Chapter Five of The HappenStance Story is written and at the printer. It is all very well being super-efficient and so on, but think what happened to the Roman Empire.
Chapter Five of The HappenStance Story is written and at the printer. It is all very well being super-efficient and so on, but think what happened to the Roman Empire.
There are more subscribers than ever before. So this time the mailshot really will extend to nearly 200 people: at least £160.00 in stamps alone. And if we allow five minutes per parcel to update and print the labels, collect the flyers and inserts, put in the packet and stick the stamp on, that’s 1000 minutes which is about 17 hours non-stop, which is nearly a week of spending three hours a day doing just this.
Have I made a monster? I hope not. It is an entertaining chapter, I think, and it took me a long time to write. However, sometimes I regret living with myself and my complicated plans.
The schedule for 2011 is done. Altogether there will be 13 pamphlets and one book. The full collection will be by Gerry Cambridge and it will be terrific. The pamphlets are a marvellous set too, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I? You’ll have to make up your own mind — hopefully after buying some of them. Please buy some of them, she added weakly.
Jackie Kay, in the Guardian yesterday, said there’s definitely a poetry renaissance happening. It is a very exhausting renaissance from the point of view of a minor, and aging, midwife. (if you follow that Guardian link, do look at the URL at the top of your webpage. I love the end: poetry-poets-stage-roar-renaissance.)
The schedule for 2012 is also pencilled in, though I’m not sharing it yet because some of the poets are ‘maybes’: it depends what they send in July.
But today (hurray-poetry-poets-stage-roar-renaissance) I am proud to announce Jennifer Copley’s Living Daylights has been delivered. It was a painless birth and the bairn is about to go into the online shop. It is a beautiful sequence about the dead, all of whom arrive one day and move back into the author’s house. It is surreal, funny and sad, and close to my heart.
Cliff Forshaw’s Tiger is still waiting for its footprints, but they will arrive later today. It is another in the sequence series and it will be born by Valentine’s Day, footprints and all, without an anaesthetic. More of that next week.
I love them so much. But there are volumes of them. The pile I am reading just now would seriously injure a small child if it fell. (The books, not the child.)
I love them so much. But there are volumes of them. The pile I am reading just now would seriously injure a small child if it fell. (The books, not the child.)
At the side of my bed, there is a hillock of books which extends to the bottom of the light-shade. I am actively reading the books at the top of that hillock (several underneath have gone into good-intention territory).
Active bedtime reading currently includes: John Lucas, Next Year Will Be Better, Stephen Fry’s The Fry Chronicles and Don Paterson’s Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I have nearly finished the first of these, am just over halfway through the second and have been unable to resist starting the third, although I was supposed not to touch it until Stephen Fry was done with. No wonder I have odd dreams.
Others that I am sort of reading, and three of which I have to review:
Les Murray, Taller When Prone (poetry)
Patrick Ingram, What Follows? (poetry)
Paul Muldoon, Maggot (poetry)
M A Griffiths, Grasshopper (poetry)
Fiona Thackeray, The Secret’s in the Folding (short stories)
Michael Jenkins, A House in Flanders (memoir)
Marion Nestle, Food Politics (what it sounds like)
John Berryman, The Dream Songs (poetry)
Carrie Etter, The Tethers (poetry)
Walter Perrie, Lyrics and Tales in Twa Tongues (poetry)
Brian Johnstone, The Book of Belongings (poetry)
Peter Sansom, Selected Poems
Paulo Coelho, The Zahir (novel)
Iain M Banks, Inversions (novel)
Last year I spent £592.60 on books. I only know this because I keep book purchases tallied as part of my HappenStance accounts. But now I think of it, that’s not all book purchases; it’s just poetry books. So in fact, I must have spent £750. Ish.
Oh — and I forgot to mention the magazines. There is also IOTA, in all its spendidness, and it is very FAT — much more than one iota. And the last issue of PN Review. And the latest issue of Mslexia with a picture of Susan Hill on the front cover that would scare anybody off writing for life. And Obsessed with Pipework, and Krax and New Walk.
