Poetry Sales and The Point

There are moments in a poet’s life - few and usually far between - that begin to take on a surreal quality, when a poem you wrote seems to grow legs independently of you and gallops off into the distance. That must be true for writers like Jenny Joseph and Sheenagh Pugh when poems they wrote became incredibly famous and popular – not necessarily their best poems, but poems that struck a chord not with traditional poetry readers but with the general public. It must be a weird feeling, especially when people don’t flock to buy everything else you’ve written – all the better stuff you’ve written! – the way they might do with a novelist. It seems that poems come as individuals.

I had a very minor taste of this over the weekend when a poem I wrote, a pantoum called ‘The Point’, was featured in the Guardian newspaper as its Saturday Poem. It’s a political satire, and isn’t ever going to have the same level of appeal as a poem about growing old and wearing purple, but (at the time of writing) it has been shared on Facebook 115 times (most of them not FB friends of mine) and retweeted 16 times. Not a lot really. I’m sure an article on Jessie J would get that many shares inside a few seconds but I am also sure that ‘The Point’ has now been read by more people than any poem I have ever written. It shows the power of The Guardian and the Saturday Poem brand. Just think how popular poetry could be and would be seen to be, if more high profile newspapers and media (TV, film, Amazon etc) published or presented poems in ways designed to extend their readership. The audience would grow rapidly, I'm sure of that.

Has the publication of ‘The Point’ sold a single copy of The Good News, the collection it comes from? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it hadn’t. People will read a single poem in a newspaper or newspaper website quite happily and may even really enjoy it, but only few people, most of them seasoned poetry readers, will read a poetry collection for fun. That’s not a problem unless you’re a poetry publisher trying to make a living or, indeed, unless you’re a poet who believes that collections are a good thing. I am one of these and would prefer a world in which more people read Dante than Dan Brown. That said, I did note that Clare Pollard’s ‘Ovid’s Heroines’ was the number 10 best seller last week at the Guardian bookshop (presumably the result of a favourable review in the Guardian not long before) in a list dominated by novels and popular non-fiction. It was good to see a poetry collection in there, a little chink of hope.

The Next Big Thing

I’ve been tagged by poet and Magma secretary Jennifer Wong to give this interview for an expanding blog project called The Next Big Thing. You can read her interview here. The idea is to say something about the process of writing a forthcoming book or manuscript. I am supposed to post my thoughts and then tag other writers to do the same on 23 January 2013, although this date is flexible. I am a week late myself.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
The idea emerged mainly from the process of writing it. In the second half of 2011, I placed all the better poems I’d written since my first collection (The Opposite of Cabbage, published in March 2009) side-by-side on the living room floor. I read them all, juggled them around, threw some away, and realised that most of those left were about happiness, the struggle for it and its accompanying discontentments. There was also a sequence on autism, but that seemed mainly to fall under the dominant ‘happiness’ theme. After that, I wrote more on-theme poems and a book, The Good News, was born.

What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
It will be co-directed by David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch. Woody Allen will convert the disparate poems into a screenplay. For lead actors, I’ll resurrect Humphrey Bogart and Greta Garbo to star alongside Tom Waits and Helena Bonham-Carter. A choir of one hundred Scottish poets will act as a liturgical chorus. Amanda Palmer and Yo La Tengo will team up to provide the soundtrack. The Smiths will reform for one night only to play a brand new Morrissey/Marr track during the closing credits.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
That happiness comes from a deeper and stranger place than any ‘Ten Steps to Happiness’ self-help book or article will ever admit (one honourable exception is A Rough Guide to Happiness by Nick Baylis, which is a most thoughtful book).

