David Ford – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

Party preliminaries

It’s complicated. In 2005 I bought ten ISB numbers. To my surprise I’d used them all up within two years and I bought another hundred.

Three years later I’m over half way through that hundred. The idea at the birthday party, Saturday June 12th, is to do a kind of ‘This is your life’, recalling all that’s been and indicating a bit of what’s to come. But there’s a lot of it.

It’s complicated. In 2005 I bought ten ISB numbers. To my surprise I’d used them all up within two years and I bought another hundred.

I think about twenty of the poets should be there, all reading little bits or in one case quite a lot. Some is happy, some is sad, some is performancey, some is music, some is cake. It will be grrrrrrrreat.

In preparation I am making lists and lists of lists. Up to now I have been making electronic lists upstairs, and sending out more invitations to people I think I might have forgotten or whose reply I think I have managed to lose. Soon I am going downstairs to make more lists on pieces of normal paper.

Meanwhile, the Ruth Pitter Selected came home this week and so did David Ford’s Punch. The former is cheering and consolatory: Pitter has that effect. She is a magical poet. Punch, on the other hand, is one of the darkest collections I have done. Many of the poems have stunning impact: they are also often sinister and somewhat scary. Neither David nor Ruth can be at the party (though for somewhat different reasons) but Gina Wilson and Gill Andrews (the next two pamphlets) should be there.

Also expecting a whean of others – a plethora of poets including, Andrew Philip, Rob A Mackenzie, Clare Best, Jeremy Page, Alison Brackenbury, Janet Loverseed, D A Prince, Sally Festing, Jon Stone, Robin Vaughan-Williams, Ross Kightly, Paula Jennings, Jennifer Copley, Stewart Conn, Christine de Luca, Margaret Christie — and MORE! Honestly this is THE poetry event of the year.

Do join us, (Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh, 3.00 for 3.30) but let me know because numbers are swelling (and swell). nell@happenstancepress.com

: Ruth Pitter cover

Dark Wood goes out

This week lots of Jeremy Page chapbooks went in the post to those and such as those — a flurry of orders through the Zen shop.

: Jeremy Page’s pamphlet

At the same time, David Ford’s Punch went off to Dolphin Press and so did Ruth Pitter’s Selected. I’ve been busy with all the associated bits and pieces: flyers for all, updating the ‘in print’ list, doing the poet bios for the website, printing flyers, attacking the sticky willie in the garden . . . Oh no, the last of these wasn’t exactly at the same time.It’s just the fact that the sticky willie gets everywhere.

So far (apart from Ruth Pitter who, though with us on paper, is absent in body) it has been a very male year. Four guys. I’m now working with two women: Gina Wilson and Gill Andrews. Very very different from each other. Also very different from anything else I’ve published.

I’m not sure these can be ready for the HappenStance Birthday Party on June 12th (in the Scottish Poetry Library at 3.00 ish), but we’ll see. I hope their authors will be there and reading a poem or two, as will lots of other HappenStance authors and subscribers. My mother and sister are coming from Sussex. There will be a cake made by my daughter. There will be music (son-in-law). Do put the date in your diary. It’s an open event but let me know if you’d like to come (nell@happenstancepress.com) because the library is not gigantic and the cake might not be big enough.

It was suddenly Summer here in Scotland yesterday. The old lady in the queue in the post office in front of me had to sit down. People were flapping leaflets in front of their faces to keep cool. Matt got the fan down from the spare bedroom and sat in front of it. Some of the new bedding plants went limp and keeled over. The tiny crab apple ‘tree’ (really a sprig) that I got for a fiver from Aldi burst into blossom.

This morning I woke to the sound of heavy rain. Back to normal.

PS Here’s an interesting review of Robin Vaughan-Williams’ The Manager by Ben Wilkinson

Right as rain

All the ‘spare’ time in the last ten days has been spent looking for used cars with Gillian (artist daughter). She passed her test (first time, unlike her mother) about two weeks ago and needs to have a vehicle to drive. ‘Bean cans on wheels’ my mechanic partner calls them. He hates cars . . . However, we finally found one yesterday: a pale blue Getz. Let’s getz a Getz. Here it is, or similar.

: Gillian’s car

It reminded me of the first car I and my then husband bought together, which was a little red Fiat (we didn’t know about Fiats then) with a sunshine roof. The salesman had huge ears which practically flapped while he was talking.

We took the car out to the Derbyshire hills the first weekend after the purchase, excited to get away on our own for a country walk. The brakes failed on the top of a hill. Completely. We got home on handbrake and gears — jist and nae mair, as they say in Scotland. I remember confronting the flapping-eared salesman in a state of fury, shouting We could have been killed! In which case the world would have been saved from this blog entry. But we weren’t, and I hope Gillian and Jamie won’t be either, even though I’ve lain awake all week visualising them in endless car crashes.

So the poetry, to stay in metaphor, has taken a bit of a back seat, though a lot of things are about to happen. The Ruth Pitter Selected has been to Mark Pitter, Ruth’s nephew and copyright holder, for approval and he likes what I’ve done — so that’s a relief. I need to send a copy with the cover to (artist and poet) Alan Dixon, who has done the woodcut on the cover for his approval now (see image on left).

: The Traveller

Alan did Persephone in Hades as well. I love his woodcuts. In fact, I have many more of them which don’t fit onto pamphlet covers but which strike me as gorgeous. We used one on the Conversation with Ruth Pitter as well — not the one originally intended but a splendid cat walking along a wall. Alan loves cats.

