March 2016: Sometimes Poetry Makes a Few Things Happen

March Acquisitions...

The title of this blog post owes a debt to Auden’s well known line, ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ because ironically, a few things have happened recently due to poetry. At the end of February I read at and attended a refugee benefit hosted by Lydia Towsey that featured some great poets. The event also supported the Over Land Over Sea anthology, a book which I’ve mentioned in an earlier post. The book’s raised thousands of pounds for groups like Médecins Sans Frontières and Leicester City of Sanctuary. This is through sales of a poetry anthology. Sometimes poetry does make things happen.

March has been fairly busy and now sees me with a new batch of reading material; some of which has been gratefully received as gifts, winnings and even purchased. This included a couple of pamphlets I won from the Poetry Business in a most random comp on email. I also have/had a cold and a chest infection (nothing changes there) so that’s slowed me down a bit, but I’ve also been organising the next batch of reviews for Under the Radar. I am very pleased to say that’s been sorted. For both the current issue and the next, the vast majority of reviewers  are female, so I’d like to think we’re redressing the balance in our own way. As ever I’ve tried really hard to ensure that a fair spread of books and pamphlets are getting reviewed, but we have more books coming in than reviewers and pages to print on. It’s good at least that there’s a lot of enthusiasm on all sides.

March is always about States of Independence. This was held on a couple of Saturdays ago at De Montfort University and there was the usual merry mix of stalls, publishers and free events and readings. The small presses were well and truly celebrated, but sometimes I think it’s the small presses that hold things up for the bigger ones. This is where you find the kind of people who are interested and open minded about books and publishing and where you can make discoveries. I read at two events, the Over Land Over Sea one and the Alan Sillitoe Anthology, More Raw Material, reading with Martin Figura. Can I say to begin with that Martin Figura is bloody amazing. I’ve written about his show Whistle before. He was reading from his latest collection Dr. Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine which, and I am quoting here from the Cinnamon Press website, ‘blurs the edges of personal and collective memory to explore family, relationships and belonging against a social, historical and political backdrop.’ That says it better than I could. I have a cold y'know.  Though I will add to that and say there was a hanging-on-to-every-word thing going on for me when Martin read. We’ve ordered a copy. The event was hosted by the anthology’s tireless editors Neil Fullwood and David Sillitoe, who read from some of Alan Silitoe’s work as well. I went to Deborah Tyler-Bennett’s and Andy Green’s readings first thing too. Mr. Commonplace (aka Jonathan Taylor) got shortlisted for the East Midlands Book of the Year Award panel for Melissa.

I spent a lot of time at the panels and readings in fact, and probably not enough time downstairs perusing the books, although I made a few purchases from Charles Boyle at CB Editions. They’re becoming one of my favourite presses. Bob Richardson was also there selling his fantastically, super-reasonably priced Poem Flyers at 20p each! He’s made a couple of flyers out poems by me. Other presses and magazines like Nine Arches Press, Five Leaves, Flarestack, Shearsman, Smith Doorstop, Soundswrite, Interpreter’s House, Shoestring, Leafe Press, Longbarrow  - I could go on, but I  can’t cover everything because I have a cold. 

 

At States...Photo by Ambrose Musiyiwa

March also featured a couple of launches. Firstly there was Sarah Leavesley’s prize winning pamphlet Lampshades and Glass Rivers for the Bill Overton Memorial Award at Loughborough Uni. Added bonus of being 5 mins walk away for me, a rare thing. Also Cliff Yates’ launched Jam at Cafe Wired in Nottingham and one of the hosts Becky Cullen sang a bit which is always a highlight. In January she got everyone to sing David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance,’ although I probably had a cold at the time and didn’t sing much. 

