Category: Nocturnal 21.12.2024

WRITING WITHOUT A NET

Amazing how easy it is to survive without the internet!

I was away on holiday last week in a Highland cottage in the rain with a lot of books and some paper (and my Loved-one). I wrote four letters, on paper, and I put them in envelopes with stamps on them. It’s a bit like going to a museum and having hands-on experience of the Old Ways of Doing Things, except I was living in the museum.

In another way, it was like time-travelling back to the twentieth century, since I took some of the future with me, including a Kindle (though I didn’t use it much) and a laptop – ditto. I actually read real books – only two of them, but one was very long. I managed to read NO POETRY AT ALL. It’s amazingly easy to survive without that too, oddly enough.

And I did the HappenStance accounts, or pretty much brought them up to date. It all served to prove how insane the whole enterprise is. Even after the Michael Marks money in 2010, Inland Revenue will owe me money, rather than the other way around. This hardened my heart to the untimely submissions waiting for me on the mat when I got home. Such a shame!

What sort of things do you buy on holiday in the rain with no poetry? I bought a necklace made of little stones (even though I already have about fifty necklaces made of other little stones), some Goddard’s silver cleaner (don’t ask) and a snow shovel. It wasn’t snowing or anything, it was just the fact that last winter when I wanted one, I couldn’t find one, and there they were, standing in a barrel outside a hardware shop in Kingussie—blue ones. So I went in and rather apologetically forked out twelve quid for the snow shovel. “It must seem weird,” I said, when people come here on holiday from Fife and buy snow shovels.”

“Not at all,” grinned the shop man. “Since they came in, we’ve sold eight” (I think it was eight) “and all of them to people on holiday. Can’t get them, you know, down south.”

I have my doubts about their unavailability. There seem to be rather a lot on Twenga, but last week I was felicitously (for the man in the shop) netless. I also have my doubts about the much-predicted snow. There was another man in the shovel shop, talking to the shopman. I remember him well because he seemed to be about twice as tall as me. Anyway, the other man said there would be a lot of snow again this winter – it was certain.

“How can you be so sure?” I asked.

“It’s the activity in the sun,” he said. “There was a lot of it last winter, and now there’s even more.”

I didn’t ask what kind of activity, though I am pretty sure he would have expanded the point. I just thought how ironic it was that activity in the sun should bring us snow.

There was very little sun last week in Scotland, and therefore very little activity in it on our part, but it did snow on Wednesday. Not enough to shovel but enough to turn the hills white, while we sat by the fire reading old-fashioned books made of paper.

The next day it got warmer and wetter, and the day after that even warmer and even wetter, and now we are home. It is unseasonably warm for October and not quite raining.

Nevertheless, we have one brand-new snow shovel and quite a lot of salt. Bring on the white stuff! We are READY.

STORY OF THE WORD

I’ve been thinking about spelling.

Some can spell well. Some can’t. Nothing to do with being clever. All to do with brains and the way they process visual information.

I’m a good speller. But then, sets of letters form patterns to me, patterns I like and feel at home with. And part of that is connected with the way I love the story of the word — where it came from, how it’s made up — which bits are prefix, which suffix, where the stem derives. And so on.

At school, when I started doing Latin at about the age of 14 (and I was never particularly good at it), it was a revelation to me. I suddenly realised where lots of words came from, how they came to mean what they mean. I’ve never got over it.

I think knowing the story of a word, or even part of its story, makes the whole business of writing it down different.

Think about spelling, and spell (magic) and a spell of time. How did one sound get to be so many things?

From one source or another, I get ‘spell’ from Old French espeller, of Germanic origin; related to Old Norse spialla to talk, Middle High German spellen. I like ‘spialla’, to talk. But also Old English ‘spell’ is speech. And Old Norse spjall is ‘a tale’, and all these words, though they have echoes in sound and form, came by different circuitous routes into this paragraph. It is a complicated and spell-binding story — probably several stories.

Somehow, we make sounds — and then visual patterns — correspond with something we want to communicate, and that is language. It’s amazing. A maze of amazement. In and out with no end to it .  . . .

THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE

Usually I don’t go, but this time I went.

Usually I don’t go, but this time I went.

Things happen in Scotland, and it’s possible to get there and back in a day. Things happen in London, and it means asking friends for a bed for at least one night. It means effectively three days away from the business. Then there’s planes or trains, and Oystercardless tubes or busses that stop and ditch their passengers. It’s a trip to a foreign city where I’m just the little iron on the Monopoly board, with no houses and no prospect of a hotel.

Nonetheless, Charles Boyle’s invitation to take part in his CB Editions Bookfair was so warmly extended, I thought I’d do it. Just for once.

Three times now I’ve missed Book Fairs I very much wanted to get to. There have been, for example, two Leicester BookFairs organized by Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Press, (Ross is also author of one of my PoemCards) in the States of Independence series, and now there’s States of Independence (West), next Saturday in Birmingham. At these events, Robin Vaughan-Williams has been a noble HappenStance author in independent residence, and he’ll be flying the flag, as they say, on the 8th (Gregory Leadbetter is going along too).

I have, however, managed to take part in a number of the colourful poetry pamphlet fairs organized by Scottish Pamphlet Poetry, but there’s a special attraction about being part of a book fair. And while on that subject, HappenStance will be at the splendid By Leaves We Live annual Poetry Publishing Fair at the Scottish Poetry Library at the end of this month, and I’ll be doing on of the short talks (in our case a bit of a conversation) with Gerry Cambridge.

But back to Charles Boyle’s CB Editions event last week (which has been blogged about a lot. Already I feel I should have prefaced all of this with a hyperlink alert). It was held on a beautiful day – not quite as hot as it’s been in London this weekend, but still sunny and warm, so people could sit and chat outside at the various venues along the little street that calls itself Exmouth Market.  You don’t do that in Scotland in September!

The book fair itself was held in exactly the sort of church hall you would find anywhere in the UK. Slightly dilapidated but spacious, with a kitchen at the back where worthy ladies must have made teas for generations.

Book Fair (early)

There were Christmas lights (unlit, alas) trailing from the roof beams, and tables assembled all round the edges of the hall. On the stage at the front, Michael Horowitz did a weird and wonderful introduction to events, accompanied by kazoo and his own personal sound effects. Later, a singer from the street outside came in and did a few songs. Upstairs, there was a little room in which readings went on throughout the day, non-stop – and although I only made it to a couple of these, I can confirm it was a friendly little room and I should like to have heard a whole lot more of them. Not a bad place to read either, despite interesting noises from the street outside – crashes of a million bottles landing somewhere, the street singer resonating up through the window, the chiming of a clock at regular intervals.

Fiona Moore (who is to be a HappenStance poet in 2013) has described it all beautifully in her Displacement blog. I hadn’t met her before, and one of the lovely things about this day was having the opportunity to hobnob with poets, who obligingly stepped off the paper into human form. Jon Stone and Kirsty Irving, for example, were sitting beside me for most of the day being Sidekick Books, but they also read in the HappenStance relay-race slot. Kirsty has her own account of events here.

Tim Love took over the stall while our reading was going on upstairs – Tim was around for most of the day. Marion Tracy arrived (she is a forthcoming HappenStancer) and Christina Dunhill (ditto). And Peter Daniels and D A Prince and Lorna Dowell and Clare Best and Mike Loveday. Oh, and Matt Merritt was there too — here is his blog on the subject: he now, of course, represents Nine Arches (opportunity to meet Jane Commane for the first time). And Chrissy Williams, who will also metamorphose into a HappenStance pamphlet in 2012, organized  the programme of readings and was around to greet us. There was even Geoff Lander, my old friend from university, living proof that all roads meet in the end. He was a chemistry student once – now he’s turned to verse! Oh and Nancy Campbell, whom I’ve wanted to meet for years, and who brought me some beautiful postcards celebrating her newly launched How to say ‘I love you’ in Icelandic. A joy.

