Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News
What's happening at HappenStance
The latest news from HappenStance
I woke this morning from a vivid dream.
I was sitting at my desk and I glanced at the bottom bookshelf.
I saw two copies of a large white paperback.
These two books weren’t there yesterday. Two duplicates.
The title of the books was easy to read, even from this distance. It was:
WRITING: THE GRIM & THE ACT
I took this as a warning and made this short.
The Clog of the Blog.
The Anxious Analogue.
The Whim & the Pact.
The Dream & the Fact
(of the paperbacked).
Why is it so hard to do publicity?
I always thought the most difficult thing to write well was – a poem.
But there’s something else I find more difficult. And it’s writing the publicity material about the poems. It’s almost impossible.
Why should it be so hard to put into words how something you think is remarkable is . . . remarkable?
It may be something to do with fear, fear that the describing words turn into marketing clichés and disappear down the drain. It’s fear of letting the poets down. And beneath that, there’s something else – a kind of rage about the way the world works these days. So much hype, so many shiny, empty words. I’m scared mine will disappear with the rest of the dross.
But here I am again about to launch five new publications. Five! Five things to say about five different publications. How can they all be wonderful?
Well four of them are wonderful, and the fifth is funny. How do I know they’re wonderful?
No, wait. I don’t like ‘wonderful’. Please put it back. I’ll have ‘remarkable’ please, and yes, I do most certainly think they’re remarkable. They made me sit up and remark. They made me sit up and remark so much that I wanted to work with these writers. And work we did. It’s taken an age to make them. You have no idea of the time spent debating commas, accents, format, poems to go in, poems to come out, running order, titles that were okay, titles that were rubbish, where to put notes, what to say on the back jacket, which design worked best on the cover, which didn’t….
The books are done. Two are at the printer’s in Berwick-on-Tweed. Three are about to make their way to Dolphin Press tomorrow morning. They’re not in the HappenStance online shop yet because they don’t fully exist yet except electronically, though that is existence.
And yesterday I spent several hours finalising the flyers and the copy for the publications list. The publications list! What a nightmare. Each time I revise it I get something wrong.The words for the new publications either start to sound tinny or I find I’ve described two books in the same way. You can’t have TWO fresh and originals. And since each one is completely different from the rest, it can’t be that hard. Can it?
Take it from me, it’s hard. Even for a bard.
But here’s what it says about the new babes on the sweated-over publications list.
Number one: a whole book, a first book, no less.. And here’s what it says on the publications list:
Noir, Charlotte Gann
Troubled, troubling and fearless, Charlotte Gann’s first collection confronts manipulation and damage, and sails into the light. A book that can be read like a film.
You may think those italics emerged easily, just like turning on a tap. Wrong. I have never before read a collection of poems that resembled a film in its clarity of image and narrative thrust. But for me, Charlotte’s book is like this. Like a noir film. With shivers.
Then there are three pamphlets, described below in alphabetical order of writer’s surname (just in case you think it’s in order of remarkableness).
The Days that Followed Paris, Paul Stephenson.
During a night of co-ordinated terrorist attacks in November 2015, the poet was at home in Paris. He was unharmed but swept up (like the whole city) into a maelstrom of publicity and alarm. These poems, in many shapes and forms, offer a response to that unhinging experience.
Instructions for Making Me, Maria Taylor.
Poems of unfailing vitality and charm. You read them and immediately want to share them. Honestly, every poet and aspiring writer should read ‘The Horse’ …
In the Glasshouse, Helen Tookey.
Haunting and evocative work that crosses the boundaries of form and feeling, searching, experimenting, feeling its way. Between truth and fable, intuition and enquiry, something magical and beautiful emerges.
Okay, what do you think? There’s so much more to be said, but in a publications list you have to whittle it down to the bare minimum.
You can’t read any of these yet, but soon you will be able to.
My slaved-over descriptive words have two purposes. They’re trying to make you want to read the poems – of course – but they’re also trying to evoke these publications as they are – entirely remarkable, but in different ways.
I’m not mentioning the fifth yet because it’s called Down with Poetry! That heretical book will look after itself.
More on heresy soon.
I’ve always specially liked the term ‘little magazine’. It sounds so un-literary. But of course, it’s the reverse.
This is how the British Library defines a ‘little magazine’:
‘a literary magazine, usually produced without concern for immediate commercial gain, and with a guiding enthusiasm for contemporary literature, especially poetry’.
