BANISH THIS WORD FROM YOUR POEMS!

It looks innocuous, sounds harmless, pops up all over the place – and it’s a killer. No, not ‘shards’. Not even ‘memories’.

What is the evil little beast? I would tell you right away but I won’t, as I’m sure you’ll guess. It is as short as your average monosyllable. It creeps up behind you as you’re thinking what to write next. It proliferates in school essays (as if they weren’t bad enough), as people feel they ought to sound formal.

What’s the word? You guessed. It is AS.

What’s so wrong with as? You can see above, it has at least three possible meanings and also at least three grammatical functions (adverb, conjunction, preposition). Often a poet drops it into a line and it’s not immediately obvious which function it’s about to take on. Well – it’s obvious to the poet of course, but that’s the problem. The person writing the poem always knows what she means. It’s the reader who gets confused. Lord help us – sometimes the word as even hangs on the end of a line before a line break. . . .

There’s:

as …. meaning like
as….. meaning while
as…. meaning because

And the common as phrases:

as of today
as if (accompanied by sniff)
as I said
as per
as regards
as though
acting as counsellor
as well as
as required
as needful
as ever

The worst of the ases – the absolute worstest of the worst – is as meaning because. Can you imagine somebody actually saying: “I am going to give up poetry as I find it too difficult?” It makes sense, yes. But it’s flat. Deader than a doughnut.

“I am going shopping as I have run out of sugar.” Listen to the rhythm. Listen to the tone. That sentence died a long time ago. Now it stinks.

So, if you’re planning on using as to mean because, use because. (If you substitute since, it can also have more than one function and more than one meaning, though not as many as the fiendish as.) Better still, stop the sentence: I am going shopping. I have run out of sugar. Not exciting writing, but at least the sentences have perked up. They might even be going somewhere.

When it comes to as meaning ‘like’, for example as soft as silk – well, it’s not great. That way lies cliché country. Be careful.

And oh dear me, look at this:

As I walk into the graveyard
I think of my dead antelope

Okay – not really an antelope. Probably something much more poignant. But that construction (as + ‘I’ + present tense verb, linking to ‘I think’ or ‘I feel’ or ‘I wonder’) is a common pattern in weak contemporary verse. Poets take note.

Am I sounding narky? As if.

Oh well, then. Yes I am. I spend my editorial life dealing with the dead wood associated with as. Often it just goes. Delete as, stop the sentence, start another. Sometimes I stick in because. At least I understand what the person’s talking about then. Quite often a writer has used as in three different ways in one paragraph or stanza and not even noticed.

I can bear ‘as if’. In fact, I quite like it. But that’s because the rhythm briskly throws the stress onto the second word. ‘F’ is a good consonant for energizing language – one of our frequently used expletives can testify to that. As, on the other hand, sounds like cold scrambled egg. Yeuch.

Please don’t add comments telling me there are exceptions. There are exceptions to everything. I’m trying to make you so self-conscious about using the evil word as that you’ll stop and think twice (even three times) before you let it in. If my plan works, I’ll have done you a favour.

Trust me as I am a poet.

See?

POMOPHOBIA IS NORMAL

I teach loads of adult students who loathe poetry. Sometimes I hate it more than they do. I look at books of it piling up around me and I feel sick. I feel like the miller’s daughter locked in a room of straw without the faintest hope of Rumpelstiltskin.

I’m not a creative writing tutor. That’s different. People who want to write poetry often love it. I teach literature (some of the time) in further education. Many of the people who arrive there read novels and enjoy films. But mention the big Po and a troubled look comes over their faces. I wish I could suggest a few hours in my classroom transforms their feelings. Sometimes it’s the reverse.

Pomophobia is normal. Why? All sorts of reasons. School has a lot to do with it. We get Poetry, like an attack of flu. To get rid of it, we have to analyse it. We don’t understand it and this makes us feel stupid. We don’t like feeling stupid and we tend to dislike people and things that make us feel that way. So. . . .

And yet there are bits of verse (stuff the word ‘poetry’) that people do like. They’re memorable, frequently rhythmic, sometimes funny and, as you get older, and especially if you’re a boy, frequently rude. You can skip to them, sing to them, stamp to them, sigh to them, get revenge on them:

Helen Curry is no good (substitute name of victim).
Chop her up for firewood (you have to say ‘fy-er-wood’).
When she’s dead, stamp on her head
And make her into currant bread.

