January 2018 - Time Flies/Time Flown

My retro clock...tonight we're gonna party like it's 1981

Maybe I'm writing this post because it's January and I should, but one thing's for certain - I'm not going to yammer on about resolutions. It's January the 17th and we're all beyond that now. However, I did see a post by Josephine Corcoran where she mentioned something about trying to keep up to date with blogging at least once a week. It's a lovely idea, but not sure I can keep up. I can't even keep up with ruddy Twitter - and that's only 140 characters. Even Donnie Trump manages that (sadly). This time last year I put up a vigorous post about sending out regularly and such like...but didn't really send out very much. Because guess what - you can't force it if you know you're not ready. I sent out the grand total of five or six times last year. At one point a few years ago I was sending out six before breakfast or something.

Instead, let me talk about what I'm learning at the moment as opposed to what I'm achieving. I'm teaching Creative Writing at DMU and now for a term at Warwick University. Teaching also means learning. I have been busy making lots of new resources and reading work by poets I'm less familiar with, as well as re-reading old favourites. My word, I ended up falling in love with 'Avenue A' and 'Now That I am in Madrid' and I Can Think' by Frank O'Hara last Sunday. I digress. Part of the job involved sitting in on  one of David Morley's seminars in December to meet the new students. I LOVED it. I felt like I wanted to read and write and read and write and then remembered I was meant to be the teacher. Not a bad thing though. Everyone has their words of wisdom of course, but here's another newsflash - as a poet I don't think you should take yourself seriously, but be overtaken by writing.There is nothing like getting caught up in the jolly artwork stage of writing a poem. I come across lots of learners with enthusiasm and this fires me as well.  This is a good thing as there have been times last year when poetry and I were not the honeymooners we used to be. Now we're holding hands again. Relief.

Wednesday is my free day and it's reading and writing day - hurrah! I work part-time but once you factor the little things like life, family, colds, lack of sleep, Lego, exercise classes (I can do a mean plank I'll have you know) and so on it doesn't leave much time for concentrated writing time. Wednesdays are a good start.

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Nine Arches Press and I have a long history of working and publishing together. One enchanted evening eight years ago this very month, I met them for the first time. I am really proud of Jane Commane's achievements with the press and was really happy when Jacqueline Saphra's Nine Arches collection 'All My Mad Mothers was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. When you have seen someone work their ruddy socks off over eight years, publishing, editing, organising readings, giving up hours and hours of their time and one of NAP's poets does really well you can't help but smile. Good for them.

May 2016: It's Spring... Publications, Events and Two Poems from Alison Brackenbury

High Spring: Cherry Tree in the Garden

 Hi, here’s May so far. As I said in earlier posts, I’ve had a bit of a poetry hiatus recently. May has definitely been a time to get back on the poetic horse.  I’ve been writing and editing, but I’ve also had a couple of acceptances and...and... here’s the big news. In September I’ll have a pamphlet out with HappenStance Press, hurrah! At the moment it hasn’t got a title, I’m calling it ‘pamphlet’ for now, but hopefully a better title will appear. So, I’ve been doing that thing that a lot of poets do, take photos of and share on-line:

And yes, I could write an entire blog post about ordering and editing, and maybe I will when I find some spare hours hiding under a mattress or something. I’ll write more over future posts, but for now I’ll say this: I’m utterly delighted to have a publication with a press I deeply admire. Nell is a wonderful editor.  Some of my favourite poetry has been published by HappenStance Press. I first came across Mark Halliday through HappenStance and over the years I’ve enjoyed books and pamphlets by Fiona Moore, Chrissie Williams, Matthew Stewart, Rosie Miles, D A Prince, Tom Duddy and others. Hopefully it'll be out in September.

This has also been the month of attending poetry readings. Earlier on in May, I went to Jazz and Poetry in Nottingham to hear readings from three Nine Arches Press poets: David Clarke, Jo Bell and Daniel Sluman. These evenings are organised by David Belbin and John Lucas turns up with his Jazz band Four in a Bar and much heel kicking takes place.  The venue for the event has changed.  It used to be in the Guitar Bar across the road, but it’s now in the Polish Eagle Club. It’s a great new place with lots of space, panelled walls and a big dance floor. It reminds of the kind of places I used to attend at weddings and christenings as a girl. The atmosphere was very relaxed and all three poets delivered fantastic readings. It was Jane Commane’s  birthday, she runs the good ship Nine Arches. Jo presented her with a super choclately birthday cake and a good time was had by all. 