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
About three years, but many poems had been through countless drafts before they ended up in the manuscript. A ‘first draft’ of a poetry collection is often at quite an advanced stage, I’d guess.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
It’s quite a personal book, although it’s not ‘confessional’ poetry. My daughter was an inspiration, but these are not traditional ‘father-daughter’ poems. I have read poems about autism, some astonishingly brilliant (such as Les Murray’s remarkable It Allows a Portraitin Line Scan at Fifteen), but I haven’t read any that quite take the approach I do. And I was also inspired to write poems of place, political identity, faith, travel and love because these all felt important to me in regard to happiness. I wasn’t always in a particularly happy state of mind when writing the poems, but I was striving to touch on something hopeful, on a future with meaning attached.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I’d hope most of these poems will reward being read several times. They aim for that. They also aim to be humorous and entertaining without sacrificing depth and mystery. It’s a tall order.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The Good News will be published by Salt Publishing in the second quarter of 2013.

*

I asked several people if they wanted to be tagged to do this, but either they were already doing it or were too busy or couldn’t for other reasons. So I have only one person to tag and that is Helen Mort. Check out her blog around 23 January. I am now also going to tag Peter Daniels as well.

If anyone else wants to do it, let me know in the comments and I’ll be happy to tag you here.

New Reviews of 'Fleck and the Bank'

A few reviews have appeared on my pamphlet, Fleck and the Bank, to add to Harry Giles’s review at Ink, Sweat and Tears. Harry’s review was as close to a dream review as I’ve ever received, not just because it was mainly positive but because he seemed to 'get' more or less everything I was trying to do. For example:

‘The poems are a series of signs pointing not to Fleck but to other signs, because Fleck himself is not there, is someone of whom even an imagined newscaster’s imagined dress is “more solid than himself”.’

and:

‘... the themes themselves are unusual, or at least have unusual clarity: to write more about a specific absence than any real moment or presence seems new to me, especially when achieved with such grace. And there will, as I’ve suggested, be many more ways to read this book than mine, it is far bigger than its size suggests... Fleck couldn’t hope for a better offering, wherever he is.’

Three new reviews have gone up now at Sphinx and these reflect the huge variety of thought and opinion that constitutes Contemporary Poetry PLC these days. Jake Campbell doesn’t care much for the pamphlet, describing it as having ‘crystalline moments of greatness, but also elements of drudgery’. He goes on to say:

‘I want to be angered; I want to feel Fleck is angry, or at least alive. Instead, he feels like a wet lettuce.’ :-)

Rosie Miles, on the other hand, finds the poems and themes interesting. Rather self-effacingly, she says:

‘I am not this collection’s ideal reader. I don’t entirely “get” it. But I assent to the world it creates and Mackenzie’s use of language is inventive and full of a kind of demotic energy.’

Actually, her readings of the poems seem perfectly fair to me.

Matt Bryden finds it “satisfying” and “generously dense and experimental.” And he makes the interesting point that

‘While some of the fun in reading is to make out Fleck a little more clearly, in one sense he is the MacGuffin that keeps you reading to figure out his world.’

And, finally – on Andrew Shields’s blog – you'll find not a review as such, but more a reflection on how juxtaposition and disorientation are used in some of the poems to create new meanings.

Thanks to all the reviewers for taking the time to set down their thoughts, whether positive or negative. It’s all much appreciated and I certainly hope Salt and I sell a few pamphlets as a result...

Fleck, Magma 53 and Two Readings

The sun has sneaked out from the heavy cloud which has made June feel autumnal so far in Edinburgh, and already I feel positive about the day. I am definitely not suited for this country’s climate. Anyway, a few recent happenings...

First of all, my pamphlet, Fleck and the Bank has been out now for about a month and seems generally to be getting a good response from readers – thanks to all of you! It’s available from the Salt shop or from me. I have just installed a ‘Buy Now’ button (PayPal or card) below the image of the pamphlet’s cover near the top right of this blog, and also one for my The Opposite of Cabbage full collection. I hope someone will soon be the first to try it! Tell you what – for the first ever button order of the pamphlet, I will send a free copy of the collection. First come, first served...

