POETRY STUFF – Page 7 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

WORDS, AND WAKING THEM UP

‘The little rabbits smiled sweetly in their sleep under the shower of grass; they did not awake because the lettuces had been so soporific.’

Soporific.

Precisely the right word.

That’s it, isn’t it? The right one, in the right place.

Soporific.

The fabulous and mysterious surprise of language, which in the ordinary way we use so lightly – merely for talking.

But when you find it fixed and free in a rhyme or simply placed without fuss exactly where it should go in the dark backward and abysm of time – well, the black bat night has flown, that’s what, and ringed with the azure world he stands.

The right word in the right place is the star to every wandering bark.

There is wildness and wet, wildness and wet, and then suddenly it’s long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. From wildness to wilderness, simply a syllable. But slipping ‘wilderness’ into the last line of ‘Inversnaid‘, as if it were inevitable, oh my!

I am working on two new pamphlets. They have provoked this excitement and woken up the wonder of words.

The two poets in question are especially good at putting the right word in the right place, and each time this happens, there’s that little shock of recognition. It feels like a miracle.

Maybe this is how clichés get to be clichés. Somebody puts the right word in the right place and the world falls in love with it. So a heart of gold loses its original beautiful self and belongs to everybody. Then the level playing field flattens. At the end of the day, we’re back to square one, which may or may not have something to do with hop-scotch.

A day job as a copy-writer has been an honorable trade for many poets and if I could write catch phrases for a living, why would I not? I throw you a phrase. You catch it and pass it on…

But there’s more to it than that inside a poem. You linger on the precise and delicious word, yes – but it’s precise and delicious because of where it is in the poem as a whole, which the sum of the parts is greater than. Another mystery: how a poem adds up to something that seems to make sense even if it doesn’t.

Here are two tasters from the poets who have stirred me to dithyrambs.

Ramona Herdman’s forthcoming pamphlet is called Bottle and actually it does contain ‘a taster of pink fizz’, but that’s nothing to what else is in there.

For example, there’s a ship in a bottle and its deck ‘flexes under your feet’. Flexes. Besides, how did you get inside the bottle?

There’s ‘a stumble of ice cubes’ and then ice ‘ticking’ in a glass. Ticking.

There’s a ‘quiver of whiskies’. Quiver.

It is a joyful job to be a poetry editor and linger over words. To set them onto a page one by one and marvel. And then to share them.

Lois Williams’s forthcoming debut may be called Like Other Animals. It’s a bargain. No, really. Read on. She wakes up words and sets them spinning.

There’s a cashier, in Poundland, for example. She’s ‘stuck there, furious, reliable.’ ‘What if our bargains are / our only words in common?’ Bargains.

At the town centre pond, there are ‘goldfish / shimmering their semaphore’. Shimmering. Semaphore.

And at home, there’s her father in the greenhouse ‘dusting off soil, bits of vermiculite’. Vermiculite. I don’t think I’ve ever said the word out loud till now. Vermiculite.

What a sensuous pleasure language is! What an amazing and humbling gift!

THE SUMMER OF BLUE

The poetry window has shut again.

Some of the coincidences that occurred during the reading period were extremely strange.

This always happens, but I forget.

Who would expect, for example, to find more than one poem featuring a walrus?

Also several poems about promises. The word ‘promise’ popped up all over the place (a lovely word, when you think about it).

Dusk, too. A lot of dusk. And silk.

As far as colour went, it was the summer of blue. Many shades of blue, more than one poem being entirely about blueness. Payne’s Grey did once put a look in, but blue was overwhelmingly the colour of choice.

‘Heft’ is, as I think I have said before, definitely the new ‘shard’, and clouds find themselves shrouding the sun quite a bit.

I am a little sensitive to shrouds at the moment, though I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen one.

Dead bodies are sometimes wrapped in sheets, but we don’t (I don’t) refer to these as shrouds.

The only shrouds I can find on eBay are connected with gas nozzles. However, on Amazon I have tracked down a ‘Premier Disposable Shroud with Plain Collar, White, Adult’. How extraordinary. Only ten left in stock.