Meanwhile, I am on Chapter 12 of Chapter 5. Writing it, not reading it. That’s The HappenStance Story again. It’s my intention to finish it today. So beware subscribers! Soon that chapter will add itself to YOUR reading mountain!
Every time it’s the same. You look forward to the rest — the bit where all the shops shut, the dark draws in and you can down tools. And then it starts.
It’s hard work. It’s harder work than working.
Every time it’s the same. You look forward to the rest — the bit where all the shops shut, the dark draws in and you can down tools. And then it starts.
It’s hard work. It’s harder work than working.
And in between, people fall out, it freezes, it thaws, pipes burst, it rains, your car breaks down, the bank is shut when you thought it was open, your bank balance is imbalanced and half your Christmas cards are late and then tumble back NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS.
You do a fair bit of laughing, an unfair bit of eating and drinking. You pile up the books you are about to read during your ‘holiday’, though you don’t actually have time to read any of them. Or maybe just one.
And then suddenly it’s all OVER and you’re shattered. You need to sleep for a week, not rampage into 2011.
Enough of the moaning. The elevenses have begun.
Points to note:
HSWF Mentoring Scheme: From this month, HappenStance is working with Writers Forum — a mentoring scheme which hopefully will encourage good entries to WF monthly poetry competitions and perhaps some increased sales for HappenStance at the same time. For ‘new’ poets, I think this scheme is well worth looking at.
The William Soutar Writing Prizeis open for poetry this year. Entry is absolutely free. You can send in up to two poems and the first prize is an Arvon Week. The second is a hundred quid. There is also a local poet prize for people resident in Perth and Kinross. Closing date February 14th. What are you waiting for?
This year’s William Soutar judge is . . . er . . . Helena Nelson. So if you should be reading this and happen to be a HappenStance poet already, please don’t enter because it might look like corruption, even though judging is anonymous. But do encourage everyone else you know to enter. Unless there are 5,000 entries, I will be reading them all.
Full information and entry form can be found on the William Soutar website. If you don’t know anything about William Soutar, now’s your chance — he is — or was — remarkable.
Happy New Work! May your poems always grow shorter . . .
It’s been a fever of folding and labelling and stamping, and more folding and more printing. And then — disaster!
It’s been a fever of folding and labelling and stamping, and more folding and more printing. And then — disaster!
I always think I’m well-prepared, and this time I was particularly good with the address labels. That is to say, I updated the subscriber list (which I’m happy to say keeps expanding, even in times of blizzard) and made up new address labels with exquisite care.
Nearly all the flyers were done by Dolphin Press, because it’s too time-consuming these days to print as well as design them. However, the letter to subscribers, the updated publications list and flyers for my own book were my job.
Which was fine because my HP2055 printer works beautifully and I had an extra toner cartridge sitting there if needed.
When the current toner ran out, and multiple shaking proved it really wouldn’t do any more, I felt an ominous shiver. The spare cartridge was a recycled refill. It ‘only’ cost fifty quid. But it fitted into the machine neatly. Oh ye of little faith!
And then . . . each sheet of paper stuck resolutely half-way round the cylinder. The machine did not like the toner cartridge, though the error message was blaming the paper. I needed to print 400-500 more documents. Grrr.
I went to Misco and ordered three new toner cartridges, full price. What’s money? They’ll arrive too late, but they’ll avert the next crisis.
And meanwhile, ever resourceful — I had ANOTHER PRINTER. A new one. I shouldn’t have this printer, but I got it when I bought the new Imac on which I’m now working, because if you bought the printer with the Mac you got seventy quid back, and so the printer itself (which is also a scanner and probably boils eggs) cost only twenty. And it was colour. I hadn’t got a colour printer. (For very good reasons which some part of my brain temporarily deleted.)
So I paused the mailshot. No, actually that’s not true. The mailshot paused itself because I ran out of price lists at about letter E.