HappenStance poets reading

So there was something of a party spirit in the air. In fact, several parties were going on in various parts of the hall. Here is Tom Chivers’ account, for example. Katy Evans-Bush calls it a Renaissance. Ken Edwards on Reality Street gives it a mention. Honestly everybody who was anybody was there. (Well, you could be forgiven for thinking so. Some of them were actually at The London Art Book Fair, as mentioned in the Sphinx feature about Sylph Editions posted recently. In fact, as I travelled back to Vauxhall on the tube, the man sitting opposite me had a huge transparent carrier bag full of publications from that very event).

Other blogger accounts included Sue Guiney (who also read — and I actually HEARD her read, with particular pleasure), and Hilaireinlondon. Rack Press, who was there, has a paragraph about it too. And there’s Andrew Bailey, whom I didn’t quite meet. There were people matching faces with FaceBook friends, one of today’s most amusing party games. Why are people never the same height they seem to be on FaceBook?

The previous night, Chris H-E had launched the new Salt Best British Poetry 2011, and many of the poets in that volume were around, as well as Roddy Lumsden, the noble editor. It was pretty busy, especially between about 11.30 and 2.30.  Chris blogged about the event afterwards – a lovely commentary. He calls Charles Boyle “deliciously grumpy and adversarial”, a great compliment. I wish somebody would call me that. It’s so much better than “the Delia Smith of poetry”.Charles Boyle

I feel I should say Charles has been very charming to me and not at all grumpy.  His own CB Editions books were modestly displayed on a stylish little bookrack to my right, and although this corner was not always manned, people kept coming and buying his attractive books. We slid notes into the money pouch of our rival without demur. He is running a fascinating book enterprise. His books are worth buying.

Chris  Hamilton-Emery talks in his blog about the dark side of such events, how they “can be downright depressing experiences when a (seriously) amateur world collides with different levels of professional delusion and, well, trajectories of intention: from the technically proficient to the anarchically crappy.” How true this is!  I was worried it might even be true of this event, but happily it was not. There was an air of cheery professionalism about it all. Fellow publishers were, as I have found ever since I commenced on this crazy venture, undeniably friendly.

And yes, people did spend money, though not, at my table, as much as Chris suggests (“. . . people came in droves. Really. Not only did they come, they spent money; lots of money.”) A great many of the people in the hall, so far as I could tell, were poets, or aspiring poets. It would have been nice to know how many could have been classed as common readers, the species that poetry so very much needs to win back. And poets are not, in my experience, particularly wealthy. In fact, I worry periodically that poets from my own list are impoverishing themselves trying to support my enterprise: about £120.00 worth of HappenStance publications disappeared on the day, which is not half bad for these events. But I think a number of my own poets bought stuff (they are such nice people)!

So from the money side of things, going to the event did not – could not –  be rational. There was the fee for the taking of a table, there was the (in my case) plane and train fares, the car parking in Edinburgh, the tubes and so on. And most of all, the time investment.

But the meeting of the poets, the taking part in the hubbub, the learning experience –  these factors made it worth it. I wish I had spent more time talking to publishers: I didn’t really manage that, though it was great to meet Andy Ching of Donut Press, whose table was near mine. I wanted to talk to others, didn’t really have time – not even to talk to my own publisher, John Lucas, who was sitting at a Shoestring Press table himself.

Back to country mouse existence now. . . .

LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED

But sometimes you can get a bit too much of it.

For example, last December I published a pamphlet by Tim Love. I’m always interested when a poet incorporates in his or her name a word that is ‘loaded’ when it comes to poetry. No single word is more pregnant with emotional cargo than ‘love’.

So what does ‘love’ mean for Tim Love when he includes it in a poem? It can’t not resonate with his own name. Not that this matters all that much. I was at school with a girl whose surname was Darling, and I always envied her that. But that was before Alistair.

Anyway, sometimes synchronicity creeps into the equation. This week I took three new pamphlets to the printer. One was by Michael LOVEday. A second was by Lydia FulleyLOVE. Thankfully, the third author, Lorna Dowell has no love in her name, but she does begin with L and end with A, like Lydia, and she also has two Os, a key vowel in love.

None of this matters in the least bit, except when you get tired.