There weren’t as many envelopes as usual – 97 sets of poems, when there are usually at least 120. But I figure people have picked up the fact that things are difficult here at the moment.

However, reading the poems was a pleasure. Real poems, of which there were many, are not written lightly, and they were not read lightly. I copied out three, so I could keep them and reflect. But images and phrases from others linger, as well as some of the lovely letters that came with the poems.

It is a privilege being trusted with people’s poems. I remain convinced that writing them is a good thing, good for the spirit (if not the shroud). and some of that invariably rubs off on the reader.

The work of words is ancient and uplifting. How glad I am to be part of that fellowship.

HOW TO BAKE A POETRY PAMPHLET

First, get the recipe from the author.

It will look much like a Contents list, but with no indication of quantities or baking temperature.

But at least it’s a place to start.

Here, for example, in Will Harris’s debut, are the ingredients:

Object
Mother’s Country
Halo 2
Self-Portrait in Front of a Small Mirror
Naming
Bee Glue
Justine
Identity
Yellow
With Cornflowers
From ‘The Ark’ I
Cured
From The Other Side of Shooter’s Hill
From ‘The Ark’ II
Something
Allegory
Imagine a Forest

But what’s the method? And will the ingredients work?

At least some of the contents promise a recognisable cake. First collections nearly always have something autobiographical that fits into the sense of ‘self’. Because when you publish, it’s a public statement – if not about who you are, at least about who you may be. It’s personal, even if the poems aren’t.

In Will Harris’s Contents, you can see, fourth in the list, a self-portrait. Almost all poets have one, though not always explicitly titled. This one is in prose; part of the mixture. You can see ‘Identity’ too, and ‘Mother’s Country’ which has to be a bit of heritage stuff. Most poetry cakes have some heritage.

And ‘Naming’ of course. Poetry gives things names, then sometimes takes them away again. I often think about Gill McEvoy’s poem ‘Difference’. It was in a pamphlet baked back in 2007, her first collection, Uncertain Days. The poet is in a plane, looking down at the grass at the edge of the runway – ‘white clover in the grass, / a bee, a clump of yellow bedstraw, / a small brown butterfly’. All at once, the airport itself is ‘a place where species are defined / by difference’. The poet wants ‘to be out there’, on her ‘hands and knees, / naming things’.

Poets name things. At first for themselves; later (sometimes) for other people.

The name of the publication is part of that. All This Is Implied. Great name. Doesn’t sound like anything I’ve baked (or consumed) before.

Having said which, when it comes to first collections, no two poetry cakes are ever the same. Each is radically different from the next. Sometimes difference is the defining ingredient.

‘Will Harris’? Not much difference there. It’s such an ordinary-sounding name. A white-caucasian-empire-building name. But he’s not. A Victoria Sponge this is not.

All This Is Implied took a good while. The author is a thinker and a craftsman. He’s been experimenting for years, putting things into words, trying them out, breaking them up, putting them back together again. And he’s been working on prose style as well. He writes excellent prose (not all poets do). Blogging about one of the ingredients (‘Justine‘), he says: ‘I think about writing as a way of addressing race, gender, history which might embrace mixedness and confusion ….’

Will Harris is a fellow of The Complete Works III. He self-defines as BAME (Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic). He doesn’t ‘play the race card’ lightly. As he says himself in an essay on this subject, ‘ the race card is not something the non-white person can choose to play. It is what is done to you’. Do read that whole essay, and watch the YouTube film at the end. There is a context here.

So yes – this debut pamphlet does ’embrace mixedness and confusion’, though the complete confection is anything but confused. Numbered among the ingredients are: games, humour, mischief, love, and form – even rhyme. It’s not confused: it’s fused.

The end product has come out pretty well, in fact. It’s hot off the press. Want to try a slice?

Cake in waiting

HOT CROSS PAMPHLETS

My last blog entry dealt with the ‘post-pamphlet process’. I’m mid-pamphlet this week so thought I’d share a bit of that too, rather than writing about hot cross buns. (I may write about the first stage one day, and even the buns, but not today.)