These new machines are so clever they make you feel neanderthal. It took me a while to find the right pressure of ‘touch’ to make the tiny touchscreen operate, but I did it in the end. And then everything found everything else by whatever remote wireless magic these things function. And the printer worked.
But multi-function as it is (Photoshot 1100 series) it doesn’t like two-sided printing. It seems to be designed for people printing colour photographs at home. And of course the toner bundle it came with hasn’t got much toner in it, has it? I forgot that bit. Printing about 80 sheets worth of price lists — with some difficulty because front was okay but back was not — has more or less used up the black.
I ordered another toner ‘bundle’ for the new bijou scanning, faxing, carol-singing printer. That’s only £250 on toner in a week. It’s an investment.
Back to folding the Christmas cards and Poemcards, getting more stressed. I know why. It’s a touch of SSD (Seasonal Stress Disorder). Meanwhile, the Accounts are nearly done. Not quite. And neither are the personal Christmas cards. I need to fold at least another 100.
When I woke this morning, it was snowing again. I am up to letter L.
This time the blanket of white and the blurred flaky sky looks reassuring. It’s getting darker by the minute. The blizzard is getting thicker. Snow calms things. You can make footprints without a printer.
I keep meticulous little files of monies paid in, monies paid out. I have all the cash receipts in clear polywallets, labelled by month. I file the bank statements for all three accounts, and the credit card, and the PayPal statements, and the pay slips (paper and electronic), and the P60 and the invoices and so on.
At the moment that means two fat ring-binders, one purple and one yellow. One of my procrastination techniques is buying new ring-binders or wallets or cardboard folders to keep things in. Then I have a nice black box for packing things up to take to the accountant to get checked. And special books for recording income and expenditure, all divided into columns so I can see what costs what.
But in the end, I have to sit down and DO it. You can’t sell poetry without a reckoning. So I begin.
At this point, I find I’ve lost some essential document or other, and go into panic mode. I hate this moment. All my careful filing is pointless because X is missing. And X, usually, is not missing at all. X is just mis-filed, or staring me in the face.
The problem is simply I haven’t done this stuff for a long time so I’ve forgotten how. I completely forget from one year to another, as though my brain conspires in the obliteration.
So I have to teach myself all over again — slowly at first, then gradually approaching a speed that’s acceptable. It’s going to take days but it is going to get done.
And then I see all the neat little columns of handwriting, and the bits I highlight and the bits I underline in red, and the sums that add up, and I start to feel quietly pleased.
(No, I am not using spreadsheets. I have thought about it, and the reckoning bit would be quicker, but it would mean more hours at a screen, and I’m already spending enough. ‘Spending’ — ha! – how the imagery of finance creeps into every single concept of time.)
This week the snow helped. It was calm and white and irrevocable. It sat there waiting for me to get the accounts moving (I started and then stopped again during the October week’s holiday). The accounts were at the top of my ‘to do’ list, where they’ve been for approximately two months. So I began, looking up from time to time at the gleaming icicles.
It’s not so bad. If I completed the accounts records every month, they would never get so huge as to LOOM over me. I say this every year.
I’ll give myself a treat later today and start folding the Christmas cards for the subscriber mailshot. . . or read some of the submissions pile. Some really lovely poems have come in this week. NO, NO, NO POEMS!!!
As in you can’t see it for. As in hit the, bite the, cut the, kiss the, gather the. As in when the dust settles. As in not see somebody for. As in dust yourself down and.
As in you can’t see it for. As in hit the, bite the, cut the, kiss the, gather the. As in when the dust settles. As in not see somebody for. As in dust yourself down and.
Plot and Counterplot is in a box in the boiler room beside the front door. Alan Hill’s No Biography is partly behind the sofa and more of it beside the french windows in the lounge. Also behind the sofa are the new PoemCards, racked in sets, the leaflets ready for No Biography and the two Po-Lites and Plot and Cop.