As you approach exhaustion, suddenly Lydia and Lorna start to sound remarkably similar, and the ‘L’ at the end of Michael shouts accusingly. You get fearful that you’ll end up with a front cover brandishing poetry by Lorna Fulleylove, or Lydia Dowell, and Michael Dowfull looms ominously on the horizon. . . .

PARCELLING, PACKAGING AND THE EVIL POSTMAN

Two new pamphlets this week, and two new PoemCards. A frenzy of packets and packaging!

Two new pamphlets this week, and two new PoemCards. A frenzy of packets and packaging!

One was Kirsten Irving’s What To Do. Kirsten is one of the remarkable young editor/poets at the helm of Sidekick Books. (Jon Stone is the other one.) Anyone who has even glimpsed the recent Birdbook 1 will be agog to see her own first poetry collection. She has a full collection already scheduled from Salt next year but this is a chance to get a taster. She is a smashing writer. Read her!

Then there’s the irrepressible Ross Kightly, author of Gnome Balcony. Decades divide these two poets, insofar as age is concerned, but they have energy and unpredictable bounce in common. And this is Ross’s first collection too. An Australian by birth, he mixes voices and methods and sometimes mayhem. There is no holding him, and in fact, at several points he seems to be about to escape his own pamphlet.

On top of these, two lovely new PoemCards. At least I think they’re lovely. Tom Vaughan’s The Mower is a winner for Spring gardeners, lawnmower lovers, and anyone who can’t stop working. The illustration is perfect.

The other card, Stewart Conn’s, was originally devised for Valentine’s Day but it would be lovely for any romantic occasion. And it has an insert. Titled Cupid’s Dart, the dart itself (with another copy of the poem on it) is folded inside the card, ready for hurling at the heart. Really neat.

Behind the Scenes
That was the official bit. Behind the scenes, a frenzy of parceling and packaging and bone-folder folding. This is what had to be done:

  • Twelve author copies of What To Do in four different packets to author.
  • Twelve author copies of Gnome Balcony in four different packets to author.
  • One packet of fliers for What To Do in packet to author.
  • One packet of fliers for Gnome Balcony to author.
  • One box of 23 additional copies of What To Do in lieu of payment to author (packaged in a Suzuki drivebelt box, very useful)
  • One box of 23 additional copies of Gnome Balcony in lieu of payment to author (packaged in Suzuki drivebelt box)
  • Twenty author copies of The Mower to be folded, packaged and sent to author, with another twenty he had ordered and some copies of his Sampler, also ordered.
  • Twelve author copies of Cupid’s Dart to author: cards to be folded and inserts (much more complicated) to be folded.
  • Three copies of What To Do, Gnome Balcony, Michael Mackmin’s From There to Here, Peter Daniels’ Mr Luczinski Makes a Move, and Matthew Stewart’s Inventing Truth to Poetry Book Society for consideration for pamphlet choice (six years so far without a recommendation: can our special moment ever happen?)
  • Five copies of Gnome Balcony and What To Do to Agent for Copyright Libraries with accompanying letter.
  • One copy of Gnome Balcony and What To Do to British Library with accompanying letter.
  • Two copies of Gnome Balcony and What To Do to National Poetry Library with invoice, as well as copies of new PoemCards.
  • Two copies of Gnome Balcony and What To Do to Scottish Poetry Library.
  • Copies of cards and poems to Webmaster Sarah Willans, to Gillian Rose (who does the cover images), to two members of my family who get everything, two friends who get most things, and several other people.
  • Copies of Gnome Balcony and What To Do to three Sphinx reviewers.
  • Six other assorted orders despatched to customers and authors.

The Cupid’s Dart PoemCard is a labour of love. I want you to know that the folding and preparation (by hand) takes a considerable time, though it costs no more than the other cards (because I am nuts). So if you can think of anyone for whom it would be appropriate, please send for one. (You’re unlikely to get this one slipped in with an ordinary order.) And by Valentine’s Day next year, I expect a run.