Yes—that just about nails the sort of publication I have in mind. Something both bizarre and respected, in many ways a bit of a throwback, of both academic and amateur interest.
Wolfgang Görtschacher, editor of Poetry Salzburg, has published two whole tomes about ‘little magazines’. Richard Price, who at one time co-edited Gairfish, Verse and Southfields, and in his own right, Painted, Spoken, has (with David Miller) co-authored a detailed bibliography and history of the British breed, from 1914-2000.
So little magazines are started (and sustained) by people with a bit of an obsession, and then they’re written about by people who have a somewhat obsessive interest in them. And meanwhile, the rest of us (when they’re poetry magazines) read them, rage about rejections from them, celebrate them when they print our poems, and wonder how and why anybody does this thing, this magazine thing.
Little magazines start by being anti-establishment. They specialize in reacting against this or that. They don’t always end up that way. Malcolm Bradbury makes a distinction between the little magazine and ‘significant literary journals’ like The London Review of Books and the TLS. But the borderline between little magazine and significant literary journal is a sort of no man’s land. What is ‘significant’ anyway? What sort of person has the authority to express views on literature, on culture?
The truth is, as it ever was, that anybody can start a little magazine. Anybody can print and publish their say, and the say of others. Anybody at all can start it. Even if you have no money at all, there is always a way. But very few can keep it going over decades. The editors who do this are a species apart.
If the story of the long-running little magazine is told at all, it is usually in fragments by a researcher: a chapter in a book, a paragraph in an article. The editor is too busy to do it him- or herself.
And so when Gerry Cambridge, editor of The Dark Horse, said he was thinking of writing the story himself, after two decades, I was encouraging.
I have a connection to disclose. Actually, several. Gerry was the first editor to publish any of my poems (though the first ones were in Spectrum, not The Dark Horse). When he started The Dark Horse, I subscribed and became a regular contributor of both poems and critical writing. I have read every single issue of the magazine from then (1994) to now. As HappenStance editor, I published a volume of his poetry, Notes for Lighting a Fire, as well as his essay about typesetting poetry, The Printed Snow. Somehow, I have now known Gerry for long enough for him to qualify as ‘an old friend’, a person I trust and respect as a poet, editor, type-setter, book-designer, fountain-pen collector and expert on birds and ink.
So—he did it. He actually wrote the story of the Horse. It was neither simple, nor straight-forward. It nearly drove him daft in the middle—doing both this and all the other things that sustain life and the magazine itself. It look longer than either of us anticipated, but the tale has been told—and HappenStance has published it, an honour and the completion of a cycle.
Gerry’s book is called The Dark Horse: The Making of a Little Magazine, and it has a mischievous title-extension too ‘& sundry divagations on poets, poetry, criticism and poetry culture’. It is a handsome volume—large and orange, with numerous colour plates showing the magazine’s design over the years. Among his other talents, Gerry is a first-class photographer, so there are fabulous monochrome pictures of writers too. And, of course, the story of the magazine, in three sections.
If you want to know what makes a person do this little-magazine thing, you may be able to work it out from this account, though I’m inclined to think it remains a mystery. Indexed by Margaret Christie (herself a HappenStance poet), and typeset and designed by Gerry, the book is an idiosyncratic and entertaining source of information about a little slice of literary experience and the associated personalities. You can dip in, or read from beginning to end. If you leave it lying about, someone else will pick it up, start to flick through (nodding and smiling), and may well slip it into their bag. It is that sort of book.
So do you need to know about the poet’s life?
Well – sometimes – where the poem hinges on autobiographical detail – you might want to.
Alison Prince, whose first full collection of poems, Waking At Five Happens Again, has just appeared in book form, for example, has had a long and extraordinary life. And her poems draw on it openly. This is especially noticeable in the ones that refer to her experience as a child during the Second World War, to her own current health condition, or to her parents, in particular her father, an intensely musical man and son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia or the Ukraine – the grandfather Alison never met.
War, for children, is mysterious and frightening, but also exciting. If you grew up in the Second World War, the stories of the Great War were vividly present. Alison’s father was one of only two men from his battalion to come back physically unharmed from Ypres and the Somme. in her poem ‘Centenary’, she recalls his memory of a trench in Flanders:
A dead man’s hand, he said,
projected from the muddy wall,
useful to lean your rifle on.