So it’s okay to rejoice in that kind of thing. I wish I dared share some of the rudest examples. I do collect them. ‘The Good Ship Venus’ is a winner.

But back to hating poetry, before I work myself back into an inadvertent lather of liking the stuff.

All those books piled up staring at me. Three more arrived to review yesterday. There are at least ten waiting unread already. I have books of poetry that people sent me as gifts. And I have small collections waiting in coloured folders waiting for me to read through and make them into HappenStance pamphlets.

The trouble with poetry is that it is so bloody demanding. It has one assertion only and it is this: READ ME. Total attention. Nothing less will do. READ ME. And then – READ ME AGAIN.

Coupled with this is the unstated promise: I WILL REPAY. The idea is that you read the stuff and it does something magical for you, something you won’t forget. Isn’t that so? But somewhere in there, there’s a secret, like the name of Rumpelstilkskin or Tom Tit Tot or Whuppity Stoorie. If you can’t come up with the secret name, the whole thing will stay straw and you’ll be stuck in that room with it for the rest of your life.

So how do you feel, when you read it and the spell doesn’t work? Horribly cheated, that’s how. Vengeful. Especially since the thing you didn’t understand a word of, or were totally bored by, is supposed to be important. The person who wrote it is hugely significant and has the key to the whole of life: it says so on the back cover.

But there is quite a good thriller on the bookcase and it won’t make you feel like that. All it demands is:

READ ME, IF YOU HAPPEN TO FEEL LIKE IT

[ONCE]

It will be easy. And a bit of fun.

All this I understand all too well.

However, on Friday, I sat quietly in a room full of poetry and a little bit of prose (some prose is necessary, like pasta, rice, bread or potatoes with your dinner). And the magic worked again. I had Mike Horwood’s book Midas Touch – not one poem made me feel inadequate. Lovely first collection. And August Kleinzahler’s New and Selected – a bit more nervous about that, and there were bits I teetered over, but some whole poems were okay. And Tim Liardet’s Shoestring pamphlet – oh hey – it even tells a story, a beautiful, sad story. And did you know Brian Aldiss, the science fiction writer, did Po too? I didn’t, but he does. Perhaps not the best poetry I have ever read but hey, it caused me no pain at all to read the lot. And I sailed through the one by Gail White practically singing.

But even better than this. I went back to three folders of PIPs. That, for the uninformed among you, stands for Poets In Progress, and these PIPs are the next three HappenStance pamphlets. They are Mike Loveday, Lorna Dowell and Lydia Fulleylove. Oh my goodness! I haven’t read them for ages, not properly, not since I said Yes to the pamphlet possibility. I slowly perused the poems that had been sitting in my yellow box beside the dining table for months, and I came out of the reading calm, happy and enriched.

And excited. It was the same with Ross Kightly and Kirsten Irving, only a few weeks ago. This is why I do it. I’m only the miller’s daughter. The magic has nothing to do with me, but these poets have transformed paper and scratchy words to gold. I want to share them and there’s nothing I’d rather do.

Meanwhile, I’ll inflict a poem of my own on you, no matter whether you hate it or not, because it’s relevant and I’d forgotten I’d written it until I came to do this morning’s blog. It emerged ten years ago, as a direct result of three lovely adult students who came to me woefully after I had forced them to read Shakespeare sonnet 138, ‘When my love swears that she is made of truth’. One of them really did say to me, ‘We’ve tried and we’ve tried and we can’t like it.’

The Challenge of Literature

(‘We’ve tried and we’ve tried and we can’t like it. . . .’)

I gave them the sonnet I always used.
‘You don’t have to like it,’ I conceded
when hardly a single one enthused.
‘Shakespeare can grow on you. Go on—read it.’

I was convinced it would do no harm
to meet the best of the best. Great art
is good for exams; it keeps you calm.
Some people even learn it by heart.

On the last day, in no mood for sighing,
I tossed them a titbit by Wendy Cope:
some nice little lines, a kind of test.
What would they think? Well—I dared to hope.