I purchased all the new William Morris stamps from our local post office and had a cheery conversation with the Evil Postman, whom some of you will know of old from Chapters of the Story. I arrived on Saturday at five to twelve, and the ladies at the poet office made him wait for my two drive belt boxes to be duly labeled and put into his bags, by which time it was two minutes after twelve and he was snarling (he snarls with evil charm).

I’ll put them in the SLOW bag. That’ll mean they’ll take at least a week to get there.”

I don’t believe him. He has a gleam in his eye when he says (as he always does):

“You should get up earlier”.

MORE ABOUT THE MYSTERIOUS JEAN MACKIE

The story goes on! A phone call from Lord Mackie (so the forwarding system from the House of Lords does work), followed by one from his nephew, Charlie Allan.

The story goes on! A phone call from Lord Mackie (so the forwarding system from the House of Lords does work), followed by one from his nephew, Charlie Allan.

But in between, other elements had begun to come together. Alan Hill (who originally sent me the photocopy of Jean’s poems) had been in touch with Mary Johnstone, and Mary knew Jean Mackie was the mother of Charlie Allan, “well known NE broadcaster”. She remembered Jean as “one of the famous Ythsie Mackie”, a family with three brothers all supporting different political parties.

Mary Johnstone is, in her own right, a wonderful person. You can tell this from her note. This is what it said:

I knew Mrs Maitland Mackie because my grandparents (Mary and Andra Mackie) lived in a wee house at the end of their days in Tarves. Farm servants were dependent on big farm owners’ charity when it came to finding a place to stay after their working days were done. Mrs Maitland and her daughter – also a Mary but of the famous Ice Cream Mackie and headmistress of a primary school with a name which you don’t pronounce as it’s read somewhere near Aboyne – it will come back to me – used to come down and visit my granny, so Ice Cream Mary told me one time I met her.

And Mary J sent a cutting from the The Press & Journal’s ‘Farm Journal’, Saturday April 13, 1991. It was an obituary by Charlie Allan for his mother, Jean Mackie, written just after her death.

So I was right in my supposition that Jean did indeed do a degree in English. But I hadn’t guessed that the dedication in her pamphlet to John Allan, famer and writer, was a dedication to her husband. Jean Mackie was Jean Allan.

She was, furthermore, a friend of radical theatre director Joan Littlewood and consequently involved in bringing the Theatre Workshop to Aberdeen in the early 50s. All the Mackies were political: Jean was no exception. She was a well-regarded educationalist, contributed to journals throughout the world and set up St Nicholas School in Aberdeen “where she was able to prove that primary education didn’t have to be terrifying or boring”. No wonder she knew the redoubtable R F Mackenzie!

Meanwhile, I have been talking to Charlie, a man after my own heart. He runs a small publishing company himself and so knows about poetry not making money. And he is a man of stories too: a writer, a former broadcaster and athlete. I have sent him a couple of HappenStance pamphlets, the Ruth Pitter and Olive Dehn ones, because they have introductions about their authors. We will see whether something similar can’t be managed for Jean, with an ISB number this time, so it is deposited in all our national libraries, as well as, hopefully, in a good few deserving households.

But for the moment, the project is in the simmering stage, so I’ll end with a couplet from Jean, in the persona of Lady Macbeth:

I shall go back now to my grave. The air
Nimbly and sweetly re-enchants me there.

ANOTHER LOST POET

Another lost poet. Who was Jean Mackie, whose first (and perhaps only) pamphlet of poetry was published in Aberdeen in 1983?

Another lost poet. Who was Jean Mackie, whose first (and perhaps only) pamphlet of poetry was published in Aberdeen in 1983?

Alan Hill, author of No Biography, sent me a photocopy of A Little Piece of Earth. The aging pamphlet had been lent to him and he thought the poems extraordinary.

I didn’t perhaps find them quite so extraordinary as Alan, but they grew on me. They grew enough for me to search out the original pamphlet. (I got the sole copy held by ABE books.) They are very strange little pieces of writing. Here is one:


Compulsion

They who had saved each thing they saw
or heard or thought
And brought it home to the other
Had nothing new but sorrow to exchange.
Since each had to excuse the loss of love
There was no cruelty they could not compass;
The untied shoelace and the broken nail
Vied with the troops of the other’s friends for hate,
The unfilled cheque stubs with the empty cradle.
There was no mercy, since they both were young.