I should be talking to David Ford later this morning and hopefully finalising most of the details of his pamphlet, Punch. Jeremy Page’s In and Out of the Dark Wood may be back from the printer by the end of this week. We’ll see.

The Po-Rating Standardisation Exercise is nearly complete. I sent the same pamphlet to 34 reviewers to rate, using the four criteria we’ve had in place since the tripartite review system went online. The results are very interesting. It doesn’t surprise me that the judgement on the poetry varies dramatically (a 4 being the lowest and a 10 the highest). However, it does surprise me that the variation on production quality is almost as wide (lowest 5, highest 10). I’m still thinking about how to put the feedback on this together.

Meanwhile, the latest issue of The Bow-Wow Shop is out. I particularly liked the bit on How Editors Choose. The return from Peter and Ann Sansom is cheering. The lack of return from some editors provokes many an evil chuckle. The B-W Shop has a great logo. I find the fully-justified white on black text extremely hard going though (I cut and paste into Word, change the justification and THEN read it) but at least the web makes that possible. (And the reviews are a long, long column, entailing endless scrolling and encouraging the supposition that nobody reads reviews anyway). And the left-hand toolbar lists the contents of issue 5 immediately on top of issue 4, which is confusing at best. Ezines are still thinking about themselves. Ease of reading on screen is paramount and rarely achieved. So much easier to work out how to accomplish this on paper, because of the centuries of forerunners.

Allegedly, an affiliation has been agreed between B-W Shop and P N Review, two very different publications but with some of the same writers. I think of P N Review, which I have had cause to admire in many ways over the years (not least for surviving and retaining its own character), as a solidly male magazine. Lots of lengthy male reflections in a solidly male prose style. Thankfully, there are bits in this Bow-Wow by interesting women like Nancy Campbell, reporting on her experience as writer in residence in Upernavik Museum, Greenland. I don’t mean to go ON about the male/female balance. It’s just a reminder that there are some women writing excellent prose. Haul more of them in!

Peter Daniels in the Bow-Wow also reviews some HappenStance publications appreciatively, which is nice and the appreciation is appreciated. He says HappenStance has style and a sense of purpose. Health warning: you have to scroll a long way down a fully-justified reviews column to find his comments on Paula Jennings (Out of the Body of the Green Girl), Clare Best (Treasure Ground) and Jon Stone (Scarecrows): look for the bit titled The Pamphleteers March On. And yes, there does seem to be a lot of fuss about pamphlets lately. It is still hard to sell 150 copies of anything — believe me.

Now, I must go make another pamphlet. And maybe some breakfast with purpose and style.

: Alan Dixon. Isn’t this marvellous?

In and Out of the Dark Mud Bath

Sphinx 12 has gone out in all its waspy colours to those and such as those. As usual, the posting process took longer than I could possibly have believed, but it is done.

So it’s back to the poetry pamphlets: Jeremy Page’s In and Out of the Dark Wood is just about done. The second draft went in the post to him yesterday. David Ford’s Punch is sitting in front of me. These two should be printed in May.

Sphinx 12 has gone out in all its waspy colours to those and such as those. As usual, the posting process took longer than I could possibly have believed, but it is done.

Meanwhile, I have been working on a Selected Ruth Pitter for some time and must get back to that because it will be a lovely thing to have out. It will include a small number of unpublished poems, which may create a little additional interest — that will be thanks to Thomas McKean who copied many poems out of Ruth’s notebooks during his visits to her home. It has been very interesting to see the steady trickle of orders coming in for the Conversation with RP — one never knows how the word gets round but round it does get. And readers have liked it very much, which is gratifying (though not surprising).

Another diversion has been a family publication titled Night Brings Home The Crowes, which is my mother’s memoir about her grandmother’s family, the Crowes, of which there were eleven children — twelve if you count the one who died as a baby. She has been writing up the anecdotes and collecting information about them for at least ten years. Finally, it is all coming together as a pamphlet publication (Sally Evans led the way) but even the family tree, on which much work has already been done, is more complicated than I could have thought. I am not a genealogist but have begun to look at how this family research stuff works. I keep thinking about those seven women in Africa, to whom we are all originally (allegedly) related . . .

And all the while the garden is unfolding into Spring.

: Thinking about mud baths . . .

Soon the new fence will have things growing up it again. The honeysuckle is recovering. The old clematis has brave little shoots here and there: I am keeping an eye on them. This morning we have rain, but this garden needs the rain so I’m glad of it. I bought a little crab apple tree in Aldi for a fiver, because I’ve always wanted one. It is sitting in a bucket, waiting for me to dig a deep hole, which may prove difficult. We’ll see. I remember the stones just under the top soil the last time. Digging to Australia in this garden would not be an easy task.

One of our games in the summer when we were children was ‘mud baths’. This entailed water (water being the underlying necessity of many serious games) and piles of newly dug (stoneless) earth. First you dig a deep hole, which you half fill with water. Then you put some of the nice loose earth back into the hole, mix the earth and water carefully to the right consistency, spread it over your legs, from foot to thigh and sit in the sun for some time, processing the sensation of mud caking your skin. You watch it start to dry and crack (because your days are endless and you have acres of time to spend on nothing else than this). Finally your sibling, who is playing the role of Mud-bath Attendant, gets the watering can and rinses the mud away. You feel renewed. You feel you could write the reviews that are waiting for your attention. Oops, sudden time jump there . . .