The bastards. They liked it without even trying.
I might have guessed.

PARCELLING, PACKAGING AND THE EVIL POSTMAN

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.

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?

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.

WHY POETRY PUBLISHERS ARE PERNICKETY

Here’s the scenario. Your cousin has self-published a book. You plan to buy a copy, though you haven’t seen the cousin for years, and she doesn’t live near you. She sends you the Amazon link. Good grief!! Her book costs TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY QUID. How cousinly d’you feel now?

Here’s the scenario:

Your cousin has had a book of poems published. He sends you the Amazon link. Good grief!! It costs TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY QUID. Will you buy it?

I know that wasn’t realistic. In real life, you want to buy the book and you swither because it’s a bit more than you expect. Twelve quid . . . er . . . now let me see. But if you like your cousin (never mind the content of the book), you’ll probably go for it.

Money’s a curious substance. It gets in the way. It has emotional properties. It can be magical and glittering (competition prizes). It can be dirty (bribes and promises).

Anyway, I need to get to the point here. When I get a poetry submission for HappenStance, first I decide whether I like the poetry.

After that, I have to decide how much I like it. Because to produce a 32-page pamphlet costs me about three hundred quid. Do I love these poems enough to fork out a quarter of my monthly income?

At this point, the analogy with your cousin breaks down a bit. I’m not buying one copy. I’m buying two or three hundred of them, and I’m going to sell at least half of those. So I’ll get some of my money back, though not yet. With most of my publications, I get back less than I paid.

But the outlay is not just money. It’s time. A lot of unremunerated time. I really need to be in love with these poems (or their author, of course, but I’m a bit past that).

I’m simplifying. There are other factors, which I won’t go into here. And ultimately if I love the poems and I like the author, I’m purchasing a rare privilege.

However, it’s because of all this that publishers are entitled to be pernickety. It is reasonable, in these circumstances, to expect poets to send submissions according to the guidelines on the website, and to do so during reading periods. Every submission to HappenStance adds up to this proposal: Would you like to spend three hundred quid and two weeks of your life on my poetry?

Competitions are different. In this case, the entrant parts with a significant fee to send in the work. She has effectively paid for her poems to be read and carefully considered. Nobody has to fall in love with anybody or anything. The work is disqualified if it doesn’t follow the rules, and a (probably paid) judge simply selects the best contenders.

The result is magic money. And acclaim. The Purple Moose Pamphlet Competition closing date is May 1^st. It is run by Poetry Wales and the winners get £250.00 and pamphlet publication. They are fine pamphlets.

There’s a new interview with Poetry Wales editor Zoe Skoulding in the Sphinx area of the website, as well as one with Luke Wright of Nasty Little Press (in his case, the deciding factors are love and performance potential).

If you’re trying to get work published and none of this works for you, my next reading ‘window’ is July. But I’m pernickety, mind. Check out the submission guidelines carefully. Read the free download about Dos and Don’ts. And read some HappenStance publications: think what they cost me!

‘OVERPUBLICATION IS A TERRIBLE THING’

Shakespeare said it first. Or at least Don Paterson’s version of Shakespeare’s sonnet 102 did:

That love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming
The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere.

Shakespeare said it first. Or at least Don Paterson’s version of Shakespeare’s sonnet 102 did:

That love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming
The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere.

Which leads DP into:

Oh yes – overpublication is a terrible thing in a poet, and only arouses suspicion. It looks like it’s coming way too easily, meaning either it’s not costing you enough, or you’re insincere, or you’re probably repeating yourself. (And it’s all too easy to do: readers like to read their poetry as if it were something rare and precious. A poet can saturate his or her market just by publishing every three years.)

Yes, it’s the opposite of ‘tell everyone if you plan to go on a diet’. The quotation is, of course, from DP’s recent commentary Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which, among other things, includes tips and advice to poets from One Who Knows. Not everyone will agree with him here, needless to say – though I do.

That’s because the pile of poems and anthologies at my elbow grows daily and there is a point at which it all becomes like too much pudding (not padding, pudding). You only look forward to dessert as a special thing, if you’re going to be able to get up and walk after you’ve eaten it.