I’m working right now with Will Harris on his debut pamphlet All This Is Implied. I love this title. It caught my attention from the start and the longer I live with it, the better it seems to fit the group of poems. It’s a nice title for a type-setter too. It occupies enough space on a front jacket to open up possibilities, and I like the internal pattern of the ‘is’ in ‘This Is’, and although it does have four letter ‘i’s, which could be a lot of dots, two of them will be capitalised, so that will be fine. (You think a lot about what words look like when you’re designing books. Both Helen Evans’s Only By Flying and Laurna Robertson’s Praise Song had a very useful letter O.)

And yes, I have checked to see there are no other poetry collections called All This Is Implied, although I was already sure there wouldn’t be. You can see my head is firmly on the title as a handle, both for the cover design and for the identity of the publication as it makes its way into the world, with attendant promotion to draw attention to its existence.

But I am jumping the bun. Let me go back to where the middle stage began and how.

In the third week of March I had a tiny opening of time, so I seized it. I grabbed the Word document containing the set of Will’s poems that had confirmed my offer of publication last October (though we have been communicating for some years, and he has been ‘pencilled in’ for longer than he knows), allocated them an ISB number and put the text into an In-Design document.

That sounds quick. It’s not. The reason it’s not quick is not just because of thinking about design principles, though I’ll come to those soon.

It’s because I think each poem through again as I put it on a page. I’m thinking now not just about individual strengths and weaknesses but how the whole thing hangs together. So my brain is focussing on links between the poems, in terms of thought, idea and verbal echo. It’s really a process of thinking of the whole publication as one artefact, almost one poem.

In terms of design, any poem that’s longer than a page will start on the left of the spread, because of the way I have so often, as a poetry reader, thought a poem has come to a beautiful ending, only to turn the page and find there’s more of it, and that the actual ending is less satisfying as the earlier false one.

But this principle of starting on the left often means the poet’s intended running order changes.

Then there’s the issue of the stretched or ‘weird’ poem. Poems come all shapes and sizes these days. It’s a bit like a hall of mirrors. They may extend in any direction and some use a variety of fonts too. I’m working with an A5 page for my pamphlets, and I won’t shrink font sizes to squeeze things in – because I think it looks naff. Sometimes I conclude that a typographically ‘difficult’ poem is simply not going to work inside my page shape. If I love it, I’ll spend a lot of time messing about with it. But if it’s just a ‘liked’ poem, and there are others to choose from, it will go. (The poet’s first full collection may have bigger pages.)

Poems with long lines are another issue. They fit best on a left hand page, where they can stretch into the middle without looking odd. They don’t look so good on the right, and I may have to reduce the margin to let them breathe and avoid breaking lines. I don’t like doing that, though there are exceptions. But starting the long-line poem on the left, also means the running order of the poems may change.

I may or may not agree that the poem the poet has chosen to start or end with is the right one. (I’m more likely to agree than not.)

If there are long poems in the set – and in Will’s pamphlet one extends over three pages and another over four (unusual) – you need to feel they’re in the right place. Of course, with long poems it depends what sort of long they are. Long and wide, or long and thin. Long and reflective, or long with a story. By gum. Well – the poet has already obsessed over this for years, so the least I can do is obsess for a few days.

In this way, I arrive at an In-Design draft, more or less following the author’s original intention. Then I do a second draft in which I make more radical changes. I print it out so I can see it on paper. I make more adjustments. I print it out again, two-sided in a booklet.

I create a cover, which is a rough copy holder with a notional graphic. However, this allows my brain to go to work on what might be there, and it encourages the writer to start to think about the text on the back, since he will need to supply some bio.

I fold the pages into a mock-up, put a coloured page in for flyleaf, and post to the author.

Together with the mock-up, I normally send a contract (not because I am preoccupied with legality but because it defines terms − like how many free copies the author will get, how big the print-run I likely to be, what author discount is applicable to additional copies purchased etc).