The Nine Arches Press Firm (L-R Daniel, Jane, Yours Truly, Jo and David. Photo by Emily Brenchi.)
Jazz and Poetry, Nottingham.

In Leicester we had the May Shindig. I think it’s only fair to say that May has been Leicester’s month. They only just went and won the football didn’t they? Ok, I was born in Notts and raised within the bells of QPR, but I’m very happy for my closest city up the road. We even went to the Victory Parade. Now, on the subject of the Victory Parade, Shindig was scheduled for the same date. It soon became clear this wasn’t going to be practical. 250,000 people turned up in Leicester that day, but they weren’t going to Shindig. We had to cancel and rearrange the date for the 23^rd. That was last night. We had readings from two excellent Leicester based poets, Shruti Chauhan and Lydia Towsey and we had the superb Alison Brackenbury all the way from Gloucestershire. It was an absolute treat having Alison join us, we were very lucky. She was reading from her new collection ‘Skies’ published by Carcanet. It’s had great reviews  in The Guardian and The Independent and been featured on Radio 4. Below are a couple of short but perfectly and richly formed poems from the collection, which Alison has very kindly allowed me to include here. Her lyricism is second to none or 'heavenly' as I said last night when I introduced her.

'Skies' by Alison Brackenbury

So May belongs to Leicester perhaps, but the author of Commonplace resides in a hinterland town between Leicester and Nottingham. We’re not forgetting Nottingham, oh no. I went to another More Raw Material, Alan Sillitoe event in Nottingham and heard some great readings from some of the contributors. There were three memorable performances from poets I know, but had never heard or seen in the flesh: Bethany Pope, Rosie Garland and Ruth Fainlight, Alan Sillitoe’s widow. Next week, all being well, I’m attending a reading at Five Leaves Bookshop with Jo Dixon and Kathy Pimlott. I’m currently enjoying their pamphlets.

Finally, I even had some poems published of my own. After some months off this has been quite lovely. This year I’ve sent off four submissions, one was a polite ‘decline,’ two have been acceptances and one is still at the artwork stage, although a poem’s been shortlisted. Who knows.  I have two poems up on And Other Poems and I’m grateful to Josephine Corcoran and Rishi Dastidar for selecting them. I’ve had two poems accepted by The North too. It really has felt like a while since this has happened.

To finish off, as promised, here are two poems by Alison Brackenbury. Please have a look at the book at the Carcanet website for more details.Both are a perfect example of how a short poem can convey so much.

8am

I am cycling, in a sensible bright coat.

A girl comes pedalling, quickly by, loose shawls

skidding from shoulders, hitched skirt, silver pumps.

I was that girl. O may she ride her falls.

‘Will The Comet Survive Its

Encounter With the Sun?’

(astronomer, writing of Comet Ison)

This, I suppose, is what we do,

we fly into the sun

and some are gone and some survive

like shadows, limping on.

And some, far closer than stars,

fill all our eyes at dawn.

...And 'And Other Poems'

Hello again. It's been a while and spring is almost here, so thought I should write something. Aiming to write a longer post and to share work by different poets very soon. In the meantime, I'm very grateful to Josephine Corcoran for posting three of my poems on her blog 'And Other Poems.' I've spent more time on other people's work than my own of late, so it came as a bit of a (nice) surprise to find my own work on-line. If you'd like to read these poems click here.

A Poem by Josephine Corcoran

Christmas is now behind us, and just before the holidays I received a copy of Josephine Corcoran’s new pamphlet TheMisplaced House, published by tall-lighthouse. Having been an avid reader of her fantastic blog And Other Poems, an on-line magazine crammed with poets and poems, I was eager to read a new collection of her poetry.

