of people they’d like to work with and publications they’d like to do. These arrive by one route or another, some of them through personal recommendation, or because one has met them or heard them read. The ‘window’ operated by a few of us is, effectively, an added extra. Most publishers start to say ‘no unsolicited submissions’ simply as a way of making the workload manageable. But they do get submissions, of course. There are other ways. There are always other ways.

A few publishers actively seek poets for their list. These may (sigh) be so-called vanity publishers, but it is easy to work this out when it becomes clear that your relationship with them is going to be very expensive. But publishers seeking poets are not necessarily vanity organizations. All publishers have to start somewhere. New imprints look for good quality poets who will help them to establish a reputation. From the poet’s point of view, the risk is that a new imprint could be a ramshackle operation with which it will be a mistake to have been involved. But equally a new imprint could turn out to be quite something. It could prove an alliance of luck and honour.

But how do you find out if someone is setting up an imprint for the first time? You keep your nose to the ground as well as the grindstone. You swallow your pride, take a tablet and consider judicious aspects of social networking. You ask people. You analyse what routes other published poets have followed. You consider setting up an imprint yourself.

I try to maintain a current list of pamphlet publishers, though needless to say it’s never quite up to date. The current one lists, for example, Knives Forks and Spoons Press, which I note has now ceased publication – such a shame! The given reason is lack of funds. Poetry publishers don’t make money because by and large, poetry doesn’t sell. That’s another factor to bear in mind. However, there’s a gap there. Could you start the next knife, fork or a spoon? It is not rocket science. It just requires a little imagination, dedication and literary intelligence.

At the start of December, David Tipton died. David, who was also a poet and a novelist, ran Redbeck Press, which once hosted an annual pamphlet competition – at a time when the only competitor in the pamphlet competition field was The Poetry Business. Latterly, he was doing less, though maintaining relationships with many of the writers he had published over the years. There was a feature about him in Sphinx 4, 2006, and I have added it as a download to the Sphinx website.

That’s two publishers who have vanished. They leave a gap. Why not start an imprint of your own? There is so much to learn, so much to gain from this enriching opportunity. By enriching, you understand, I am not referring to money. We need more women, in particular, doing this.

To all who sent additions to the HappenStance December stack, thank you for your interest and your patience. There will be replies. Just not quite yet. . . .

CLOSING THE WINDOW

July was probably the hardest submissions month ever.

That is to say there were not only more submissions than usual (the article in Poetry News had a considerable effect) but the quality was higher too.

This is how it works.

I try to deal with the envelopes as they arrive, not let them pile up because that’s too daunting for words. Sometimes I’m in when the postie struggles to get them through the box. Sometimes I come home to another pile.

As the month goes on, I become increasingly crabbit. This is because the process of reading so much poetry is stressful. I read every poem and I read them carefully. That’s full-on concentration, and I write on the poem-pages in pencil, sometimes very detailed comments. When a poet sends 12 rather than 25 poems, I feel pathetically grateful. The reading of each submission will take at least one hour, usually far more. I’ve sharpened two whole 2B pencils to death this month.

If I come across a very good set of poems, I get anxious. Why? Because I have too many publications scheduled already and there’s a hard year ahead with my other jobs. So on balance I’m trying not to accept new poets, while staying open-minded because there might be something . . . I can’t refuse.

I’ve written at length about the business of swinging the odds in How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published. At one time I used to send this gratis to quite a lot of people but I have only four left. I always hope poets approaching me will have spent time finding out what I look for – by reading blog entries like this one, or this one, or this one, or last year’s.

Certain thoughts are in my mind, as I open the envelope and make my first impression notes.

Is this a name I know?

Have I read (and liked) their poems before?

Is this a first or second (or third) submission?

Is this one of my subscribers?

Do they know my name?

Can they write prose? (covering letter)

Why have they sent to HappenStance?

Have they read any of my pamphlets?

Do I like the sound of the person?

Have they remembered the SAE?

Does the presentation look professional?

What’s the publication track record like?

Are they female? (I’ve never managed to publish as many women as men in a single year).

Are they Scottish/based in Scotland? (I do at least one publication by a Scottish writer every year)

Depending on the answers to these questions, I’m more or less favourably disposed towards the poems themselves, and the person who wrote them. Often, I find my crankiness annoying to myself, never mind the poor poet, who finds me scribbling rudely ‘Put your name and address on every page!’

If the pages are bound, stapled or neatly assembled in a plastic binder, I swear like a pirate as I disassemble them and prepare to read.

Sometimes the poems arrive with a cover sheet brandishing a large TITLE for the proposed collection. But I’m only at the stage of wondering whether I’ll find any poems to like. And sometimes, this TITLE puts me off because I think it’s a terrible title. But that’s by the by.