This soldier-survivor met the love of his life, Alison’s mother, when she came back from nursing in France. Both of them had seen terrible injury and pain. But they got on with ordinary lives, except that they were far from ordinary, and never ever ‘soft’. Her father did well in his banking career. His aspiration to be a concert pianist was shelved, but he played every night in the front room, wearing an overcoat and hat if the fire wasn’t lit. When he forgot to draw the curtains, people passing by gathered at the garden fence to listen.
There were two children: first Alison and then, five years later, her brother Roderick. But another war loomed. Just before it started, Alison was taken to the island of Arran by her grandmother, and knew for certain that it was where she belonged (she lives there now), but then she was carted back to London and a war began. And the children played in bomb craters and survived. When Alison’s mother asked ‘Where have you been?’, the answer (in her poem ‘Kids’) was:
Hurling a Spitfire through the sky, mother.
Manning an ack-ack gun.
During wars, children get on, as best they can, with the serious business of play:
People in uniform banished our dream.
They had no time for us.
We were just kids,
though not what you could call children.
Alison miraculously escaped death when a bomb lodged in the rafters over her bed and failed to explode. But some of the neighbouring chldren were less lucky. ‘Wartime’ tells the story of two who ‘would have been old ladies now / except the Luftwaffe arrived’. They ran across the road to the public shelter:
A bomb killed one of them
but the other stumbled on.
Only inside the curtain
did the dim light show her hands
holding the spilled wreckage
of her abdomen.
During a war, death is no stranger. There it is at your right hand, sharpening the angle of the light. And this poet, now in her eighties, faces an assault again – not from outside, but from within. Problems with heart and lungs bring back that knife-edge, both literally and metaphorically. Past and present merge, a wild and beautiful blend, as the ‘heart beats in double time’ and ‘rests are not restful’. Here’s the second stanza of ‘Fast’:
The armies of perfection are most beautiful,
helmet feathers waving in the sun,
lances slanting like blown corn,
so good, so generous, so warm,
so oath-bound to serve life
even when life is off somewhere,
flirting outrageously with the dark-cloaked
seductive musician
who will play ‘The Last Post’.
Alison Prince is an artist (she can paint and draw beautifully) and a musician (she plays clarinet in a jazz band) and a story-teller (author of countless children’s tales) and a biographer (lives of Hans Christian Andersen and Kenneth Grahame) and a gardener (it’s in the poems) and a teacher and a mother and a grandmother and a poet. In her later years, poetry is the form in which she brings all the threads and threats of her life together, and the fusion is like no other. Waking At Five Happens Again, published jointly by Mariscat and HappenStance, is the book of a lifetime in which a whole life nestles, offering its stories and reflections, making its own sense out of the great puzzle of existence.
‘Centenary’, which begins with Alison’s father’s story about the dead man’s hand, ‘useful to lean your rifle on’, ends like this:
I knew him in another war,
crouched in another bolthole underground.
The hurricane lamp would flicker when
shock pulsed through the earth from a close bomb.
His hands, clamped round an empty beer glass,
trembled. We pretended not to see,
because there is nothing so dangerous
as being afraid.
***
It’s a sort of spectrum. At one end – the safe end – there’s persona (Robert Browning – ‘My Last Duchess’).
To get to the other end (hot and dangerous territory) you move through ‘Lyric I’ to potentially real experience, personal anecdote, unambiguously personal experience, personal outburst or rant, and – at the far edge of the spectrum – first-person confession and writing from the jugular.
In poetry, the word ‘confessional’ has generally had bad press. It’s like ‘Georgian’. Its dynamic strengths have been subsumed by the whole idea of spillage and blurt. So generally it’s used by critics with a tone of disdain.
Latterly the word ‘personal’ seems to be acquiring the same disparaging resonance. In more than one place I’ve read comments suggesting mainstream poetry in English is sadly dominated by memoir and personal anecdote. Too much boringly true experience. Not enough innovation and excitement.
Personally (I use the word advisedly), I’m suspicious of innovation and excitement. I’m with Robert Frost in saying ‘I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.’ Or to put it another way, there’s nothing especially good (or new) about innovation per se. Yes, I know I am sixty-two years old and I don’t remember what I thought when I was twenty.
