SCHOOL KILLS POETRY

I can’t abide Visiting Hour by Norman McCaig. Marking school work has killed that poem for me. Too many nostrils bobbing down too many corridors in too many essays.

I can’t stand Visiting Hour by Norman MacCaig. Marking school work has killed it for me. Too many nostrils bobbing down too many corridors in too many MacCaiging essays.

However, Visiting Hour wasn’t dead when I was at school. It happened later, when I grew up and somehow turned into a teacher. I was appalled by the way schools in Scotland nurtured an obsession with certain texts. They taught the same poems, two or three of them, year in, year out. How could they bear it?

I think it’s because most school teachers don’t actually like poetry. But I don’t think this bizarre obsession with particular texts totally exterminates the Life of Po. Instead, it does something worse. It creates a disproportionate love for a particular piece, to the exclusion of all else. School leavers re-sitting exams in my evening class sometimes protest, ‘But I LOVE Visiting Hour. Please can I just write about it again?’ Arrgggh. I’m a teacher. Get me out of here.

Why do they love it? Perhaps because it’s the only poem they’ve ever studied and survived. The experience doesn’t seem to make them want to read any more poems, not even by Norman MacCaig.

I’ve just fished out the book we used for O level when I was at school in Cheshire forty-three years ago. It’s small and blue and the title is Ten Twentieth-century Poets, edited with notes by Maurice Wollman, first published in 1957. There’s a sticky label at the front: Wilmslow County Grammar School for Girls, and the book was once used, in turn, by Susan Heald (5B), Rosemary Green (4X), Lindsay Brown (4E) and Sheila Foster (6”). At the end of the year we were allowed to buy a copy if we wanted to, and I did.

The book contains poems by Auden, Betjeman, De la Mare, Eliot, Yeats, Andrew Young, Edward Thomas, Edwin Muir, Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. We studied five of these – the last five in the list, the ones to whom I’ve given first names. I read some of the rest as well, including ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (a boy I had a crush on told me it was good).

I thought all poets were dead men. I was at an all-girls school studying poetry by all men.

They weren’t all quite dead. Most were: Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Edwin Muir had been gone for ages. Frost was more recently defunct. I would have been astonished to know that Andrew Young was still alive. . . .

We didn’t obsess over one text. We read a clutch of poems by each of our five. We talked about some of them more than others, liked some of them more than others, and learned some of them off by heart, ready for the exams. We learned poems, and French irregular verbs, on the bus. I still have ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ (Frost), by heart, and sections of the other poems – Edward Thomas, for example, in Out in the Dark:

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

I don’t believe we analysed poems to death. Or if we did, I have no memory of it. Only the poems.

I probably do love them more than I should, like Herman’s Hermits and Elvis Presley’s ‘Wooden Heart’. They undoubtedly underpinned my sense of what poetry is, which is why, when I began to write myself, free verse wasn’t my first choice.

I think our class teacher liked poems. I think the girls in my class quite liked poems too. But I don’t know that. Perhaps while I was sitting there liking these words and phrases, they were being slowly asphyxiated for other people in the same classroom. Susan Heald, Rosemary Green, Lindsay Brown, Sheila Foster – where are you? What have you got to say about this?

Special offer: If you’re reading this, and you’re still at school (which doesn’t seem likely, but it’s worth a try), I’ll send you some free poetry (which you may or may not like). It won’t include a copy of Visiting Hour. Just email your address to nell@happenstancepress.com

HOW TO WIN A POETRY COMPETITION

I once carried out a lengthy analysis of winning entries in order to pin down the secret.

The exercise failed. All I managed to do was come up with tenuous links between winning poems, and some clear ideas about what made poets lose.

Yesterday I was at the final stage of judging the William Soutar Writing Prize, a free-to-enter Perth-based poetry competition which attracted just under two hundred entries last month. That’s a relatively small number compared to the biggies, which attract thousands and which you have to pay to enter. But at least it meant I could read all the poems.

It didn’t mean it was easy to pick the winners. My short list of 13 already excluded a couple of poems I liked a lot. It went down to 12 when I realised one exceeded the required length. (In all competitions, a surprising number put themselves out of the running by breaking the rules.)

Tim Love says “Winning competitions can be like applying for a job. The first stage is more to do with avoiding errors in order to get in the short-list. The second stage is where depth is revealed.”

I think he’s right. There were poems in my short list that would have made it to the long list of one of the major competitions. They were sound, well-made, interesting pieces of writing. With depth.