(At this point, I’ll throw in a mention of the submission guidelines, which ask people not to bind the poems, and a few other things. And the Dos and Don’ts, which are also available as a free download pdf in the shop. If poets haven’t found their way to these, I draw one of two conclusions. 1. They’re not very good on the web and get lost easily in websites. 2. They haven’t looked.)

The reason I take apart people’s carefully bound and often page-numbered submissions is this. I read the poems one by one. I mark poems I like well enough to publish (if it comes to that) with a little tick and sometimes a smiley if I like them a LOT. I put those poems in one pile. The rest go in another pile. (This is the point where a poem can easily get dropped or misplaced, and if the poet’s name’s not on it, they may never see it again). If the pile of poems I like is either bigger than the other pile or contains a couple of poems I love, I may ask that poet to send again.

I don’t offer to publish pamphlets on first submission. I register an interest. I suggest a maybe. I tell them I’m thinking about 2015 just now. (I don’t mention it’s a pity they’re a man, because that’s not their fault.) I suggest the pamphlet competitions are well worth entering. And so on.

I feel very mean, when a poet has sent me all their best villanelles, not knowing how I hate villainelles (sic). For the record, for this unreasonable publisher, it is no-no to

villanelles
sestinas
pantoums
ekphrastic poems
‘after’ poems

This doesn’t mean I would never publish one of the above. It means they need to win me over with something else first, and then make the case for the first villanelle I will have liked for years.

In terms of presentation (I’m now unreasonably sensitive to how the poems look as well), this is what I prefer (it’s in the Do’s and Don’ts):

a plain font, nothing fancy
the same sort of size of print you find in a book (usually a 12)
name and address of author discreetly on every sheet
single-spaced (1.5 if you must)
one poem per page (even if it’s a sequence)

I wish I knew what the formula was for a fabulous poem. If I did, I’d bottle it and sell it. There is no formula. There is no way of consciously doing this magical thing that’s ‘right’. I can, however, comment on a number of things that either make poems go wrong (to my mind) or make them same-ish.

Same-ishness is a problem. There are numerous poets writing worthy, well-made poems, poems I often enjoy reading. But they don’t quite lift off the page. Something slightly drags them down into being a little bit like something you’ve read before. I refer to some of the methods that contribute to this as ‘Contemp Po’. And then I get over-sensitized to some of the Contemp Po techniques because they can put me off poems that have a real poem in them.

Here are some of the features I see as current mainstream Contemp Po:

– poems in couplets (ok occasionally but can be ubiquitous)

– poems based on one extended metaphor (sometimes it works)

– cross-stanza enjambment with no particular logic to it, except to fulfil the poet’s desire to divide stanzas into neat chunks of two, three, or four lines.

– poems divided into neat chunks

– a couple of prose poems thrown in (I don’t hate them, but they’re not mandatory)

– over-elaborate syntax, relying on multiple colons/semi-colons.

– poem based on a single sentence but the reader gets lost in the middle

– lots of sentences with no verbs in them.

– disappearing articles (both definite and indefinite)

– disappearing subjects (verb with no ‘I’)

– lots of ‘I see’ and ‘I watch’ and ‘I feel’

– numerous ‘as’ sentences

– poems constructed round a sequence of imperative verbs

– poems ending on the word ‘love’ (I know: I’ve done it too)

– the word ‘yet’ flagging an epiphany

– bizarre line breaks. Why break on a hyphen? It’s been done, and done, and over-
done.

– erratic and/or distracting punctuation

– lots of verb clauses in apposition to each other (see below)

There’s an increasing tendency to write sections relying heavily on two or more verb clauses, each appended to the same subject. Often this increases towards the end or high point of a poem. Like this:

I walk into the room, pick up my gun, shoot
the publisher.

She goes for her pen, scribbles a poem,
hurls inhibitions round like confetti,
wonders why the world hasn’t ended yet.

I’m interested in why this verb thing is happening so much. Was it always a habit? Do we instinctively emulate phrasing that sounds ‘poetic’? I think it could be something to do with rhythm and cadence. A sequence of verbs like that – when you read them, you LEAN on each verb, and that leaning thing propels the poem through, just as a series of imperative verbs set up an energy charge. Free form often yearns for rhythmic pattern.

What should a poet do to prevent me from obsessing about leaning verbs and ‘as’s and semi-colons? (I apologise. Really.)

This is hard to explain, but I think it’s like a window. You walk to the window and admire the garden, or the view of roof-tops. You don’t see the glass or the frame until long after you’ve admired what’s on the other side.

If I’m distracted by the mechanics of a poem – the couplets, the line lengths, the enjambment, the verbs, the rhymes – whatever – it means I’m seeing the glass, not the view. That suggests the text is not, for me, working as it should.