And I send some ‘new poet information’. This includes notes on proof-reading; a note about sales and publicity, so they will understand a little more about how the whole cost and promotional side works, and a note about supplying bio. Just lately I’ve produced yet another sheet explaining what information I need them to send after the first draft.

What happens next? Sometimes it’s the phone call. Sometimes the poet reads the draft and wants to change some aspects of content substantially, or wants me to consider some newer work as well. In that case, I think about whatever they send, and do another draft, and another mock-up, and then we talk.

Very occasionally the phone call is an actual face to face meeting. But mostly my poets are nowhere near me geographically so it’s the phone. Among other things, we will talk through the poems page by page. The poet tells me where there are typos or changes. If I have messed about with something, the poet either defends the original version and I take it back, or we agree that he or she will mark a section of a poem for further thought. So that phone call is usually at least a couple of hours, and there may be another before we’re done.

Then, after making the hot cross buns – on a Saturday when electricity is free – I do another draft. By this stage, I’m probably sharing copy by pdf attached to email because the author knows what the publication will look like in print from the mock-up. The author considers draft whatever-number-it-is-by-now. Do we need to talk again? If so, we schedule a time. More likely, I need to add detail – like notes or information on the acknowledgements page, and certainly the cover is work in progress. So I’ll add whatever is to be added, remove some errors, make a change to line 6 on page 15, lines 23-25 on page 17 and so on…

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested some images to Gillian that she might work on for the cover, and she does. What she comes back with is never what I expect. But weirdly it always seems to be ‘right’ in some way or another. I mess about with her images, and my typefaces, and get some covers together, including some poet bio if the poet has sent it (they are always slow to do this because everybody hates writing it) and a sentence of my own describing the contents as I see them. (I have now been thinking about this statement for three weeks at least. Later the copy may change significantly, and the poet has input to this too.)

We try to come up with two or three options for cover design and let the poet choose. They rarely choose the one I like best. However, the reading public usually likes the cover, and so does the poet, which is all that matters. Sometimes, I will do a final mock-up, including covers and post them. It depends how much time we have at this stage, because you could go on forever tweaking a comma here, worrying about a title there. It’s good to get the thing to PRINT and hurray! But the poet (and the editor) have to be happy with what they’ve arrived at.

And then, having consumed a hot cross bun with cheese, and with the print-ready copy taken to Dolphin press, I start on the ‘post-pamphlet process’ that I wrote about last week…

PUFFING AND PANTING AND PAMPHLETS

So we have two new pamphlets at last!

One is a debut – Robbie Burton’s Someone Else’s Street. One of the poems in it keeps sticking in my mind and I woke thinking about it.

It’s ‘Dawn, Lizard Point’, in which the poet looks out through a ‘picture window’ to sea. She sees, briefly, in lighthouse beam, a man fiercely paddling a canoe through the waves. Then he disappears into the mist.

I keep seeing that man in my mind’s eye, and this in turn reminds me how poems are often like clues. They focus on something we once saw or heard or sensed, something slight at the time, but it sticks in the memory. It seems like a clue (a clue to what’s really going on—or a symbol of it).

Someone Else’s Street has a number of clue poems in it. Even individual lines can be like that. ‘When fat rain pockles the pond…’. There’s a delicious clue if ever there was one.

And Robbie’s pamphlet has a number of mysterious connections with the other one published at the same time, Jennifer Copley’s Some Couples—which was originally to have been titled just Couples, until I recalled a Valley Press publication by Michael Stewart with this very title. So it had to change to Some Couples, and thus two pamphlets at the same time begin with ‘Some’.

There are other synchronicities. Among the poems included, Jennifer has ‘Cellar’; Robbie has ‘Coal Cellar’. Where Jennifer has ‘Some Couples’, Robbie has ‘Uncoupled’. Robbie’s glimpse of the man at Lizard Point is paralleled by Jennifer’s ‘Fleswick Bay’ where she finds ‘a bunch of fresh freesias / wedged in the cliff with a note— / I miss you, I love you. Louise.’