For one thing, at twenty I wouldn’t have ventured any opinion in public (and just as well), but now I have no compunction. I don’t agree that ‘mainstream poetry’, by which I mean the stuff that is in most of the print-based poetry magazines and read by most (but not all, not all) of the aspiring poets, is marred by being written out of unambiguous personal experience. If it is marred at all, it is by a failure to find sharpness and insight inside that material. This kind of failure characterises every era. The majority of printed poetry (I am not dealing with spoken word here) is worthy but forgettable. A little bit of it, for reasons hard to define, bites.
Where am I going with this? I like personal poems. I believe writing out of true experience is intensely valuable at some point to everyone, though of course not everyone chooses poetic form in which to do this.
As soon as you put true experience into any kind of words, you’ve made something of it. Describing is a kind of understanding, or at least moves towards it. One of the purposes (there are many) of poetry is to share an attempt to understand what’s going on. And to share what being human is like.
Tom Duddy writes about ‘a kind of vividness that poems at their best can and should have’ and at the same time his ‘craving for such vividness—a vividness without which I cannot be satisfied, no matter how admirable a poem or piece of writing may be in other respects’. He came to each poem, he said, not as a poet but as a reader with a need. A need for vividness.
Which means precisely what? The word ‘vivid’ has its origins in the Latin verb ‘vivere’ meaning ‘to live’ (it’s also in ‘revive’). Some poems are more alive than others. They revive us. It’s a little like a film moving suddenly out of black and white into colour. Or the sun coming out on a grey day. Or a human being whistling who suddenly turns into a master fiddler and the whole world dances.
So when I say I like personal poems, I like this kind of personal. The kind that wakes me up. That satisfies the craving for vividness, that reminds me what I read poetry for.
I’m working towards two new HappenStance pamphlets released this week. Kate Hendry’s The Lost Original is centred on personal experience. It begins when the poet is a child and her parents separate, and it ends in Costa, with the poet as a mother herself. But it’s not what poems are about that counts. It’s their vividness, which can sometimes be accomplished with such plainness that it’s humbling. Here is Kate’s opening poem. Each time I read it, my heart flips:
Baked Beans
He’d already gone, when Mum told me—
to a room in the Alveston House Hotel.
Still a chance he’d come back home.
It was baked beans on toast, in the garden;
the green baize card table (brought out
for good weather) unfolded just for me.
After I’d been told, I ate up my food
and I took my empty plate, knife and fork
back inside and washed them up myself.
Not one metaphor. Not one simile. Not one rhyme. The vividness all in the detail. The Alveston House Hotel. The green baize card table (how well I remember them). The empty plate. The knife and fork. The ‘just for me’. The ‘washed them up myself’. The vulnerability of the child eating in the garden (in ‘good weather’) on her own. Not one emotion: just that coldly ‘empty plate’.
This is what Kate Hendry can do with personal experience: share its vividness in a way that makes me be that child. To share this well is a sort of emotional intelligence. I re-learn through feeling it, what I already intuitively know, that the deepest emotions may not show. That the child who copes well is feeling things she can’t or won’t articulate, and may never communicate. Until she writes this poem.
The other new HappenStance pamphlet, Alan Buckley’s The Long Haul, is less obviously personal. On the spectrum, he’s nearer the may-be-personal-experience end. But hell – his vividness is personal. Take a look at ‘Flame’ – the sample poem in the webshop. It sends a shiver up and down my spine every time I read it. That’s vividness for you. It’s addressed to a ‘lover’. I have no doubt this human lover existed (or exists). But when you read it, this poem is addressed to you. And it is alive, and burning.
Both The Long Haul and The Lost Original deal with fathers, and these fathers are tricky people, difficult men. In Kate’s pamphlet her father features several times and, in a sense, he’s even on the book jacket, because he s the one who insists she master ‘Compositae, Rosacea, Gramineae’ from Keble Martin’s Concise British Flora. Alan’s dad makes one intensely memorable appearance ‘grappling under a bonnet, / as deft at the wrench as the fine adjustment’ while his son fumbles even ‘to lever off a bicycle tyre’.
How shall we ever understand our fathers? They are like us, and not like us. They never understood us. And we are still trying – those of us who can remember them vividly – to make sense of all that, whatever it was. This is poetry and it’s personal.
As a writing topic, age is in. Age has always been in.
Sarah Catherine’s ‘a classical blog’ quotes Sappho on the topic. And Mimnermus. And Alcman. And Anacreon. The Chinese ancients had it nailed too – all over the place.