Obviously, this is true of lots of published poetry, and I’m only looking at submissions. But aren’t we all looking for the thing we hardly ever find? The view of the garden?

GETTING PUBLISHED IS THE LEAST OF IT

Beautifully published books vanish in obscurity. Poets are lost all the time.

But what about the magic-poem phenomenon? It occurs unexpectedly and unpredictably. And when it does, publishers are bypassed completely.

So here’s a little test. Which world-famous poem was originally scribbled on a brown paper bag, the first poem the author had ever written?

Perhaps you do know. There was some publicity in 2004 when Mary Elizabeth Frye died at the age of 98. Frye is usually described as “a Baltimore housewife and florist”. In 1932 she was moved by the distress of a friend whose mother had just died. The friend was Jewish and in America. Her mother died in Germany. She couldn’t be there, she couldn’t even visit her grave.

This is what Mary Frye wrote to comfort her friend, using the nearest available scrap of paper. Though later circulated among friends, it was never officially ‘published’:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft star-shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

At least, that’s the version printed in Frye’s obituary. There are others. There is even interesting controversy about whether she really wrote the poem. I like to think she did.

In any case, nobody can deny the popular appeal. It’s a remarkable piece of consolatory verse – and one of poetry’s enduring capacities is to console. Particularly interesting is the way it champions the identity of the individual spirit at the same time as blending the person, the ‘I’, into everything that exists.

Mary Elizabeth Frye didn’t need a publisher to make that poem famous. It got there all by itself, and that was before the internet. But now there’s the web, and some things travel even faster. A very different kind of poem, for example, is that silly one – the one about the ‘Spell Chequer’.

Have you read it? Probably. It’s widely disseminated in schools and colleges. Every now and again it pops up in a chain email or FaceBook ‘share’. It never has an author. It’s full of deliberate spelling errors – the kind no spell check software can identify because each word is correct in itself but incorrect in context. To drive this home, the byline reads “Sauce unknown”.

Actually the source is known. It was written by Mark Eckman in 1991, since when it has travelled the length and breadth of the globe, delighting and entertaining various people, especially teachers. Of course, it’s ‘just’ light verse, but it’s magic. It did that thing. It went viral all by itself.

In the railway station in Kirkcaldy in Fife, there’s a large poem on the wall, imprinted into a piece of marmoleum (‘marmoleum’ is a variation on ‘linoleum’, Kirkcaldy being the home of lino). ‘The Boy in the Train’ is one of my all-time favourites. It’s by Mary Campbell Smith, who doesn’t even have an entry in Wikipedia. And yet that poem has certainly travelled! Brilliantly evocative, it recreates a small child’s journey at a time when the railway was mysterious and enchanting, most people didn’t possess motorcars and electric lights were still a novelty.

How did the poem get its deserved popularity in Scottish culture? It appeared in a school magazine. Mary Campbell Smith was not a pupil – she was the Head Teacher’s wife. Clearly she could turn her hand to a bit of verse (and probably many other things). People liked it. It was passed around, shared, handed on. It began to appear in anthologies.

Was Mary Campbell Smith known as a poet? No. Did she write more fabulous poems? If she did, nobody knows about them.

Some people, and I am one of them, hold that the highest accolade for any poet is to become Anon. By this I mean the identity of the poet is forgotten but the words live on. ‘Westron Wynde’ is the one I think about most often, especially when it’s raining. It was first found in print, as a song lyric in 1530. No-one knows precisely when it originated or who wrote it. But as long as there are people alive who speak English, surely this one will live?

Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,
The small raine down can raine.
Cryst, if my love were in my armes
And I in my bedde again!

DEATH BY POETRY

It happens all the time.

Death by poetry? It happens all the time.

A circular email arrives. It is addressed to several publishers, so I am one of a list – often quite an interesting list. Occasionally the list of other names is suppressed, so the email appears to be copied to its author, but I know I am one of many because the email will begin, “Dear Sir/Madam” or “Dear Publisher” or, as in one last week, “Dear Small Publishers”.

Then there is an appeal to read some poems. These will either be attached as separate documents or pasted in a long string underneath the message.

There may be elaborate claims for the brilliance of the work. There may be detailed descriptions of the author’s long-reaching literary arm.

However, the small publisher doesn’t read that far. She has already deleted the message or, as in my case, saved it in the Mad Poets file.

Sometimes, especially if I think the poet may be young, I reply with some advice, which may be a stupid thing to do. Once it involved me in a lengthy interaction, where the male poet (for some reason they are always men) bombarded me with poems. A barrage of verse. I had to block his messages in the end.

I do not read the poems. Okay—that’s not totally true. Very occasionally I read a few lines, with a sort of horrid fascination. I have never, in this situation, come across anything I liked. But even if I did, I wouldn’t like the way it had been thrown at me, and so I wouldn’t consider working with that poet, not for one moment.