In the pile I put to one side, the non-winners, there were some fabulous lines and fragments. But in the end it’s the whole poem or nothing in a competition.

There were also the non-starters. These tend to be characterised by being presented in a centred format, often with an odd or over-large typeface, faulty punctuation — that kind of thing. It is not true (contrary to popular belief) that metre and rhyme make a poem less likely to win. But it is easier to spot weakness in formal construction, I think, than in the looser array of free verse (I was about to write ‘free dress’ — but in fact, this is partly it — how the poem is dressed.)

Back to the winners. This is the point where I became a committee of myselves. First I typed them all out again, in the same font so I wasn’t biassed by layout and typeface. Then I read them aloud. A poem is not just what it looks like and what it means: it’s how it feels in the mouth and the ear too. At least, that’s true in my book.

I had to do a bit of scouting about on the web, too, to check some background detail. When poems create a context for themselves, in terms of topical or historical reference, it’s good to check it out. Actually, I like it when the poem operates in a larger frame, when it sends its reader on a treasure hunt.

And then I sat down again with my 12 poems, all carefully typed out in Calibri. At this point, I could make a strong case for all the final contenders, and especially for particular features of each one.

But one has to decide. And that’s like the whole business of poetry publishing. In the final stages, subjective personal preference comes in. It is not enough to admire a poem. Which one do you want to learn by heart? Which do you desperately want to show your friends?

And so I did decide. But I’m not saying more about that here. It will be on the AK Bell Library website and the William Soutar website later this month . . . with the prizes awarded at Perth Writers’ Day on March 26th.

Meanwhile, for me it’s back to the three pamphlets in hand: Peter Daniels, Matthew Stewart and Michael Mackmin, winners one and all. Oh, and check out Graham Austin’s opportunity on the HappenStance competitions page. T S Eliot afficionados might like to take a crack at this.

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.

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. Cliff Forshaw's Tiger

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 . . .

WHAT’S WRONG WITH POETRY REVIEWS IS . . .

. . . evidently a LOT. So far as we know, no-one has yet selected “because of the wonderful reviews” as their top reason for purchasing a poetry magazine.

Some poetry magazines can, and do, easily solve this problem by not having any reviews at all. Others have minuscule two-liners. But still there’s the issue that too many of the reviews so often deplored are written by men. Those of you following the current Magma thread “Are literary publications biased against women?” will know all about this.

Knowing all about this, poets frequently complain that their books don’t get reviews, even by men. Or that the single review they got was horribly biassed or badly written.

Badly written? Obviously this website seeks to apply a corrective by offering three well-written reviews of each poetry pamphlet we see. Many Sphinx reviewers are women, although I am nervous about counting the precise gender distribution.

But whatever their distribution gender-wise, Sphinx reviewers are required not to sound authoritative. They give a personal response, in an accessible style. They are, like the wedding guest in The Ancient Mariner, “one of three”.

But one of three or not, a still harder task falls on their shoulders, and it’s all my fault. I’m concerned about the degree to which the language of blurb and cliché is entering reviews, the last place on earth where these manifestations should find a home. So I have a list of proscribed phrases, and it keeps getting longer.

It keeps getting longer because editors are ornery and unreasonable people, and I am one of them. And sometimes my reviewers, quite naturally, react edgily (“edgy” is officially out of bounds but I can break my own rules). George Simmers, editor of Snakeskin, and occasional Sphinx reviewer, fell upon my latest guidelines and instantly rustled up a review, in verse form, using almost all the phrases he will never use in a Sphinx review. He also makes use of the word “beige”, the colour voted most unpopular in the United Kingdom in 2002. You can read it in his blog here.

A new set of reviews will be on the Sphinx part of the website imminently, as well as an interview with two of the redoubtable guys (I’m trying to avoid the word “men” but they are) behind Pighog Press.

(If you happen to be a man, and read this, please don’t worry about your gender. In the end, the balance, in poetry reviews as well as much else, will probably adjust dramatically in favour of the gentle sex and then just a little positive discrimination will get you back on your feet in no time.)

ps Here is my current ‘to be avoided’ list:

• début collection

• eagerly awaited (by whom???)