So, yes, more clues from Jennifer. A line that sticks in my head is ‘She was stuck in her life and couldn’t climb out’. But this is a poet with haunting phrases that follow you around—like ‘her mouth that wouldn’t say goodbye’ and—perhaps even my favourite—‘the badger known as Graham’. Tiny stories. Odd angles. Jennifer Copley sets off in a natural conversational tone but can end almost anywhere.

I also woke this morning thinking about my post-pamphlet list of tasks, and whether I’d covered them all, so I thought I’d share them. Useful for those thinking about publishing, and I’m always hoping more people will.

Also a reminder of the practical side of all of this: it’s not just poetry here, you know. It’s packing and planning and punctuating and parcelling and processing and posting, and puffing and panting our way through the waves.

Post-pamphlet process

Scan cover and save in suitable format for use on website etc
Upload the pamphlet details, ISB number and cover scan to Nielsen book data so it can be ordered through book shops & at same time keep my own record
Create flyer
Get flyers printed
Create shop page with pamphlet details for sale
Create poet’s page on website (or update existing page if it’s a second publication)
Add book details to Amazon inventory
Write about new pamphlet on blog and say something I haven’t already said on a) the back jacket b) the flyer c) the shop page or d) the newsletter
Tweet and Facebook the blog link
Update ‘publications in print’ list with new publications, remove any that are sold out and upload to website
Put aside 6 publisher copies in the box in the roof
Put aside copies for entry to Michael Marks etc
Post the free author copies and some fliers to author
Send out the first review copies
Send out gift copies to those and such as those
Send out legal deposit copies to Boston Spa and Agency for Legal Deposit Libraries
Send copy to Poetry Library at Southbank
Send copy to Scottish Poetry Library
Pay the printer
Pay the artist for the graphic on the cover
Publish the shop page created earlier
Supply early orders that come in through website
Find space under the stairs for the new boxes of pamphlets and tell Matt they won’t be there forever
Organise mailshot to postal subscribers to tell them about the pamphlets (order more envelopes, stamps etc)
Write newsletter for mailshot and print 350 copies
Organise electronic mailshot: put the electronic documents in the right place on the website
Do electronic notification for online only subscribers
Send out electronic news about the new pamphlets to people who signed up on email list on the home page
Help publicise launch event if there is one
Remind the author about review suggestions
Collect up all the drafts and versions and sixteen cover designs, and flyer copies and letters and paper records associated with this pamphlet, put them in a labelled cardboard folder with one final printed pamphlet, and file in a box in the roof
Update the accounts
Make a cup of coffee
Start work on the next pamphlet

Caption: The publisher’s grandmother’s day card

POETRY AND FLOUR

When baking poems, you should use strong flour, which is made from hard words. This produces the right kind of dough for lyric work produced at high temperatures, because it has a high fluten and bard core content.

Fluten (or high fluten) holds the gas produced when imagination ferments. This is how the poem rises and in this way a highly aerated product with even crumb is achieved.

Hard word varieties of flour produce the best medium for poems, if ground correctly. However, UK weather does not lend itself to hard-word flowering. Sometimes the mix is fortified by the addition of refined fluten.

Whole-word flour contains the words ‘grim’, ‘endospume’ and ‘flab’.

Refined flour contains only ‘endospume’.

A device called Alveobum Chopkin, invented in 1921 by Maisie Chopkin, provides an index called P that is now commonly used by professional makars. The P index measures the word strength. The maximum of the curve, identified by Y, represents the toughness of fluten, while X represents the bard core. The higher the value of X the more impenetrable the po.

In general, the more a poem requires long gestation, the more a flour will need a high P, because it better supports synxtax produced in fermentation while maintaining elasticity of expression. Fluten is able to absorb complex syntax for one time and half its weight. The stronger the flour is, the higher the absorption. This varies from an absorption of less than 50% for weak flour up to values higher than 70% for strong flour. ‘Extra strong flour’ may have fluten added.

Under the UK Word and Flour Regulations 1998 (BFR), industrial production requires the addition of certain enrichments (irony, compressin, post-modin and exaspiratin) to all word flour (except soul meal) at the mulling stage.