Last night I was reading the 2015 Emma Press’s Anthology of Age, edited and illustrated by two relatively young (age is a matter of perpective) people. It’s a lovely set of poems about age and aging – and many of them are heartening.
Meanwhile, the Saltire Society brought out Second Wind last year, a pamphlet by older poets Diana Hendry, Vicki Feaver and Douglas Dunn tackling the aging process with the energy of youth.
And the Scottish Poetry Library, in conjunction with Polygon, is planning an anthology of ‘Scottish poems for growing older’, due later this year.
Even I myself am currently working on a new publication from Alan Hill, a sequence of short poems titled Gerontion. (You may be able to guess its central concern.)
We human beings brood about age a lot. It seems to trouble other animals less, but then other animals don’t look in mirrors.
On her later birthdays (88, 89, 90 and finally 91), I used to ask my mother how she felt about having achieved that particular age.
‘What age?’ she would say.
‘Well, 90 is pretty old, isn’t it? How does it feel to be so old?’
She would shake her head. ‘I feel just the same as I always have,’ she would always say, never one for a fuss. But latterly she looked in the mirror less – much less – which is perhaps why her cardigans were frequently done up wrong, or the patch of melted chocolate on her blouse failed to bother her.
Mum was ill with Alzheimer’s Disease, which confers both bother and blessing, and it was the reason why we were jointly compiling her memoirs. She felt extremely well most of the time. On one of the birthdays, I told her how old she was and she was astonished. ‘Am I really so old?’ she said.
‘You certainly are,’ said I.
‘Well, how old are you?’ she asked me.
‘How old do you think I am?’
‘About 25?’
I laughed, of course. ‘Mum, I am 60.’
She looked at me properly then, and with horror. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘That’s AWFUL! It was like being in a science fiction film, where the main characters are suddenly spirited into a future fifty years ahead, chatting happily, until catch a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, and a horrible reality dawns.
But my mother soon forgot this and went back to being her young self with me cast as a somewhat younger friend. In fact, I thought she was feeling younger and younger in the later years. Quite often she was a child whose parents were just about to arrive.
I think most of us continue to feel much the same inside, throughout our adult years, until some aspect of physical decay strikes us. So poems about age and aging are really about some form of loss, loss being (to my mind) the central and abiding theme of poetry.
Young poets are supposed to write about love. Unsurprisingly, we fall in love with youth which (apart from Jane Eyre) is associated with health and beauty. We do not fall in love with age (the stereotype stoops from street crossing signs).
But even love poetry is really about loss.
The yellow book has gone to print. I’m not sure how it got there and I want to get it back.
The yellow book is, of course, How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published, the book that has obsessed nearly every waking hour between Christmas and now. There’s a chapter of ‘What ifs’, and here’s one of them:
What if you’ve enraged your publisher by trying to change aspects of the collection, including rewriting some of the poems, sixteen times between first offer and printing?
Try not to do this. Relationships are important, and there is a time to let go. If you want to rewrite poems at the last minute, do it later and make a feature of it. Publish a volume titled The B side: rewrites of A. Better still, write some new ones.
What good advice. I shouldn’t have written ‘Try not to do this’, though. I should have written: ‘DO NOT DO THIS!’ Few things are more difficult for a publisher or editor than a writer who keeps rewriting the text. But what if that writer is yourself?
Which it was. Every time I re-proofed that book for the tiny slips of this and that, finding new ones each time, I would see a sentence that could be expressed better, or a chapter heading that felt wrong, or a bit where I was repeating myself (there may still be some of those) or – worst of all – the very morning I was due to send the book to print I decided , at 7.00 a.m., to re-design some of the pages.
These are things you should never ever do. The more changes you make at the last minute, the more likely you are to incorporate errors.
It wasn’t even me but my brother-in-law who observed the mistake on the spine of the book. It read ‘How (Not) To Get Your Oetry Published’. My daughter thought it was a deliberate joke. Beware you poets out there! The HappenStance editor generates Oetry without even trying. One day that oetry could be part of your oevre.
When you yourself are author and editor, and you can make changes, the temptation is overwhelming. I talk quite a bit in How (Not) to about self-publishing but nowhere do I mention this awful downside: the business of letting go. How do you let go of a book you’re producing yourself? How are you sure it’s good enough, finished enough, comprehensive enough, accurate enough, yellow enough?