This creates a wee problem for those poets who are hugely prolific, and possibly for those who are currently writing a poem a day for NatPoMo. Well – it does if writing and poems and sharing them with the world are seen as hand-in-hand activities, as they are by many.

This week, on Facebook, poet and publisher Peter Daniels shared Book Business comments from someone called Neal Goff (great name) of Egremont Associates, a firm that helps publishers sell stuff. And what does he say?

. . . in order to succeed in selling books directly to consumers . . . publishers are going to have to step back and nurture gatherings of consumers in the consumers’ interest areas before creating content that those gatherings want. This is the antithesis of what publishers were once able to do, which was publish content and then create audience interest.

Oo-er missus. I was at one of Colin Will’s book launches yesterday – lovely readings from Geoff Cooper, Eddie Gibbons and Lyn Moir to support their new pamphlet publications. Was that nurturing gatherings of consumers? I suppose it was in a way.

As is Rob Mackenzie’s Poetry at the . . . Store this very evening, at which one of ‘my’ new poets, Matthew Stewart, launches his new pamphlet (32 pages of poems compiled carefully over several years).

But I don’t think we can nurture enough consumers to beat the book battle. Nurturing people is very time-consuming. It’s hellish trying to nurture folk and produce poetry publications at the same time. Are you being nurtured as you read this? If not, email me. I will send chocolate.

Jon Stone suggests “alternatives to the single author volume” may be the answer. More anthologies. Anthologies do seem to reach more common readers, or readers who like their theme, which can counteract the Fear of Po. The two big sources of income for poetry activity, in the days of vanishing AC funding, must surely be competitions and anthologies (take a look at Bloodaxe’s top ten titles).

This gives me a nice opportunity to work in a mention of the new Grey Hen volume, out this week, Get Me Out of Here! Poems for trying circumstances. Quirky (often funny) poems by “older women poets” of whom I am one. A very enjoyable read and probably going to be marketed to a nurtured gathering of older women readers (there will be noteworthy exceptions). We older women (OWs) are still, I imagine, the main poetry-book-buying group in the UK. (YWs reading this: you can be an OW eventually. If you want to know what it’s like, read this book. YMs: tough.)

And there’s another excellent new anthology from Leicester-based Soundswrite, this time women from aged 25 to 98! A pleasure to read. If I were in the area, I would want to be involved with this group: a place where nature and nurture are combined. (YMs: sorry.)

But Mr Goff suggests that “the internet is the best marketing medium ever invented”. Maybe so. Maybe no. It connects with a vast number of people, theoretically, but that vast number of people is having a vast amount of stuff marketed to it every second of every hour of every day of every. . . .

Therefore, like her [Philomel], I sometime hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song.

LOVE AND LOSS . . .

. . . the only two themes, it seems to me, and they are one and the same. I only met Linda Chase once in the flesh, but I loved her. And now she’s gone.

She died last Friday. She was a person so bursting with vitality that I realise I never expected her to do that. Not die. Dying is what ordinary people do.

She was a good poet. That’s how I met her first — on the page. I reviewed The Wedding Spy, I think, for someone — can’t remember which publication — but the poems caught my interest like a small flame catches dry kindling. I knew she was different. But not how different.

Linda organised Poets and Players, hosting readings by all sorts of poets and performers, in Manchester. Other people, who knew her much better than I did, will write much more about all the things she did for, around and at the service of poetry, which she loved. There is a brief obituary by Jeffrey Wainwright here.

It was through a Poets and Players reading that I met her. At her invitation, I read at St Ann’s Church in the centre of Manchester, with Caroline Carver and Janet Loverseed — the only time I’ve ever read in a church, except at school for Christmas services.

Afterwards, Caroline and I stayed overnight in Linda’s beautiful house in Didsbury, a place of peace and light. I associate Linda with white light. It is a combination of something about her and her poem, ‘Night Vision’, which I”m going to quote in a moment or two.

Many of her poems are exceptional. This, for example, from ‘Kiss in the Dark’ in The Wedding Spy:

She has thickened around the middle
like a successful custard
on a wooden spoon.

See how tender she is towards women — loving, generous, warm. Here’s the end of ‘One Woman Dancing’. I have been this woman. Perhaps I still am:

I don’t have to dance if I don’t want to dance,
but I do, so I do. One woman dancing.
Look, there’s another. And another.
Each of us out there, eyes shut, rocking. Yes!