The Misplaced House is full of poems themselves like the rooms of a house. Some poems deal with personal history; Josephine had a Catholic upbringing, was born in Southport, Lancashire and spent her childhood there as well as in South London. Some of the poems deal with more political issues such as representations of terrorism in ‘You Say Drone’ and sometimes both aspects are brought together in poems such as ‘I Remember the Fear of Forgetting’. That poem is set in the exam room where ‘Archduke Franz Ferdinand / and Sophie, his pregnant wife, are hiding / in my pencil case’. Throughout the pamphlet there were plenty of stand-out arresting lines and images which immediately appealed. For instance in ‘How to Keep Spare Keys’ a deep sense of loss inhabits everyday items and I found this image stark and emotive:

            Find the names of unborn children

            on the backs of lost receipts.

In this entry I’m sharing the first poem in the pamphlet, ‘Stephen Lawrence isn’t on the National Curriculum’, which Josephine has very kindly given me permission to feature here. The first time I read it felt as if my body physically reacted to it. It made me sit up and take notice. Not least for those crushing, sad details, such as Stephen’s age, his future aspirations and the mention of the ‘130 yards’ he staggered after being stabbed.  Stephen was a young man with a future, but his name became remembered in one of the most shocking and indeed most frustrating of racist murder trials.

This poem achieves something which is very hard to do, it is serious, clear-sighted and emotional without ever once being vague or sentimental. All the detail is real.  The poem is knitted together with lots of subtle internal rhymes which bring out its emotive power. Next time I need to show students an effective and controlled example of a political poem I’ll use this one. Parenthood is also key to the poem. I felt there was a connection between the mother in the poem and Stephen’s parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence. The poem begins with a child being tucked up after bedtime stories, after the mention of the ‘long ago and far away.’ The mood soon turns from sweetness to painful honesty. It’s time for a terrible lesson in recent history to be taught (as the education system won’t teach it).

At the time of Stephen’s murder, I was a teenager in West London.  Local communities didn’t trust the police’s handling of the black teenager’s murder. The McPherson Report, the public enquiry into the killing, suggested, among other recommendations, that to guard against such incidents from happening again, there had to be: “consideration of a revised national curriculum to prevent racism and value cultural diversity.” Although some cultural diversity is taught in schools, it’s arguably limited.  Josephine says “My own children, for instance, who’ve been at Secondary School since 2010, have never been taught about Stephen Lawrence, for example. “

            It’s been famously said ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ but in this instance I think Josephine’s poem expresses something very important about loss; the waste of a young man’s life and also addresses the need for a wider cultural education. Before I share the poem with you I’ll leave the final words to Josephine who puts it very succinctly: “I thought that there was nothing NOTHING I could ever do for Doreen and Neville Lawrence and I would never be able to say anything to them to tell them about how sorry I am for their loss.  But I thought at least I could remember Stephen and tell my children about him.  So that's how I came to write the poem.”

Stephen Lawrence isn’t on the National Curriculum

I tuck you in

with long ago and far away,

pull the blanket of it wasn’t us, it wasn’t here

around your heart, although I know

that five inches is 13 centimetres,

that 130 yards would cost a lot

of blood. There’ll be Rosa Parks

and Martin Luther King for homework,

and someone saying it’s good

we teach them that,

but no-one has a map of South-East London,

and today your teacher didn’t say his name.

I teach you this: He spelled it with a ‘PH’

not a ‘V’. In 1993

he was eighteen.

He wanted to be an architect.

He was waiting for a bus.

This poem first appeared in The Morning Star in 2013 and can be found here as well.

More Jazz, Poetry and States of Independence 2014.

It's been another busy week. Am starting to really miss actually writing poetry, though in the last seven days I've certainly heard a great deal of poetry. Seven days ago I read with poet, colleague and all round kind soul Simon Perril at 'Jazz and Poetry' in Nottingham. We also read with some local student poets and the jazz came from John Lucas' band 'Four in a Bar.' Geddit? Simon read from his new Shearsman book 'Archilocus on the Moon.' I've said it before and I'll say it again that Simon's collections are some of the most cohesive I've every read. So the readings went on and jazz was played between them and the Hotel Deux was an intriguing venue. A former hotel, with the downstairs divided into different rooms and the 'jazz room' itself had lots of fascinating instruments pinned to the wall. There was even a bouzouki, my dad would've loved it. I met my first Liverpudlian poet of the week as well, Andrew Taylor, and want to read more of his work. If you'd like too see video evidence of Simon and I reading then click here. It's on Facebook. Event organiser David Belbin was the camera man.