Plot and Counter-Plot
Behind the stairs are more pamphlets. In plastic boxes with the lids firmly on.
Because of the dust. The dust is created by Sandy Kelly. Sandy Kelly is refitting the bathroom upstairs.
There is nothing grand about this house. It’s ex-Council or GDC, can’t remember which. It’s pleasant inside, a bit eighties. Every single bit of it needs redecorating. The conservatory (but at least it has one) leaks in four places. Bits of fitted wainscot fall off every now and again all over the place. Scraps of wall-paper are peeling. It is a national spider protection zone.
But it is about to have a nice upstairs bathroom, and Sandy Kelly is the man. He has been working on the job now for three weeks. The shower is done. The wall tiles are done (but the grouting’s not finished). The floor tiles are not in place yet. Nor is the toilet, the washhand basin, the cupboards that go around them. And my mother is coming to stay on Friday for the launch of Plot and Cop in the Scottish Poetry Library.
I’ve been hoovering and dusting every couple of days (not like me) because of the layer of fine dust that has been settling over everything. It floats down the stairs and then permeates everything. Upstairs, the other pamphlets are in the spare room with the door firmly shut. So are all the bits and pieces that were in the bathroom before, or at the bottom of the stairs gathering dust. How mum will get to the bed in there remains to be seen.
It’s only dust. People’s houses disintegrate in earthquakes. In Scotland, one of the safest countries in the world, so far as natural disasters go, there’s really nothing to complain about.
We are but dust and to dust we shall return. Just not quite yet, I hope.
Collapsing, nearly fainting and then projectile vomiting at the end of a poetry event, while a young mandolin group is serenading the audience, is wayward behaviour.
Collapsing, nearly fainting and then projectile vomiting at the end of a poetry event, while a young mandolin group is serenading the audience, is wayward behaviour.
But as soon as you think you are not actually making your final exit, as it were, it’s hard to decide which is worse: feeling crap or feeling horrendously embarrassed for your hosts and fellow poets. I’ve never done it before. I hope never to do it again.
I hereby nominate the following people for the Noble Behaviour to Wayward Poets Award (NBWPA):
Helen Birtwell (kind and generous organiser of the reading as part of the Cley and Sheringham Festival). Jehane Markham (whose lovely lunch was unceremoniously splattered across the school hall floor and who had made my visit to Norfolk, up to that point, such a joy). Helen Ivory and Martin Figura, who received WP Helena Nelson at their house in Norwich at three o’clock in the morning when A & E let her out.
The NBWPA is not, regrettably, a cash award, but nominations automatically ensure membership of a secret (but not that secret now) organisation whose members know they will be rescued, whatever the crisis, at any moment anywhere in the world that members of the NBWPA are present. There are more members than you might expect, the organisation having been set up in the early 1990s, at around the time of the first poetry festivals.
Anyway, I spent five or six hours in an A & E ward in Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. I don’t watch much television. In fact, I mainly only watch one programme on a Saturday night when I have finally stopped working. I was brought up with a grandmother who was an addict of hospital drama. We watched Emergency Ward Ten and we watched Dr Kildare. Avidly. So continuing this family tradition, I watch Casualty, even though it is not intentionally funny.
My time in a real A & E was just like a five-hour episode. No, better because I was actually in it. I was the Collapsed Poet storyline. As the nurse extracted my blood, she asked me to recite one of my poems. It’s harder than usual to remember poems — even your own — while your blood is seeping away for nefarious purposes. However, I managed part of the peeing poem. It seemed appropriate. There were a lot of people — much iller than me — peeing and vomiting and groaning around what they call the ‘trolley bay’ (Friday night, remember?). So I was something of an exception, in that I wasn’t drunk.
The people who looked after me there were, every single soul, kindness itself. They were working very hard — I watched them for several hours — but with humour and cameraderie. They checked out more bits of me than I can remember since my only other A & E experience, an ectopic pregnancy 24 years ago.