And in Extended Family, opposite the ‘Nice’ which is brilliant and funny and will never leave me until I leave, ‘Premature’, with more white light:

She knew about light already–
white hair, white stick
and the scent of the garden,
premature as a rampant spring
bucking the frost, regardless.

I thought Linda would buck the frost forever. The energy that emanated from her was something else. For breakfast, at her huge kitchen table, there was fresh fruit salad she had chopped that morning, with fresh mango and blueberries and thick creamy yoghourt. The mango was better than any mango I can manage to buy. I can remember her cutting it with consummate ease as though she had been doing that all her life, and laughing. I marvelled at this woman who did so much, including chopping mangos, just before more visitors arrived for a poetry session.

I think mango and Scotland are impossible to combine with conviction. But I often buy blueberries, extortionate as they are, and when I eat them, I think of Linda. Always. I am not even making this up, and of course, she didn’t know this, because I didn’t tell her. So much we don’t say.

I intended to spend more time with her, some time in the future which now she hasn’t got. This is mortality. We go along, and along a bit more, and along a bit more, and then our light goes out.

The blossom outside today is incredible. Summer has arrived without warning, bypassing most of spring. You can practically see buds swelling and opening into leaves and flowers, like BBC documentary film on fast-forward. And it’s wonderful and it’s sad because love and loss are the same thing.

Here is ‘Night Vision’ by Linda, for Linda. You will find her quite clearly, if you didn’t already know her, in these lines:

The bed is piled high with white.
All six plumped up pillows are white
and the night shirt I have on is white
and the lampshade and the blinds are white
and the rugs around the bed are white
and I wait here, covered, while you wash.
Then you come dripping, rubbing your rump
buffing your back, trailing the towel
and I open the duvet and draw you in
as the feathers fill their cases, freshness
from the bath, gardenia scent from the soap,
making much lighter the white in the room.
You tell me it’s time to go to sleep,
but sleep is for people blinded by dark.

COCKING IT UP AGAIN?

The email newsletter went out last week flagging three new publications. But guess what I forgot?

This is what it said:

Three new pamphlets. Which will you choose?

Matthew Stewart’s Inventing Truth is a first collection, Matthew works in Spain, and there’s a sense of moving between languages and cultures behind this unusual pamphlet. The poems are almost all brief. But they’re poignant and thoughtful. Moments in amber.

Peter Daniels is a name familiar to most readers of small press magazines. He has been writing good, resonant poems for a long time. I, for one, was convinced he already had at least one full collection in print. He hasn’t, not yet, though he will have soon. This pamphlet contains some competition winners and some new poems. Like the image on the cover, he is a writer of poise, elegance and panache.

Michael Mackmin’s pamphlet Twenty-Three Poems was published by HappenStance in 2006 and sold out quickly. Best known as editor of The Rialto, Michael’s own poems are quirky, different, experimental. If I hadn’t banned the word ‘risk-taking’ from my Sphinx reviewers I might mention something about risks. Instead, I’ll just suggest you read the poems.

The deliberate mistake (not) was failing to mention the titles of the second two new pamphlets (Twenty-Three Poems is long out of print). I thought this would add an air of mystery which would make you go and look for them.

No, that’s not really true. I just cocked it up again.

However, to make it easy, here’s a link to the shop details for

Matthew Stewart’s Inventing Truth

and

Peter Daniels’ Mr Luczinski Makes a Move

and

Michael Mackmin’s From there to here

I’m very pleased with these three. Good contrasting poets. Lovely looking publications. I sez it as knows.

Shortly there will be two more. One will be by Kirsten Irving and we think it will be called What to Do. The other is by Ross Kightly and it will probably be called Gnome Balcony.

But nothing is finalised, and I am going on holiday next week. In fact, with luck I will already be on holiday by the time you are reading this. When I come back, the poets, or their muses, may have changed their minds.

Watch this gnome . . .

POETS AS ATTENTION-SEEKERS

Let me have another opportunity of years before me and I will not die without being remember’d.

(Keats to Fanny Brawne, March 1820)

Let me have another opportunity of years before me and I will not die without being remember’d.