Then Saturday and De Montfort held it's fifth annual book festival 'States of Independence'. There were lots of interesting panels and book stalls. I ended up buying loads of things. States was also the venue where I met my second Liverpudlian poet of the week, Sarah Crewe. She was reading with Alan Baker and my other colleague Kathy Bell, as part of a panel of Oystercatcher readers. Sarah's poems were a breath of fresh air for me. Alan's were full of intricacy. There was so much energy in that room and it was great to hear poems from Kathy's new pamphlet 'At the Memory Exchange.' I also attended the Soundswrite panel. They're a local group of women writers who meet up regularly in Leicester. Caroline Cook delivered a strong reading from her new Soundswrite pamphlet 'Primer' and there was a host of other poets reading too, including Jayne Stanton who will soon have a pamphlet out with Soundswrite as well. Also went to Deborah Tyler Bennett's and Ann Featherstone's Music Hall panel. For a few moments I dreamed of being Vesta Tilley, wouldn't that be an interesting way to live?

I also hosted a panel with Rich Goodson, Cora Greenhill and Gregory Woods about 'The Poetry of Sex' anthology. We read poems about and around the theme. Some more 'about' than others! We all have poems in the anthology of the same name. There were some mixed feelings about the book aired in the panel. Suppose all anthologies run that risk. I don't really write about sex directly (is this sometimes a 'female' thing?), so I placed the work in the context of my upbringing, life and culture. One of the poem's I read was 'Ante' which appeared in New Walk magazine last year, and was about the decision to have children:

Ante

Our children are only a blueprint. We imagine their milky bodies

flickering in a sonogram. We unpack our cases. They’re hiding

under our crisp bed in the hotel. The sun sinks into a cocktail glass.

Mouth the Spanish word for blood, think out loud: there will be

so many things to learn. Drink one guilty mouthful; let bubbles

fizz between your teeth. Mark this occasion of knowing in silence.

You no longer recognise the tilted face on the curve of your glass. 

Obviously that decision changed mine and my husband's life considerably! Our twins were also at States and were jubilant at having won a box of chocolates in the WORD! raffle and having a go at printing out letters courtesy of Cleeve Press. There were many stalls and it was great to see Jane at the Nine Arches Press one, as well as Jacqui Rowe at Flarestack. Brought three pamphlets! Was good to see 'The Interpreter's House' on sale too. Editor Martin Malone was selling copies of the magazine and the latest issue (55) is great. Also nice to see the poet David Clarke over from Cheltenham, we chatted about the pleasures and pains of poetry reviewing during lunch. There were lots of things I wanted to attend, but it was impossible as the sessions were back to back. Roy Marshall and Rory Waterman would've been a treat, as would've Renni Parker and the WORD! Crew. Sorry I couldn't cover everything!

Ok, so here's my obligatory shot of all the books I brought..actually they're pamphlets:

It's good to go to such events! Especially at a time when I'm finding little time for my own writing. The small presses save the day... again.

p.s. I have two poems on Josephine Corcoran's excellent blog 'And Other Poems' including the one about a certain actor, which you can read here.

Bingo!

'I've seen the future #poetrybingo'

Josephine Corcoran

I've had a few problems with the blog of late, there have been some Malware warnings coming up on screen. Fingers crossed you're able to read this now and the problems been sorted. Back to poetry... or more specifically poetry bingo. In the summer I put together a light-hearted bingo card of words and concepts which I noticed were cropping a lot in the poems I was reading. These words were mainly gathered from magazines and all of them were from contemporary sources. I shared one as a bit of fun with Helena Nelson and she decided to print them as a set, published HappenStance press! They soon became a set of four cards. The cards are an avant garde poem, bingo card, and postcard in one, they also look rather nice on a wall!  Here's a brief explanation from the HappenStance website explaining what the cards are about:

The set of four different cards can also fulfil a useful slot in terms of entertaining postcards for poetry friends. A5 in size, they contain the key words on the back as well as plenty of space to scribble messages, poems or aphorisms.

The bingo cards are available for purchase on the site, so click here to have a look.  A little eccentricity does you good!

Moi and cards...