• any description of one poet in terms of another by making up an adjective from that poet’s name eg Larkinesque & Eliotian

• the new Peter Reading (or any other poet’s name)

• shows promise (patronising with faint praise)

• a new voice

• one to watch

• upcoming poet (or worse – ‘up and coming’)

• literary terms that general readers struggle with (e.g parataxis, synecdoche, metonymy)

• at the height of his/her powers

• emerging poet

• important poet

• sui generis

• risk-taking, taking risks (unless you’re going to be very precise about what you see as risky or have tongue firmly in cheek)

• beware of ‘edgy’ – which is starting to become the new ‘risk-taking’ – and ‘spiritual’

• metaphorical domain

• exciting new talent

• demotic idiom

• and please no ‘epiphanies’

SPHINX HIGH STRIPE AWARD ANNOUNCED

The much coveted Sphinx High Stripe Award is announced annually. At least it will be. This is the inaugural announcement.

The much coveted Sphinx High Stripe Award is announced annually. This is the inaugural announcement.

All poetry pamphlets submitted (in triplicate) for review in the Sphinx area of this website receive three written responses from reviewers. Each reviewer is also asked to give a stripe rating based on 4 criteria, as follows:

Production quality (paper, covers, ‘feel’ and design of publication)
Quality of the poetry.
Coherence/ character/ identity (whatever!) of collection as a whole. It could have coherence in terms of deliberate fragmentation, if that was a consistent central idea.
Warmth of recommendation to other readers.

The three reviews are then edited into one document, with the amalgamated stripe rating published on the website in the form of a Sphinx logo bearing the appropriate number of stripes. Any publication which gets 7 or over has had a warm response.

Since this is the inaugural High Stripe Announcement, the selection has been based on all pamphlets reviewed since the system was introduced. In that time, only three pamphlets have received nine-stripe awards and therefore they are the winners in this unfunded and under-publicised competition.

They are . . . (drum roll). . .

The Announced, Ruth Valentine, Ellipsis 1/ Sylph Editions 2009 (sold out and therefore now a collector’s item)

No Panic Here, Mark Halliday, HappenStance 2009

Shadow, Alison Brackenbury, HappenStance, 2009

The careful reader will note that all three were published in 2009. No nine-stripers in 2010, then? Not yet. We are still in the process of reviewing last year’s publications. However, the following were close contenders with 8.5 stripes also in 2008/9:

Emblems, Wayne Burrows, Shoestring Press, 2009

Hem and Heid, James Robertson, Kettillonia, 2009

Amicable Numbers, Mike Barlow, Templar Poetry, 2008

Party Piece, Anna Woodford, Smith/Doorstop Books, 2009

Treasure Ground, Clare Best, HappenStance, 2009

I hope it doesn’t look like corruption in the ranks that two of the nine-stripers are HappenStance publications. One of these two, Mark Halliday’s No Panic Here, received a fairly swingeing review in issue 1 of New Walk, so it would suggest that readers either love or loathe the publication (but at least that’s interesting). I’m also alarmed to find I have managed never to notice we reviewed Anna Woodford’s Party Piece twice, so that was six readers as well as further proof that I’m losing my marbles, if I ever had any. I have no idea how that happened, although I do know I was one copy short at one point and bought another, which suggests I had five (but not six). Duh. Lovely wee pamphlet, anyway.

Congratulations to Ruth, Mark and Alison, winners. Congratulations to Mike, James, Wayne, Clare and Anna, close contenders. I may yet have some Sphinx t-shirts printed so that winners will be able to remark at poetry gatherings and festivals — ‘Been there, got the t-shirt’. If I were rich, I would send you all a sack of money.

At the moment I will put the Sphinx high-striper accolade at the top of all reviews of publications receiving 8.5 or above, so if poets or publishers want to link from their website to that page, it might boost morale and hopefully attract readers.

(thanks to Ross Kightly, who helped check the stripes).

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.

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.

SUBSCRIBER ALERT!

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.

ONLY FIVE IN SCOTLAND

There are only five subscribers to Ambit in Scotland. Perhaps all five were lurking in the audience at the celebration of the 200th issue at the CCA Writers’ Centre in Glasgow last Thursday. Or perhaps not. But I have a plan to boost their number . . .

The five subscribers may be far away in the Borders or living in crofts on islands. However, Scottish artist Ron Sandford was there last Thursday (he lives in one of the Shetland Isles). He’s been doing remarkable pen portraits of contributors to the magazine for decades.

The magazine has been outstanding for its art work all along. It has featured Posy Simmonds, David Hockney and Eduardo Palaozzi, to name (as they say) but a few. Martin Bax, editor, has a talent for tracking down talented people and charming them into the pages. It’s a long time since 1959, which is when he started all this. At one time, Carol Ann Duffy was poetry editor.