(Keats to Fanny Brawne, March 1820)

Would you have a look at these poems for me?

The first time I encountered this bold question, I was moved. Of course, I would look at the poems. I was a college teacher. Besides, didn’t I write them myself? Didn’t I understand?

Many poems, many writing groups, many poetry competitions and magazines later, I know how much I did not understand about poetry and the matter of sharing it with a public readership.

It was ‘Frank McBard’ who asked the question, and Frank who began to clarify things. Frank is just one example – because the world has many Franks, young and old, male and female.

Frank was ‘widely published’ long before we met. Later, to his credit, he became aware that his early poetry ‘successes’ were exploitative scams, but this didn’t hold him back.

He had a brief phrase of entering competitions and submitting to national and international magazines. However, he had little success and sensibly decided the returns weren’t worth the outlay. Instead, he attended evening classes (mine among them) to build confidence. To learn. And learn he did. He learned what other poets were doing. They performed in pubs; some printed and sold copies of their work in the local library.

Frank had a better idea (this was before the internet, before computers in homes and libraries). He had sets of poems reproduced in small photocopied booklets and distributed them free. He selected local issues and people – wrote verses especially for them – presented them with these poems as gifts. He demanded press releases about himself from the local paper. Soon he was widely referred to as ‘local poet Frank McBard’. This gave him a sense of satisfaction, although he aspired to more.

McBard’s title as ‘local poet’ was fully deserved. Rarely does a person labour so hard and at such personal cost simply to earn the name of ‘poet’. I have deliberately not commented on his actual poetry – because it is irrelevant. Frank’s outstanding ‘gift’ was for marketing his work. And it mattered to him – mattered enormously – that he should be recognised as a poet.

As for the famous dead poets I grew up idolising – each of them had a touch of Frank; and if they did not, then they co-habited with a Frank substitute who did the work for them. Failing all else they were ‘discovered’ posthumously by an academic McBard who rode to fame on their coat-tails (attention-seeking is not restricted to poets).

The only difference between the great poets and Frank is that superior writing can be marketed in different places. Wordsworth, Plath, Keats, Larkin, MacDiarmid – these writers slaved for their place in the literary canon. They dedicated themselves to selling (metaphorically and literally) their work, often to the detriment of much else in their lives. They combined writing talent with marketing gusto.

Would Frank have come to be locally ‘known’ without his self-marketing ability? I am certain he would not. Would he have become ‘known’ if he was a superb writer with no self-publicising determination? I fear – no. Success in the literary world can only be a reality for those who possess both talents, though not necessarily in equal proportion. Of the two, I am inclined to think the quality of determined attention-seeking the more significant.

All this makes me wonder, especially in the field of poetry, about those writers who do not attempt to publish their work. Where are they? Do they really exist? What has become of their work over the last millennium? And how many of them are women?

McBard, I am not ashamed to admit, inspired me. I saw his efforts and redoubled my own. I was richer than Frank and could buy more stamps and enter more competitions. I had the benefit of an academic education and a life-time study of literature. I knew a fair bit about poetry. And so it began. At first, my work was summarily rejected by a number of outlets. Then the acceptances started. Like Frank, I wasn’t satisfied easily.

And now – what does it all add up to? Several publications later, I am still doing it, as this blog bears witness. For nearly forty years I was the sort of person who wrote poetry in isolation. I spent a great deal of time and effort working on it – and I still think this impulse is quite separate from the instinct to publish. Why would anyone spend three weeks messing about with three words if they were not either dedicated or seriously deluded?

When, inspired by Frank’s efforts, I started the long and costly journey towards publication, I told myself it was about communicating. I told myself it was about art. But it wasn’t. It was simply about getting attention.

The highest honour for any poem is to be remembered and passed on, and for this to continue long after the name of the author is forgotten. The poet is not “an important fellow” as Stevie Smith rightly said. But the poem doesn’t get remembered unless somebody – usually the poet – gets it out there. You can’t aspire to be Anon unless somebody reads, or hears, your words.

I believe the craft – which is what I first cared about – succeeds or fails at home, where the poet is her own most demanding critic. The burning need for attention is another matter. Without it, there might be no literature. Without it, the very best of our art would (and perhaps it does) end its life in a back cupboard.