The Rhyme Ambush

You find yourself thinking in such predictable ways—predictable even to yourself.

How do you get out of the boring loop of knowing too much about where you’re going? No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

This is why I love rhyme. It creates an intervention. It calls in words you had absolutely no intention of using.

Yesterday, I was thinking about scallops. I won’t go into why. Scallop shell of quiet, popped into my mind… and the way the ‘l’ consonants swell between the scallop and the shell, and how it reminds me of the softness of waves.

Collops, I thought. What are they again? Little slices of meat, in old recipe books. Derived from ‘escalopes’ apparently. Give me a dollop of collops. Which made me think of roll mops. Which made me think of Pickleherring, in Robert Nye’s The Late Mr Shakespeare.

Wallops arrived with a wallop. Good old English language for keeping the sound the same but changing the vowel.

Trollop. Now there’s a word that’s gone out of circulation. ‘You Trollop!’ we used to say in mock horror. Why is a combination of ‘l’ and ‘p’ so satisfying to the ear? There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip. Plop, slop, slip, slap, clippety clop.

Which made me starting singing

Horsey, horsey, don’t you stop.
Just let your feet go clippety clop.
Your tail goes swish and your wheels go round.
Giddy up, we’re homeward bound

I sing this, or a version of it, to my grandchildren, and always thought it was an old nursery rhyme. Thank you, Wikipedia for putting me right. It’s part of a longer piece written in only 1937 and so less than two decades older than me.

How did I get here? I was thinking about unexpected interventions and where they take you, and I haven’t even mentioned Coleridge’s person from Porlock yet, though the ‘l’ and ‘p’ sounds of that phrase have had it hovering on the edge of my mind for some time.

All this, really, because of that lovely bit of intervention that went viral yesterday, when a little girl interrupted her dad’s bit of TV expertise. I hope nobody got a wallop, even metaphorically speaking. We yearn for unpredictable delight: surprise, scallops, astonishment, upheaval. And when it arrives (without hurting anybody) we rightly celebrate it.

Reading A Poem Can Be Like Opening a Re-Sealable Packet of Cheese

Tear here, it says. Just in the corner where two thin clear sheets almost, but not quite, seal together.

So you attempt to separate them.

You work your thumb nail between the two so you can, with your thumb and forefinger, pinch the top piece of plastic away from the bottom, and tear.

The anticipation of the cheese assails you.

Except you tug and nothing happens.

You pull again, harder. Nothing.

You apply full force and the plastic corner slips out of your grasp and the cheese thuds onto the floor.

You pick it up to try again. You are nowhere near on speaking terms with this cheese.

You go back to the key corner, the official way into the cheese.

You read it very carefully.

It definitely says ‘Tear here’ – that MUST be the answer.

Again you get hold of the little plastic tab and pull as hard as you can, and again … nothing happens.

Is there something wrong with you? Has the packaging lied?

It’s impossible to get into the cheese this way. What sort of a person does it take to get into this cheese?

Or perhaps it doesn’t mean ‘tear’. Perhaps it’s tear, as in sob, wail and cry. If you weep over the cheese, will it open for you?

You are not prepared to cry just to get into the cheese.

So you fetch the scissors, the little pointy ones that will slide down neatly between the edge of the cheese and its containment. Snip, snip, snip.

Like a time-served brain surgeon, you fold back the plastic lid. The cheese is exposed.

It looks oddly shiny. Shiny and polished. Too polished, like the cheese itself is made of plastic.

You can stare at it but you don’t want to devour it.

And of course, you can’t re-seal. You can wrap it in cling-film or foil but you can never start again from scratch.

What will you DO with the cheese now?

In a spirit of vengeance, you go for a workshop implement.

You grate the cheese. You reduce it to a pile of airy syllables.

The whole meaning and literary tradition of the cheese – where is it now? And who is to blame?

The person who put that cheese in that packet, that’s who.

The person who said it was intended for consumption.

The person who said ‘Tear here’.

FOURTEEN TIPS FOR DEALING WITH REJECTION

I don’t mean in love, or in life. I’m talking poems here.

