THE TWO JIMS, AND HAVING A SAY

There is Jim C, and then there is Jim . . . C.

I should have known it was a mistake to release two publications by poets with the same first name. Both Scottish. Both charming gentlemen, whom I would not wish, in any way, to offend.

However, Jim Carruth (author of Rider at the Crossing), when abbreviated becomes Jim C. And Jim Wilson (author of Will I Ever Get to Minsk?) is also . . . er . . . Jim C Wilson, and therefore I often save files of his as Jim C.

So more than once, I have sent communications about Jim C to Jim C. I mean, Jim C Wilson to Jim Carruth. And to add insult to injury, I have kept referring to Jim Carruth’s pamphlet, Rider at the Crossing as Rider at the Crossroads.

The Two Jims will have a Christmas launch at the Scottish Poetry Library on December 15th (a Saturday afternoon), and there will be several Zaleo wines and some interesting sort of tasting going on. What are the chances that I will introduce the Crossing as Crossroads, and Jim W as Jim C?

I think I ought to say that although the two Jims are Scottish and share a first name, their poems and their personalities are nothing like each other. They are men of distinction and character. Both can be funny, but in very different ways. One is West, one is East. One is Jim C and one is Jim W.

For Jim W, the collection represents many of his best poems from the last several years, and some of them recall other great personalities from Scottish poetry, people Jim met in person and remembers here: Norman MacCaig, for example. He is a rich source of anecdote and tradition, and he always has a little mischief up his capacious sleeve.

For Jim Carruth, often known for his settings in field and farm, there is not a farm in sight. But there is much else: fun, and sadness, and the feeling of a bit of a crossroads. I mean crossing. No, I do mean crossroads. You have the sense he is mid-career as a poet, looking back and forward, appraising the road already travelled, weighing up what’s on the horizon.

Paula Jennings will not be surprised at my getting things wrong. Her lovely and unusual collection, From the Body of the Green Girl, stuck in my mind as Out of the Body of the Green Girl, and as a result I kept putting that erroneous title into bits and pieces of things, including the official registration for the publication. I had to go back and register the correction. In fact, even a few moments ago, I typed them the wrong way round. But I think she has forgiven me.

I am in many ways a perfectionist, so these things are painful. How on earth did I manage to publish four poets whose first name was Martin? (If you have just sent me a submission and Martin is your name, it will not increase your chances of success.)

My level of confusion rises when exhaustion sets in, and exhaustion, like strawberry jam with additional pectin, has certainly set this week.

As I am all too fond of reminding people, it is not easy to sell poetry. Although that literary form is still somehow regarded as rare and beautiful, most possible purchasers are content to regard its beauty from a distance. So the business of negotiating, designing and printing a small pamphlet publication is the least of it. After that, there’s the flyer to design, the book to register, the online shop to populate, the poets’ bio pages to complete, the copies to post to the National Library, the Agency for the other copyright libraries, the Scottish Poetry Library, the London Poetry Library, the authors (some in packets, some in a large box), the queues in the post office, and so on. Later, it’s review copies and fulfilling the online orders, which start trickling in.

The poets themselves will shift some copies. This is good but it won’t be enough (or it rarely is). This is where the subscribers come in, the wonderful people who formally express an interest in HappenStance, in the form of a £7.50 payment. For this, they get (at the moment) an annual chapter in the story of the press. This year, the chapters vanished completely and one day these things will have a value, so if you have Chapter 6, hang onto it. They also get a pamphlet of their choice.

After that, they also get approximately two mailshots per year by post. By good old-fashioned, and now extremely expensive, stamps. The Christmas mailshot has just gone out and this year it even contained a free gift, a small and lovely little thing designed by Jenny Elliott and her secret and mischievous Shed Press. And there’s the Christmas card: 300 were handfolded last week and enveloped.

I have always been better at giving things away then making money. So it’s a particular point of pride to me to design attractive flyers for each publication, with a sample poem on the back, and these go in the mailshot too.

Of course, I hope some people will order some pamphlets as a result of all this, not least from the two Jims, and most subscribers do order at least two or three publications a year – the point at which the subscription scheme starts to cover its costs and put some cash back in the bank. And at least those who can’t afford to buy, or who don’t fancy the current bunch of poets, get the flyers and other bits and pieces.

Over the years, the subscriber list has grown steadily. Each person has a number and I am now up to 384, I think. In real terms there are just about 300 ‘live’ subscribers, several of which have become regular correspondents and friends. I’ve lost 80ish. When I say ‘live’, some of my subscribers really have died, to my particular grief. These have included, for example, Julia Casterton, Cliff Ashby, Tom Duddy and Bertie Lomas. Others simply drop the subscription, either because they don’t like most of the poetry I’m publishing (a wholly valid reason for dropping out) or because they only subscribed because they were sending in a submission of their own, and I have not come up trumps.

Most of the poets I have, in the end, published do continue to subscribe, and there are a lot of them now. I once calculated that if I had eventually published 500 poets (I am up to about 130), and if they all continued to support the press and purchased two pamphlets a year at full price, or 4 at half price, I could continue to fund six new pamphlet poets annually, and do all the other poetry stuff I do. Or almost. Now there’s a thought.

But it’s not just the business of buying things. Or selling things. It’s the issue of a proper readership. What I hope for in the HappenStance subscribers is people who actually read the poems—and preferably tell me what they think of them. Because the current list of publications reflects something in the story of literature. This list is current and contemporary. This is some of whatever poets are doing right now, at this minute, in the UK. And at some point, folk will look back on it and maybe say, ‘Now that was quite interesting.’ Or ‘Now that was bollocks’, or ‘How on earth did they underestimate that one?’