All of which resulted in my blood pressure returning to normal (it was not co-operating earlier) and me being discharged, no worse for wear, except to be very worried about all the people who were worrying about me.
Back home now, I’m glad of the extra hour. I could wish the bathroom hadn’t been dismantled (it is currently being refitted) so we are still washing in the downstairs toilet (don’t ask — I really mean the washhand basin), but that’s a minor detail.
And the whale? Very complicated. The whale is Gillian’s design for Graham Austin’s pamphlet Fuelling Speculation. And the picture is Jonah inside the whale (read the pamphlet and the penny will drop.)
I should have got that whale organised last week: we are running behind schedule. However, Gillian’s computer died, and then the scanning software for the new one wasn’t set up, and then Photoshop wasn’t installed. And one thing after another meant that when she came to meet me at the airport yesterday, to make sure I was fit to drive my car, she brought the sketchbook with the whale so I could scan it myself. I haven’t done that yet. I’m still treading softly.
But brushes with mortality are good for us. They make us hug the people we love a little more closely than usual, and phone the ones we can’t hug, and think how lucky we are. Jonah probably felt like that when the whale sicked him up. Everything connects.
When we went on holiday my dad would have a bag of books — his maximum quota from Knutsford library. Science fiction, the sea, thrillers, anything to do with the war. I had a similar back from the children’s library. My sister must have had the same. My mother had books in German and a dictionary and her letter-writing stuff.
When we went on holiday my dad would have a bag of books — his maximum quota from Knutsford library. Science fiction, the sea, thrillers, anything to do with the war. I had a similar bag from the children’s library. My sister, who was also reading fit to bust, must have had the same. My mother had books in German and a dictionary and her letter-writing stuff.
We stayed in rented holiday cottages, self-catering. They always had a fire and places to read, which was just as well because quite apart from the fact that we were all voracious readers, it rains a lot in Wales and the Lake District, which is where we went. Anyway, even if it was sunny, we took the books to the beach.
We took several tins of cake too. My mother baked for a couple of days before we left and there was a fruit cake and sometimes more than one tin of flapjack. We ate a lot of flapjack. As I read my way through the complete works of Enid Blyton, I munched, and my mother’s baking turned into the slabs of fruitcake in the Blyton pages.
These cottages had no televisions. One had a toilet which was outside. The beds were cosy. We had hot water bottles. One of them had an amazing shelf of green Penguin murder mysteries over the fire place — which was a big open hearth. It stretched from one wall to another. It’s where I met Agatha Christie, Edmund Crispin (who also wrote poetry, by the way, and who liked Ruth Pitter), Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Dorothy Sayers. It was a feast. I never got to the end of them, though we went there several years and I probably read least two books a day. I can’t read that fast now.
I learned a painful book lesson in that cottage. It was in a remote situation in Pembrokeshire. But the bloke who looked after (and perhaps owned) our cottage was on the other side of the bridge with his young family, and we played sometimes with those two children. The older girl was a bit older than me. Their house was pretty primitive inside: dark and messy and musty. You didn’t really feel comfortable there, but you went anyway because when you’re on holiday sometimes you want some kids to mess about with.
My birthday fell towards the end of that holiday and among my presents I got a new Puffin by Patricia Lynch. I’d adoredThe Grey Goose of Kilnevin and I was dying to read this one, but I kept it for later, like you keep good chocolate, a treat for after the holiday was over.
When we got home, I couldn’t find it anywhere. The birthday spoils were intact but the book had vanished. Mystified, I wrote to my friend Carol from across the bridge and asked her to ransack the cottage in case I had left it somewhere. No book was reported.
The following year we went back. Playing one day in Carol’s bedroom, I spotted my missing book. It was on her bookshelf. She had nicked it, presumably. I can’t remember whether I confronted her. I think I may have done because I seem to remember her telling me it was hers. And after that we weren’t friends any more.