She saw all this could translate into mourning
But he, who had courted doom since he was weaned
Could not connive at any kindly ending
So, the last unsayable thing said,
With what relief he reached
And pulled the roof about their heads.

 

This is an elderly pamphlet and I think it was written by an elderly person. But she had a youthful and uncompromising intelligence. There is a lengthy (over-lengthy) prose introduction by Cuthbert Graham, author of Living Doric, and then (I believe) editor of the Aberdeen Press and Journal. He points out all the bits we shouldn’t miss in the poems, and also finds them “full of proofs that the already-fragile elderly have profound, soul-shaking emotions”, from which I infer that the author was not young at the time of publication. He concludes, furthermore, that “the poet who writes about life from the stand-point of old age has one tremendous advantage. He, or she, can draw upon the entire range of human experience.”

So here is Jean Mackie drawing upon the entire range of human experience, and I still haven’t managed to find out much about her. I can’t even find a source for the quotation from which she draws her title: “Some ants carry their young / And some go empty / And all to and fro a little piece of earth.” I feel I should know it, but I don’t.

She dedicates the pamphlet to John R Allan, sometime Glasgow journalist and author of Farmer’s Boy. He was born in Aberdeenshire in 1906, so I reckon perhaps a close contemporary of Jean Mackie. Needless to say, he is dead.  She thanks RF Mackenzie for encouragement: this is Robert MacKenzie, Summerhill champion, free-thinker and radical educationalist. Lost and gone forever.

Jean Mackie knew some interesting people, people it’s easy to find more about, deceased or not. Not so easy in her own case. I phoned Rainbow Enterprises who printed the pamphlet (phone number via Sheena Blackhall via Lizzie MacGregor at the Scottish Poetry Library). Their current owner spoke to the previous owner who would have published this little verse collection in 1983. If anything was remembered, they would phone me. No phone call.

The pamphlet is not terribly well put together. Some of the punctuation must be erroneous, I think, and some of the direct speech (but not all) is set in bold, which is distracting and looks peculiar. The evocative feeling still comes through. She knew her Shakespeare. There’s one funny and satisfying conversation with Lady Macbeth, and a whole ‘Elegy’ which calls on the quotation from Cymbeline, “Golden lads and lasses must/ Like chimney sweepers come to dust”, as well as a hint of Wordworth.

Jean Mackie will be dust now. There is a feeling in her verse that she had outlived many of her contemporaries. The poems will be dust soon too. Here’s to keeping ‘Elegy’ alive a little bit longer:


Elegy

Strange, to weep
For a draughty tearoom in a cold town
And some young men and a girl
Who could talk about poetry.
There were better things, I knew then,
To do with young men
And I do not suppose
The talk was all that good

Nor witty

Nor were we all that pretty.

Suspicion now is certain
All golden lads and girls
Have looked like chimney sweeps
And carried clouds of glory on their brow.

Today I held the grandson of that girl
Who is dust now.


There is no-one from whom I can ask copyright permission yet, but I can keep her words circulating. Also I do have a lead. Her sister was Catherine Aitken, and that leads me to Guardian journalist Ian Aitken, whose obituary for his wife Catherine was published in 2006. Catherine (I bet she was a younger sister of Jean) was a doctor. She was the daughter of an Aberdeenshire farmer, Maitland Mackie, who set his three sons up as farmers and sent his three daughters to Aberdeen University. My guess is Jean read English and was, at one time, one of the group of “young men and a girl / Who could talk about poetry”. There is a surviving brother, says Ian Aitken: he is a Lib-Dem Peer. Now there’s a lead!

I reckon the survivor must be George Yull Mackie, Baron Mackie of Glenshee, former Chairman, and later President of the Scottish Liberal Party. Born July 1919, he will now be approaching 92. I have written to him, using the House of Lords online system. The confirmation tells me: Your message may be slow to deliver, because we do not have a direct contact address for Lord Mackie of Benshie. Instead we are sending the message via the House of Lords fax machine.