Secondly, Magma 53, edited by Kona Macphee and I, has been published and is available from the Magma website. The launch at the Troubadour Cafe, London, on 4th June, was a fantastic occasion, and the first of two photo-enriched reports on it will be going up at the Magma blog very soon, hopefully later today. We are delighted with how the issue turned out – from the poems, reviews and articles to Hugh McEwen’s excellent cover and M J F Chance's illustrations.

Thirdly, and finally, I am doing two readings in the next week. I’m reading tonight, Wednesday 13th June from 8pm at ‘Verse Hearse’, Rio Cafe, Hyndland St, Glasgow (near Kelvin Hall underground station), along with the uniquely creative nic-e-melville (expect plenty of high-quality cut ‘n’ paste and Tippex), followed by an open mic. Then, I’m reading next week, Tuesday 19th June, at the Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh (at the back entrance of Waverley Station) from 7pm, along with Chris Emery and Andrew Philip (£4). [Unfortunately, we've had to cancel this reading. Apologies for this. We hope to reschedule it for a later date] This will be the Scottish launch of Chris's new book, The Departure, which is well worth getting hold of.

Review: 'More Shadow than Bird' by Nuar Alsadir

The bio note on More Shadow than Bird tells us that Nuar Alsadir is training to become a psychoanalyst and this I can well believe after reading her poems. Her subject is the unknown self, fleeting glimpses into the hidden depths of motivation and personality. Her characters often have difficulty in understanding who they are and where they’re going. They are at the mercy of events, misunderstanding others and themselves, and yet a hazy kind of clarity emerges: “more shadow than bird”, it’s true, but the habitually invisible can hardly be held in easy focus.

The attempt to focus results in remarkably clear and striking images; the connections between them aren’t always immediately obvious but they aren’t arbitrary either. Some poets juxtapose outlandish images for reasons of humour or even stylish obfuscation, but Alsadir is trying to express things that aren’t ordinarily expressible. ‘The Ride Home from Mourning’ begins with the phrase, “My underwear is my backpack/ and I feel true” and later, with a desire for accuracy, “grey, with thin strings”. The mood evoked from such imagery is not self-pity, but a desire to express the impact of loss. The narrator asks the questions people ask at such times: “Where do we go when we go/ no more? The unmooredness puzzles”. There are no answers to such questions, but the narrator reflects on how we mourn:

the unintelligible inside us
and the accurate on our backs.

This final couplet clothing unintelligible unmooredness (which is nevertheless somehow moored deep within us) with the weight of accurate expression sends you back to read the poem again, and it’s true that these poems, like all good poems, need to be read more than once. Her images are perfectly clear but produce complexity in combination. The most similar UK poet I can think of would be Claire Crowther and, perhaps behind both, we might detect American poet, Lorine Niedecker.

‘Disquiet’ is a fairly riveting sequence of short independent prose paragraphs. They read like aphorisms but seem less certain of themselves than traditional aphorisms. It is about disquiet, but some lines could be read as describing Nuar Alsadir’s poetics:

What blooms does so in the space that breaks from knowing.

and:

Reason is like light, it comes in quanta. There are no lines connecting thoughts, only packets and leaps.

Making the leaps and connecting without drawing hard-and-fast lines certainly brings rewards here. Most of these poems can’t be explained or summarised but I was always convinced that something interesting was going on. ‘Breakfast’ would be one example. Phrases repeat and echo throughout the poem – images of eggs, roads, and three characters (one man, one woman, and the first person narrator) having an argument are all jumbled up. Some change has occurred. Anyone who can write lines like

.............He thinks she’s a trail
of cigarette butts to something human

and:

Morning. We crack eggs in the pan,
wait to see what creature will rise

has my full attention. The characters appear disorientated and curiously estranged both from their own selves and from those around them. The man’s perception of the woman as a trail is countered in the final line. He doesn’t notice, but “she’s not the path, but where it begins.” What exactly is being said here isn’t clear to me, but I find the poem intriguingly mysterious and strikingly well written, worth continuing to ponder on.