I started subscribing (and submitting) in the early 1990s. I found Ambit would take poems other editors didn’t reach (or the other way around). Some of my unsuitables had their first airing in Ambit. Now I’m one of its stable of reviewers, whinnying in every issue about something or other (better than whining).

Ambit is, like all the other literary magazines, a labour of love. It lost its Arts Council Grant last year but it’s still going, buoyed up by dedicated volunteer workers, subscriptions and direct sales — goodness knows how. It must cost a small fortune to print. It features art work, prose fiction and poetry. All sorts. The work’s nicely presented with plenty of space on the page and issued quarterly, so it draws on a lot of material over the year.

The editor gets shedsful of poetry. (No surprise there.) Not so much prose fiction. Short story writers and novelists with homeless chapters, please note. Glasgow architect Douglas Thompson had chapters of his extraordinary futuristic novel Sylvow in Ambit before it found a publisher.

Perhaps we’re too poor to subscribe in Scotland? The annual fee is £28.00. (But Poetry Review, which does have an Arts Council Grant still, but doesn’t have stories and pictures, is £30.00. “And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”)

Since Borders folded in 2009, there isn’t a bookshop in Scotland selling Ambit. Apparently, every Borders in London used to shift 200 copies per issue. In Scotland too, sales were considerable. It’s not the sort of gap subscriptions are likely to bridge. Worth sending to. Worth subscribing to — at least for a year or so.

I’m doing my bit to boost Ambit subscriptions in Scotland. If you live or work here, and you’re reading this, email me (nell@happenstancepress.com) with up to 150 words about yourself and why you’d like a gift subscription. You don’t have to apply as an individual. I’m particularly interested in members of reading or writing groups, who might read and pass round a copy.

I’m giving away three, which would increase the subscriber base in Scotland by 60% overnight.

Spread the word.

PENNED

I have prodded it, poked it, stuck in iambics,

fired it, wired it, thought of alembics,

sent it to pundits,

shot it down, stunned it,

cursed it, rehearsed it (some were offended),

cut it up, pruned it, had it extended.

Time passed, aghast.

Now my final gambit:

send it to Ambit.

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF BOOKS

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!

ROYAL MAIL GIVES AWAY FREE STAMPS!

The snow had all sorts of effects here in Scotland (another three inches busy glittering this morning). It closed schools and colleges for several days. It led to “accidents on untreated roads”. It led to more “untreated roads”. In fact, the road where we live has not yet had a treat.

However, there were some beneficial effects, too. Among these was the free stamps.

Okay, it isn’t quite as generous as I make it sound. However, it is a fact that during the snow in December, when postal deliveries were delayed or prevented, many letters, parcels (and Christmas cards) arrived un-franked. (Just occasionally, a dedicated sorting office employee would strike through the stamp in vicious biro).

My mother claims she had one whole delivery of un-franked Christmas cards in Sussex.

I spend a huge amount annually on postage. It used to be about a thousand quid. Now it’s nearly two. I live in fear of under-stamping, so quite often I significantly over-stamp. If I post out between one and three pamphlets, it often falls inside the weight category 101–250g, which is 81p second class.

There are no 81p stamps any more. There used to be. I bought the last 100 from our local post office last August.

However, a large-letter second is 51p, and a second-class ordinary size stamp is 32p and I have a lot of those. So often I put 51+32, resulting in 83p — two pence over-stamped. Hell, what’s two pence between close associates?

For its part, the Royal Mail delivers a number of parcels and packets un-franked, so that I can use the stamps again.

Yesterday, for the first time in ages, a whole delivery of mail arrived with ALL THE STAMPS FRANKED! Oh, wait a minute though — there was one second-class stamp in pristine condition — the frank had just missed it. I cut it off the envelope and added it to my collection.

Then, out of curiosity, I counted how much I had amassed, in usable stamps, since November.

There were lots of the little gems in my plastic bag: mostly ordinary first and seconds, but a good number of large-letters seconds too, as well as an assortment of others. They amounted to a total of £17.71.

But wait — last week I re-used all the un-franked, reusable packets I’d collected. One of them was stamped (un-franked) with four x £1.00 stamps plus 4 x 41p. Wahey! They were probably worth about another tenner.

£27.71, then. Reduce, re-use, re-cycle.

One should not look a gift stamp in the mouth.