Besides, the phrase ‘coals to Newcastle’ springs to mind. I am sitting in a room where two walls are lined floor to ceiling with books. Almost all these books are either collections of poetry, or books about poetry or poets. The third wall has a table, with piles of poetry books, and another bookcase full of . . . er . . . poetry books. I am sitting at the fourth wall, which has a window and so no room for a bookcase. However, on the desk in front of me, beside the Imac screen there is a pile of . . . you guessed already. Some of the work in this room is wonderful, and if I had time, I would be reading it now. I probably should be reading it now. Why would I want more? Especially of dubious provenance.

My job (because I am a humble publisher) is to sell poetry to other people, not have them hurl it at me.

Perhaps the real reason the mad poets’ emails are so frustrating is the way they caricature what I myself am doing as a purveyor of poetry. Here are some poems. You’ll love them! Best you’ve ever seen. Really—latest pamphlet, book, sampler. Unmissable.

But poetry is patently missable. We can live without it, despite the fact that some of us continue to search for the texts that feel indispensable. It is an odd search, and an odd dedication.

A little of the right sort of poetry—that’s what we want. It is never a matter of the more, the better. Too much poetry is a killer. I like pamphlets for that reason. Not too much in them, not too overwhelming, no overweening aspirations. Don’t ask me what ‘the right sort’ is. I only know for me, not you.

But I like a publication that results from an interaction, a process. I like a poet with humility and reserve. I like understatement, and I like irony, and I like playfulness.

There is a ‘right’ way to approach publishers with poems. It requires the poet to notice the publisher as a human being with personal preference and practice. These are not secret things: they’re easy to find out about. Websites are full of information. The world is littered with interviews and articles and year-books and listings. And you can write to a person—you can establish some interaction—without sending poems.

The poetry publisher is never short of Po. Although the mental (and sometimes physical) space is knee-deep in Po-matter, more and more of it arrives. He or she does not wake up one morning to say ‘Hurray! Five hundred more poems have arrived. Just what I wanted!”

However, he or she may—just possibly—say: ‘Hurray! A letter from J M B: I hope she’s included some new poems.’ It’s a relationship. It’s a context. We are human beings, not poem counters.

However, for those who continue to believe fame, fortune and the fabulous future are just around the corner if the victim publisher will just dip into the amazing poem in their email, I recommend British Writers Awards. This organization will take lots of money in return for feeding the belief that a life of influence and affluence is just about to commence. . . .

THE TACTICS OF SYNTAX

“I love Peter Gilmour’s syntax.”

It’s what I found myself saying last week at the launch of the two new publications. Oh dear – five years ago I would never have said anything half so pompous. Now I’m reading submissions of poems and writing in pencil – all over the place – comments like ‘the syntax doesn’t work for me here’.

Perhaps I shouldn’t even use the word, or at least I should clarify what I mean by it. Here is the Merriam Webster definition. In fact, Merriam Webster has three versions, and I think what I have in mind is chiefly the second: “a connected or orderly system: harmonious arrangement of parts or elements”.

To add insult to injury, these days there’s computer syntax. I’m not a programmer, but so far as I understand it, if there’s an error in ‘syntax’, the program won’t run. Sometimes a comma out of place puts the whole thing up the spout.

It’s the same in poetry. Often something in the sentence – a punctuation symbol perhaps, or a subject/verb dissonance, or a descriptive clause that doesn’t seem to know where it belongs – pulls the reader up and stops the poem working. Contemporary poets are fond of fragments – sentences without finite verbs. These certainly have their place. But there are an awful lot of them around.

I have a weakness for single-sentence poems, though only if they’re beautiful. It’s rare for a poet to handle the structure of a sentence so properly and so harmoniously that it can run over several stanzas without the reader once feeling disconcerted or dizzy. Besides, it’s easier to write in impressionistic fragments.

Give me a writer who can construct a prose sentence with elegance and style. It provides me with the sensual pleasure I imagine others get from wine, or a 50-year-old malt. It’s why I love the work of Carson McCullers and Gerald Murnane (and they’re not even poets).

There are writers who can carry a beautiful sentence into a poem. They do it without dropping subjects or toppling weighty descriptive clauses on top of each other. Their nouns don’t look like verbs at first sight and their verbs don’t look like nouns. The work is harmonious to the eye, to the ear, to the brain.

Peter Gilmour is one of these. I’ll close with a sentence from ‘Rupture’:

…….I was enjoying myself in truth,
…….hurrying not just the car but the marriage,
…….not just this last journey but our pilgrimage,
…….to a hot and hellish end.

…….….[from Taking Account, HappenStance, 2011]