I wish I didn’t mind making mistakes. I really wanted to get another bound proof. But if I had, I would have had to read the whole book word by word again, and I didn’t think I could bear it. I’ve read it backwards. I’ve read it forwards several times. I’ve read it inside out. At one point I was pleased with it. Now I really don’t know what I think of it any more (this is not what it will say in the publicity blurb which claims it is ‘frank and funny’ and ‘tells you all you need to know about getting your oetry published’).
I know I did one formatting thing in a stupid way. But I realised too late. It came to me in the middle of the night (when I was not sleeping because I was thinking about the yellow book again) what I should have done. I hope I got away with the wrong method. I hope people like this book.
I can always do a revised edition.
And a new and revised edition.
And a second new and revised edition.
Let the book go, Nell. Let the book go.
Should anyone (I know it’s unlikely) wonder where the blog has gone, it has gone into a chapter about blogging and taken my brain with it.
How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published is very nearly done. We are on the cusp of finalising.
I am currently poring over a chapter of ‘What ifs’ which will be some of the questions that nobody seems to answer. If you think of any ‘What ifs’ about getting poetry published, share them now please and I may be able to throw them in.
Soon I may have some ordinary brain space left again to write something else. It’s slightly alarming to find that the writing exercises in the book (it’s not just about getting published, you know) have made me go and write poems when I should have been doing proper work. Honestly! What on earth do I think I’m doing here?
So I’m half-way through How (Not) To Get Your Poetry Published, the new, enlarged, revised, authorised, homogenised edition containing the Answer To It All.
What gets me about self-help books is the knowing tone. So I’m trying my best not to write in a knowing tone. But the knowing tone keeps getting in.
Poetry publishing has obsessed me now for over a decade. I know some things about it, but I still don’t want a knowing tone. I want a questioning tone, a raise-one-eyebrow tone, at the same time as some of useful facts and some ideas. A bit of ‘you need to know this’ and a bit of ‘have you thought about that?’
And it’s got to be funny some of the time. If you don’t have a sense of humour when it comes to getting stuff published, it can only end in tears. Or as Roberto Calasso says in The Art of the Publisher: ‘. . . if our life as a publisher fails to offer sufficient opportunities for laughter, this means it’s just not serious enough.’ This applies just as much to poets.
But I’m finding I can’t bear too many pages about how to prepare, how to make your approach, how to develop a strategy etc. It gets so far away from the joy of writing. Periodically I have to leap out of this book and go and look at something real, like a blob of mud in the back garden or the light reflected in the lenses of my glasses.
So I’m working some reading/writing stimuli into this book – optional, of course – to cheer people up as they go through. If anybody reads it, that is.
If you are reading this now and you think you might, one day, read this book titled How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published) and there’s something you’d particularly like covered in this hypothetical book, could you let me know what it is? You can use the comments section at the bottom of this page or the contact box on the website if your idea’s more private.
What have I got so far? Good question.
Apart from the enjoyable bits (the reading/writing pages) and the case studies (what not to do), this is what I have, but not in this order. (One of the points below is a lie: it’s not in the book at all.)
— motivation (fourteen reasons why)
— understanding the publishing process
— thinking like a publisher (but try not to on a Sunday, it’s very wearing)
— researching a publisher
— choosing the right publisher for you (if there is one!)
— how to make your approach (swinging the odds in your favour)
— thinking outside the box
— DIY publishing
— how people get books published, other people!
— how to gauge whether you’re ready
— track record in magazines
— why you have to use the web
— how to win the National Poetry Competition
— social networking for poets
— thinking about poems in sets: what makes a collection work?
— how to build a readership
Ideas welcome please as soon as you can manage them. But no knowing tones, towing groans or flowing moans, right? Things are bad enough already in the head of Nell.
1. Because you could read Fiona Moore’s blog instead.
2. Because I considered the topic of rejection but here’s Jeff Shotts on The Art of Rejection and he’s done it better.
3. Because you’ve read enough blogs for one day.
4. Because these sort of lists are hardly original.
5. (You don’t need to read the rest of my reasons. Anyway, there are only ten because the entries that list ‘ten of’ get more hits
6. which is why I’m thinking of stopping at five)
7. or maybe extending it to six in order to say I’m rewriting How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published and I’m up to the chapter headed ‘Should poets blog’ which ends ‘or you could go and write a poem instead’. (This book is killing me.)
8. Because you could go and write a poem instead.
9. Because there are only nine. Pay some attention to the nine muses, especially Euterpe. I’m simply an interruption.