And I’m talking both as a rejectee and a rejecter. Both are unpleasant roles, but the former is worse than the latter. Or worse for some people.

I vividly recall the early days when I was sending out a lot of stuff in A5 manila envelopes. Sorting out the poems into groups. Typing up the accompanying letters to editors. Printing final copies as consistently and beautifully as I could. Folding them precisely, popping them into the envelopes, slipping the envelopes into the big red post box. This was long before Submittable. Long before Email. Those were the days.

Until they began to come back. Inside the first manila envelope was a second, addressed to me in my own handwriting. It had a fold down the middle where A5 had been folded to A6 to fit inside the first envelope. You could see these envelopes returning a mile off. You could hear them flop onto the floor in the hall. You could hear them flop heavily, like envelopes with six poems in – not three or four (which might mean two had been accepted).

The worst aspect was the flip-flop heart on opening the envelope: a mixture of hope (you can’t help it, even if the envelope is heavy) and pragmatic anxiety. If some non-poet is with you at the time, you have to hide these feelings. You can hardly stand there and curse when your Aunt Emily is waiting for her cup of coffee.

Some people are very good about this stuff. ‘So what?’ they chuckle, and get on with their lives. Not me. I used to feel dismal for the rest of the day, at the same time as being furious with myself for having that ridiculous response. After 24 hours, the negative emotion had shrunk to a whisper. After 48, it had gone completely. This was good, but there were more rejections on the way. And each time, the same cycle of ridiculous emotions.

When you open an envelope with returned (rejected) poems, the wee souls never look the same. They go out so hopeful and clean and nicely folded. They come back rumpled with their tails between their legs. Where has their confidence gone?

So why on EARTH do I suggest that other poets, many of them fragile in confidence, should put themselves through this? The reasons are complex (more of this in my book How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published), but I do still suggest it, even at the same time as still – to this day – finding it difficult myself.

Yes, I have some tips. It’s the sort of thing you expect from blogs. But as well as this, you can of course remind yourself of various truths, like that none of this is personal; that the return of the poems doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t like them (or you); that they may just not like poems about dogs/sex/the menopause/Donald Trump; that they may already have two poems about frogs in this issue; that the poems were the wrong shape, style or size for the magazine; that your work arrived when the issue was already full; that the silly one about human fleas may have given them the wrong idea about you etc; that it may not be the best idea to share your feelings about the editor on Facebook….

Let’s get down to the tips then.

1. It’s a business. Get down to the paperwork. You sent them out … when? They came back … when? From … where? Keep a meticulous record. You need to know how long each mag sat on the work. And how many rejections you have had from them so far, since there is a point at which you will stop trying.

2. Remember the unique collection you’re in process of making. I mean your collection of rejection slips. Some of them may be valuable one of these days. So go for that slip, grab it and check how rare it is. (The rare ones have comments, coffee rings, blood stains, or were intended for somebody else, not you. Seriously.) File it.

3. Some people say ‘send those poems right out to the next magazine’. I wouldn’t do that. I think you need to put them to one side for a little while. Read them again once your negative emotion has dwindled. Then decide whether you should tweak or change or even abandon. This can teach you something. You might vary the set next time too.

4. Check how much work you still have out there, circulating. Something should be doing the business for you. So you might send a few other poems out. And if you feel really rebellious, include one of the ones that came back today with a totally different title!

5. If your emotions are intense, find a field or open space, or somewhere with few people around and scream at the very top of your voice as loud as you can. This is fabulously therapeutic, not least because – after the scream – you’ll laugh.

6. If you still feel TERRIBLE, write a poem about it. Strong feeling is great. I have several poems written after rejections, one or two of which found good homes.

7. Go and read a couple of your favourite touchstone poems. Remind yourself what this is all about. And how vitally important being a reader is.

8. Maintain perspective by checking the world news. So many awful things can trump rejection from a little magazine. Especially right now.

9. Remember persistency is your friend. If a specific poem has already been rejected six times, the seventh is far less painful. In fact, it becomes fun to see whether it will ever be accepted.