You learn. When I was twelve I went to school with a large bar of chocolate in the top pocket of my blazer. Stupidly I forgot it was there and left it in the cloakroom instead of stashing it in my desk. I shot back after assembly to get it, and needless to say, it was gone. My form teacher, Mrs Yorke, who taught Biology and Religious Education, told me I should be consoled by the thought that some hungry child had had no breakfast and so my chocolate had gone to a good home. I was not consoled.
In the holiday book bag last week (we were away near Kingussie, reading most of the week beside a log fire), I had Stephen Fry’s Moab is my Washpot. Good read. He was one of the thieves, the boys who went through other boys’ blazers for the spoils. He wasn’t hungry, or not physically. He just wanted stuff, like we all do, but somehow he overcame the thing that stops us taking it. Like my friend did. I don’t think she was especially happy. She was tall and gangly and growing fast, and living in the middle of nowhere.
Anyway, I read a lot of stuff last week, not much of it poetry, and it was good. Kingussie is bucking the trend and has extended its second-hand bookshop. It now has rooms with open beams and carpets and lamps, and its £1.00 for a paperback and £2.00 for a hardback. Another reason to go back.
So I haven’t bought my Kindle yet. I should, I know I should. But the holiday bookbag is part of my brain. I wouldn’t know what to do without more books than I can carry. I can do without the cake, I can do without the chocolate. But not the books.
Poetry is always recycling itself: it’s a kind of permanent landfill.
Or to put it another way, it’s language that continually recycles itself: the soundtrack to our lives, popping up here and there, changing and churning, biodegrading, upgrading, forming a sludge the size of a continent somewhere in the middle of our collective unconcious.
Poetry is always recycling itself: it’s a kind of permanent landfill. Landfill, mindfill, handsfull, sound-swill.
Or to put it another way, it’s language that continually recycles itself: the soundtrack to our lives, popping up here and there, changing and churning, biodegrading, upgrading, forming a sludge the size of a continent somewhere in the middle of our collective unconcious.
If we have a collective unconscious. But then, that term’s just part of the sludge.
It’s an amazing thing, language. At least it amazes me. But it would, wouldn’t it? I’m one of the arch-perpetrators of making the sludge temporarily concrete, printing it onto a substance made from trees and packing it into little cellophane bags.
Rachel commented last week that she wondered why I bothered with the little bags. It’s because I think of the poetry pamphlets as valuable. The little bags protect the corners. The words keep beautifully inside those bags. If you buy a rare pamphlet publication — the kind that costs a hundred quid or so ((I have done this), they tend to come packed this way. So although pamphlets are ephemeral, I suppose I treat them like they’re not. I’m going to stop using the self-seal kind though.
And I like to work with local printers and feel that I am, in a tiny way, part of the local economy. Liz and Robert at the Dolphin Press in Glenrothes don’t do books. They do pamphlets, raffle tickets, flyers. They use machines they’ve had for a long time and skills they’ve had for longer. They talk to me and they have two beautiful dogs. I can pick up the publications on my way to collect my LovedOne from his workplace, so this feels sensible and sustainable to me.
Actually I rather like all the coloured bins, though I’m trying to put less in them. And Matt and I nearly had a row in Morrisons last week when I refused to buy the carrots in pre-packed bags and insisted on putting them in the trolley loose. All this fuss about one stupid bag! he ranted. But I make even more fuss about one stupid comma. Off to do more of that right now, in fact.
There are new pamphlet reviews on the website! This has been slower than usual because of the rampage of publications going on in this little corner of the world and because of me fighting with the Inspiron machine (which has empowered, but not inspired me). And there will be more soon. It would be nice if I had had review copies from Faber’s new pamphlet imprint. Needless to say, none have arrived here . . .
Look out for reviews of:
David Ford’s Punch Gill Andrews’ The Thief Gina Wilson’s Scissors, Paper, Stone Martin Lyon’s Sandcastles at Evening Helen Ashley’s Ways of Saying Lucy Lepchani’s The Beckoning Wild