Will it work? Watch this space. I’ll end with some of Jean:

 

The Stranger

I stood and held your hand
Putting on as pretty a show as I could
But no, I did not know you.
Thirty years since, you said
And did I not know you once?
I said I was ashamed not to remember
But I would give you tea and cake.

You sat there by the fire,
Made all the excellent old jokes
And then turned and said
You look exactly the same
And I shook my head
So as not to hear my voice tremble.

If I had known you were to die that summer
I’d have come over to your chair
And put my arms around the stranger sitting there

But I was too busy reminding myself
Of what is becoming in ladies of fifty.

WHAT THE F?

Publishers are not to be trusted, and a poet (thank you, Oscar Wilde) can survive anything but a misprint. Yes, I did it again.

Publishers are not to be trusted, and a poet (thank you, Oscar Wilde) can survive anything but a misprint. Yes, I did it again.

We live in a marketing age and it is very easy for poets to get lost. It is necessary to promote them, or at least we’ve accepted that it is. Hence Twitter and tweeting, Facebook and fleeting, Blurb and bleating.

I do my best in this world of pzazz and huzza. However, I make mistakes. I blame the Fs. After all, I never had a problem with Cliff Ashby. It is because Cliff Forshaw’s second name also begins with . . . F.

But I should explain: when people arrive at the HappenStance website, they can elect to receive the email newsletter. Quite a lot do just this. The emails go out three or four times a year, with news of new publications and exciting (sic) events. From my point of view, this is a good thing, since it elicits a small skirmish of orders, and that’s what keeps the boat afloat, the flag flying and the metaphors mixing.

On the other hand, it is one more thing to do in the list of necessities for each new publication. Things such as:

  • registration with Nielsen
  • bio page and photo on website
  • scan cover for online shop
  • information data for online shop
  • open sales file and author address labels
  • do the marketing flyer and electronic flyer
  • do the review slip
  • ask poet for review addresses
  • remember dog chews for printer’s dogs
  • pick up publication from printer
  • check bank balance
  • pay printer
  • pay artist
  • post out review copies
  • post out complimentary copies
  • send to copyright libraries
  • send to Scottish Poetry Library
  • send to National Poetry Library
  • send author copies to author
  • send cheque or more copies to author
  • enter for PBS quarterly choice (3 copies)
  • send to my mother
  • create a storage space
  • include new publication in the diagram that helps me find where in the spare bedroom each publication is hiding
  • send out for Sphinx review (three reviewers who are not current authors)
  • mention in blog

So the email newsletter comes last. I don’t want it to be a straight repeat of what’s written elsewhere because that’s boring. So I write something new.

Last week it was something about Jennifer Copley’s Living Daylights, Chapter 5 of The HappenStance Story, and Cliff Forshaw’s Tiger.

Or it should have been Cliff Forshaw’s Tiger, but Cliff proved my downfall. I called him Geoff. I have a good friend called Geoff, whom I email every week. That could have had something to do with it.

I don’t think Cliff Forshaw gets the newsletter. He hasn’t said anything about it yet . . .

 

 

 

POETRY IS EXTINCT

No, it’s not, of course. That was just to get your attention. In fact, the number of poets in the world is catapulting into almost unimaginable statistics.

No, it’s not, of course. That was just to get your attention. In fact, the number of poets in the world is catapulting into almost unimaginable statistics.

Just now there are something like  6,897,900,000 people alive, give or take a few hundred thousand. Suppose the incidence of those human beings who write poetry is one in a thousand (I know this isn’t very scientific since some of them can’t write and some of them are babies). That means there might be 6,897,900 people who will be, have been or could grow up to be poets. Nearly seven million.

The estimated population in the heavily populated little country in which I live, the United Kingdom, is currently 61,838,154. That’s nearly 62 thousand potential poets because practically all of them WILL be able to read and write. Obviously some of them are babies and some of them are on the way out. But still . . . it’s a thought. Even if only a quarter of those are in poetry-writing ages and situations, that would be over fifteen thousand poets.