10. Send a couple of rejectees to a good critical friend for comments. The critical friends – your good readers – are enormously important.

11. Do a thorough review of the magazines you’re sending to. Do you like enough of the work inside them to justify wanting to be printed there? If you don’t, then don’t send there again. Reject that magazine.

12. Be naughty with your multiple rejects. Cut them up and change the stanzas round. Make two little ones into one longer one. Share the very short one on Twitter. Then photograph it and have it printed on a mug. (There is a home for every pome.)

13. Start a little magazine. Nothing too complicated. You could do it online, if you like. Changing your role from rejectee to rejecter is hugely educative. (Or read Gerry Cambridge’s book: The Dark Horse: On the Making of a Little Magazine. You start to see the whole thing in an entirely different way.)

14. Be aspirational. Decide whether the poem has been rejected enough times to qualify it for the fabulous Salon of the Refused, where rare items from your rejection slips will also be joyfully received.

What makes a successful poet?

Or should I put it another way: what makes a poet successful?

One kind of success is marked by competitions and awards. The ten poets who were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize this year achieved success in terms of public acclaim. Their work was selected, reviewed and will probably be more widely read than the work of most other contemporaries.

On the other hand, only one of them (Jacob Polley) won the entire award, so that was the big success, wasn’t it? He got the twenty thousand quid. He has made it.

Except the money will vanish. There will be another winner next year. And in the meantime Jake has poems to write, and a mass of expectation to live up to. And as Paul Muldoon once said in a Master Class – or at least this is something like what he said – the poet is never a master on writing poems because he has to discover how to write each one all over again. Each new poem demands its own way of writing.

And meanwhile there are all the poets who didn’t win. And all the poets who will never win. What is success for them?

For a long time, publication alone was regarded as the big validation – and despite some successful self-publishers, that idea still carries some weight, though it’s worth bearing in mind that some hundreds of published books will have been entered for the TS Eliot prize compared to the shortlist of ten. These were all books that by virtue of publication had achieved some success. Just not not TS-Eliot-prize-shortlist success.

When I was at primary school I was quite good at sprinting but Helen Booth always beat me, no matter how hard I tried. And I was not bad at swimming but Barbara Longbottom was miles better. When I got to secondary school, I got into the tennis team, but only into the third reserve for doubles. And as for hockey, I was in the team because I reliably turned up for practice. The PE teacher once called me (how we remember these things for a life-time) ‘the fly in the ointment’.

Why does life train us to value winning so much? It is a mixed blessing. I went to a children’s party and watched a game with prizes. The kids were very little – just beginning the party game experience. When little Betty or Bobby won the prize, all the other wee ones bawled (or wept, if you read last week’s blog). When they grow up, they will learn to conceal those tears.

What would life be like if we were not competitive? What would poetry be like? How would we find what we want and need to read if there was no process of selection, no concept of a ‘successful’ book?

In Anne Stevenson’s poem ‘Making Poetry’, which I commend to you, she talks about the ‘siren hiss’ of ‘success, success, success’:

And what’s ‘to make’?

To be and to become words’ passing
weather; to serve a girl on terrible
terms, embark on voyages over voices,
evade the ego-hill, the misery-well,
the siren hiss of publish, success, publish,
success, success, success.

So there it is – the downside of success, the huge lure and danger of ‘the ego-hill’ and, on the other side, ‘the misery-well’ – and this is from a poet who has won many prizes.

It is wonderful to win. It’s wonderful when your friends win. But the feeling of elation doesn’t last long. And only a very few people win the big prizes. Some excellent poets will never win. Does that mean they aren’t ‘successful’?

Well, there is a different kind of success. If you’re a practising poet, you’ll know it. You know it when you find it. And it’s not impossible to find though it isn’t an everyday experience by any means.

It’s when some piece of poetry you have made, by some miracle, seems to work, and at the same time to do something you didn’t expect. It surprises you. In some cases, the surprise amounts to astonishment. It’s almost as if somebody else had written it.

And if on top of that, someone else reads it and ‘gets it’ – oh boy. You’ve scored.