Cliff Yates

As for my writing...well I’ve come out of hibernation a bit and actually sent off a few poems, first batch since October. Now the waiting game begins. Also - and I’ll say more next month - I am putting together a new manuscript for a pamphlet which is scheduled for later on in the year. I haven’t done this seriously since 2011/’12. It’s VERY HARD. Maybe it’s even harder than putting together a full-length manuscript because you have to be very picky. There was me thinking it would arrange itself, NO CHANCE. I’ll probably be writing a blog post about that sooner or later, you lucky people. 

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Before I go off in search of antibiotics, I'd like to mention Kim Moore's blog as she wrote an entry which really resonated with me, the title of which was the (previosuly mentioned) Auden line: 'Poetry makes nothing happen.' There's a really intriguing poem by Kim at the end which spells out all the things that poetry does or allows you to do, by saying, ironically, that it doesn't. I'll leave you to ponder. See you soon.

The Great Lost Blog Entry

It's November. Haven't updated the blog since September and we've gone from summer to autumn without so much as a squeak. Right now I'm really busy so I thought this was a perfect time to ignore my tasks and displace my energies into the blog. Back in September I wrote the following post and for whatever reason forgot to post it. Well here it is:

Does A Poem Have to Know Where It’s Going?

One of the phrases I hear a lot at readings is ‘I don’t know what this poem is about’ or ‘I’m not sure why I wrote it.’ There is probably no point ever writing a poem maybe, but perhaps what the speaker intends to say is that the poem came out of nowhere. Whenever I wonder where poems come from, I imagine a big black forest somewhere, with poems climbing trees and digging holes like animals. I would argue that many contemporary poems try and imitate the dream, whereas older, traditional ones, many of which were and still are studied at school are the ones which are more immediate on the whole. They explain themselves, there’s more rhetoric, they make statements. I suppose in terms of new poems we’re talking Imagiste onwards, which can be dated around 1912, (Bob Richardson taught me everything about the Imagistes at the last Leicester Shindig, there were even visual aids involved). Virginia Woolf would say the First World War changed everything, poems stopped making sense because for many people the world did. It became gradually harder for poets to use such emotive, abstract sentiments after the Somme and Paschendale. Woolf famously uses this example in 'A Room of One’s Own' to illustrate the kind of poetry which she says would never be written after 1918:

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;

My heart is like an apple-tree

Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;

However, I would say that for most people who don’t write poetry this would be their idea of a poem: lyric, beauty, sentiment. It’s these new-fangled poets who don’t write like this. ‘All those similies; all that juicy fruit and halcyon sea, eeesh’ says contemporary poet. This poem knows where it’s going, people on the whole (let’s argue this one if you like) don’t write like this anymore.

‘Ok’, says the poet, ‘poems have to make sense in terms of dream logic, off to my notebook I go.’ My own view is that all poetry from different time periods and cultures must be enjoyed. For this experiment, however, the poet wants to be contemporary. To test this I have opened a copy of the latest Rialto – the closest thing next to me at the desk – randomly. Below are the opening lines to a poem, ‘The Last’ by Robin Houghton:

They’ve been coming since posters were invented:
sometimes in dreams, to the tipping of cowboy hats

Ok, so who are they, they sound a bit ominous, not friendly, there are cowboy hats involved, what if they have guns? Later on the poet describes: ‘And still they would come, insistent. / They left my body as they found it…’ To me that’s chilling, but I’m still none the wiser as to who they are but they are interesting. On closer reading maybe they’re not so bad, I’m thinking about them as heroic figures perhaps. The poem mentions ‘they’ are dressed in Liverpool shirts and the person in the poem wrote about them in ‘diaries’. Maybe they’re people he/she wanted to be or dreamt of being when young? If he/she had known when the ‘last’ of them had arrived they would have ‘thrown a party.’ Sounds sad, or a tribute to something lost.

Having thought about the poem I’m reading it again and enjoying it and unpeeling it with interest. I plucked that poem from the air of course. One poem isn’t enough perhaps, but this is a blog post not the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures. You never know where you are going, you just go with the poet. You have to trust.