In 1821, the year Keats was polished off by tuberculosis, the UK census estimated the population at 20,983,092. (Thank you, George Simmers.) According to my manifestly unreliable calculation, that could be, say, just under twenty-one thousand poets at various stages of their existences. And considering some of them had TB already and a lot of them couldn’t read, and if they could read, would have had no access to poetry books, it’s probably about ten thousand. But I think that’s still far too high.

According to another possibly unreliable wiki source, as late as 1841, 33% of English men and 44% of women signed marriage certificates with their mark, because they couldn’t write. Apparently the level of literacy was somewhat higher in Wales. . . So I reckon of possible poets, maybe two or three thousand? (I’m sure More or Less could do better.)

Actually, Patrick Yarker could do better and looked this up too. This has been such a lovely day — I have had fun with this ongoing dialogue. Raymond Williams, in the chapter about the ‘Growth of the Reading Public’ in The Long Revolution (1961) suggests (page 187 of the Pelican edition):

Able to sign reg.      Men             Women              Total

1839                   66.3%          50.5%                 58.4%

1873                   81.2%          74.6%                 77.9%

By the end of the century Williams suggests some 95% of both men and women could sign.  His interest is more in the reading element of ‘literacy’ than in the writing, and he has nothing much to say about poets (though notes the popularity of cheap editions of poetry, and of Shakespeare, at the revolutionary end of the preceding century, as part of his argument that technology and capitalist imperatives were crucial in the process of widening the circle of the literate. He also engages with the old argument that quality must decrease if quantity expands, and suggests it is more interesting to consider the changing character of what counts as ‘literature’ at different historical moments.)

In Ron Silliman’s Blog, June 14, 2007 (thank you, Tim Love) Silliman points out that “when the New Americans were just getting started in the late 1940s, America was a nation of 150 million people, with an annual total of 8,000 book titles per year of all types, and something under 200 publishing poets. .. .”

And he goes on: “Today the US has twice as many people, but is now publishing, according to Bowker, over 290,000 book titles per year, of which some 4,000 titles alone are poetry. There must be somewhere between ten and twelve thousand publishing poets in the US today, in contrast with 200 fifty years ago.”

An American friend last week was attending an event with a thousand poets. Quite apart from the scary idea this represents, it is probably something like the same number as those writing poetry at some time in their lives in the UK in the mid nineteenth century. In one building!

No wonder people moan these days about getting their poetry published. No wonder I am bombarded by emails with poetry in them! I can’t quite hold the relative scale in my head, but there are HUGELY more people in this business than ever before. Vastly more. Mind-bogglingly more.

Does quality decrease if quantity expands? I don’t know that it does. The number of high quality writers must also, surely, expand, and it may be that the proportion of the inept to the ept (for want of a better term) remains the same. Hands up if you know any way of researching this without offending 75% of the writers you know.

But whether people are writing well or not, poetry runs in and out of what they do, because it is more than any of us as individuals. It’s something to do with the life of language and those who speak it. The more people who are up and about on a Sunday morning thinking and speaking and articulating words, the more poetry there will be (as well as more drivel, tripe, twaddle, poppycock and balderdash).

And so poetry remains extant, not extinct. Unlike the Tasmanian Tiger, which has definitely snuffed it. However, we are fascinated by what we have lost, aren’t we? Muses are most effective when absent, so it seems to me.

Cliff Forshaw‘s HappenStance pamphlet, Tiger, is at the printers just now and should come back to me at the end of this coming week, together with Chapter 5 of The HappenStance Story. The Tiger sequence originated in a residency in Tasmania when Cliff got fascinated by the way the absent beast persists in symbols and reported sightings. One of the poems in the sequence is called ‘Loop’, and here’s the loop of film that inspired it: the last Tiger in captivity, so far as we know. If you buy this pamphlet (or Jennifer Copley’s Living Daylights), you can select the other one as well for half price. What are you waiting for?

Note: one more week to enter the free Ambit subscription competition, if you are in Scotland. See previous but one blog entry.