When I was at school, and even at university, I read dead poets. Nothing against dead poets. I like dead poets. But when, back in the early 1970s, I picked up a copy of a contemporary magazine – like Poetry Review for example, which I had even heard ofI didn’t like most of it. It didn’t live up to whatever it was I expected from the rare and beautiful thing poetry was supposed to be. I didn’t know where to start to find the thing I would like or did want.

Even now, it’s difficult, isn’t it? I read a ton of poetry every year. We have to heave it away from the door in buckets. And lots of it is okay. Some is good. Hardly any is rare and beautiful. Even the best poets alive write little that’s rare and beautiful.

People sometimes ask publishers why they started. In my case, there are many answers to that question. One of mine – and I don’t often admit it, because it feels risky – is that I wanted a say in what was going on. Someone always has a say in what gets to be Literature. But actually, anybody can have a say. It’s not as difficult as it’s cracked up to be.

Besides, it’s one of the best rides at the workaholics’ theme park.

 

 

 

DEATHS AND ENTRANCES

The entrance first, and it is feathered.

The entrance first, and it is feathered.

Christina Dunhill’s debut pamphlet Blackbirds is currently winging its way around the country. It is a beautiful little thing, full of myth and magic, presented in a style that’s anything but airy-fairy. Her poems have been popping up in various UK magazines for years, notably The Rialto, so her name is already a familiar one.

This poet shifts the centre constantly. You’re never quite sure where you are with her. That sounds like poetry to make you sea-sick, but that would be quite the wrong impression. What I’m trying to describe is the sense of unpredictability. Oddly different aspects of life are approached from unexpected angles. She keeps you on your toes, like a hall of mirrors. My tropes are not in the least up to the job. You need to read her and see.

But there is also a death, one that has grieved me very much. When I first started publishing, it never occurred to me that this would be part of it—that one would develop emotional attachments to poets, not just as writers but as people, as members of an extended family. Many of them are what Ruth Pitter called “blood-relations of the mind”. The risk of all such attachment is loss.

The first HappenStance poet to die was Olive Dehn. She was marvellous, an absolutely unique poet, and I loved her, but she was in her nineties and I think she was ready to go. Cliff Ashby, who died more recently, had also done his time: it was a gradual dwindling and a graceful exit. He made a terrific old man.

But the latest loss is Tom Duddy, who was not so old—not old at all—and he was not expecting to die just now. He was diagnosed with cancer just before Christmas and had treatment that was intended to prolong his life. It didn’t work.

In his last months, he was working intensely on poetry and there is a body of work—some of it quite remarkable—enough to make another book. He writes as though he is dying, as though each moment contains the secret of life. We should all write like this—if we only could, if we only could.

Tom’s first collection, in 2006, was a HappenStance pamphlet—The Small Hours—I have run out of these, so alas no use trying to order one. That pamphlet came about because Tom’s poems were featured in a Magma showcase, and I was so struck with them that I wrote to him, via Magma, and asked whether he would like to send me poems with a view to pamphlet publication. This is the only time I have ever done this.

What was so striking about Tom’s poems? It is hard to explain. What he does is never in your face or splashy. He is an understater. But he can see things in life— that mysterious process we are a part of till we stop—that I can’t pick up any other way. He is irreplaceable.

He has some paragraphs worth reading about his poetic principles on his website, and you may notice that the information there is much greater than on his poet’s page in the HappenStance home site. He was not a man who easily spoke about himself and he found the web copy difficult to assemble: he felt he should do it to help find readers for his book. Tom’s default mode was reticence.

His first full collection was published by Arlen House, a small Irish imprint. The Hiding Place (2011) included many of the poems from the original pamphlet but also some new ones, poems with mysterious and evocative power, drawn from the most ordinary situations. (I reviewed the book on GoodReads here and Matthew Stewart discusses it here.)

In Duddy’s writing, ordinary situations are drenched in mystery, with himself, most secretive of persons, at the heart of all awareness. Here, for example, is ‘Garden Party’:

At some strange distance, the good children
are playing among the metal chairs
in the patio; laugh after laugh
goes up from a group that still loiters
by the dead barbecue; old old friends
look well pleased to assemble again
on awkward ground under the sycamore;
the evening sun leaves all impressions

at the edge of consciousness; and an air
of lateness shimmies in the trees.
I almost reach across the table
towards the woman opposite,
almost speak warmly to her,
almost give myself away for once.

The mystery is flagged by the word ‘strange’ in the first line, and then everything teeters. The group ‘still loiters’ but is about to go. The barbecue is ‘dead’. The ground is ‘awkward’. The light and the atmosphere is ‘at the edge of consciousness’ where anything might be true. That ‘air / of lateness’ suggests a time out of time, a time when something other might happen. Everything is ‘almost’ – the word he repeats three times. And in that moment when he almost gives himself away (but doesn’t), he gives himself away.

One of the poems from this book, ‘The Touch‘, was included in The Forward Book of Poetry, 2011 and you can hear him reading the poem here.

Tom Duddy is gone from the earth. He is alive in that poem and many others. He could, and can, see things I can’t see, which is why I find his poems indispensable. There will be another book, though not yet. Please, please look out for it, and in the meantime, read what is already in print.