Other poems are more immediate, such as ‘Walking with Suzan’ and ‘Bats’, both of which you can read in full at Michelle McGrane’s Peony Moon site (along with several others). ‘Bats’ again may tell us something about Nuar Alsadir’s approach to poetry. The bats, “not like you/ or the other rodents” are unashamed and “share their darkness like a piece/ of delight”. The crawlers have to “rise for breath, belief”. In contrast:

The bats do not need applause.
If you clap, they will change direction.

Echoes of W.S. Graham there, of course, from the end of his famous poem, Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons:

...keep your finger-stops as light
As feathers but definite. What can I say more?
Do not be sentimental or in your Art.
I will miss you. Do not expect applause.

The evasion of applause or indifference to it. An immediate change in direction at the first hint of populism. Art, not Commerce. So let’s not clap, at least not loudly enough to be heard. More Shadow than Bird is an extraordinary collection: beautiful, reflective and provocative in equal measure. It deserves readers and perhaps the turn of a page, that near-silent form of applause, is all that matters.

More Shadow than Bird by Nuar Alsadir is published by Salt, 2012, in paperback, currently £7.99.

The Fleck Pizza

Look, here comes a flying saucer, FLECK
on top in chopped tricolour peppers!

He has arranged them this way:
the pizza a self-addressed valentine,
rehearsal for the real thing.

- from 'The Bank, part 2' in Fleck and the Bank

This pizza tasted pretty good!

Magma, Fleck and More Shadow than Bird

I had been thinking of creating a new blog, a new start and all that, given that this one has been semi-abandoned in recent months, but that would make no sense. Instead, I’m going to re-launch Surroundings today and try to be more organised.

I have had a fair bit on in recent months, which has made it almost impossible to blog. Until the end of April, I was tied-up with the co-editing (with Kona Macphee) of Magma 53, which is now hurtling towards production and will indeed be published on 28th May with a launch on 4th June at the Troubadour in London. I can’t give anything away yet, but I do feel really pleased with the issue.

I was also revising poems for a new pamphlet, Fleck and the Bank, which has just been published. I still haven’t seen a physical copy but a package should arrive today. I know what’s going to happen. I have various things on today, to do with work, which will take me out the house for a fair bit of the day. The package will arrive when I’m out and I’ll have to collect it from the sorting office in the Gyle Industrial Estate, an area full of factories and warehouses. I’ll wander about for ages in search of the sorting office amid dozens of near-identical buildings and, by the time I find it, it will have closed down for the day. Anyway, it's just over five pounds from the Salt website, where you can also download a free pdf sampler.

Finally, just a quick mention of a book I’m reading at the moment. I spent April reading Rilke, WS Merwin and Durs Grunbein and thought nothing would top that combination this year. However, Nuar Alsadir’s first collection, More Shadow than Bird, is outstanding. I will try to say more in a future post, but for now I’ll just say the title is well chosen. The poems deal not so much with flickers of light illuminating the strange or obscured, as with shadows flitting briefly and quickly across a scene – often the shadows of the apparently unknowable self (if the ‘self’ is an iceberg, this collection focuses on the vast section below the surface). That’s not a prescription for vague writing – every word seems precise and vital – but for a persuasive and musical evocation of what usually remains unthought or entirely out-of-sight.

'Fleck and the Bank' Cover

The cover of my forthcoming chapbook, which will be published as part of the Salt Modern Voices series. It features a guy called Fleck, a bank, and poems which riff around themes of collapse, disintegration and disappearance via friends, virtual friends and obscure notes. Orignal lines square up to stolen ones, money makes a cameo appearance as a ghost, politicians leap into cauldrons of boiling fat, theology is done by mobile phone, and the Patron Saint of Plainsong Maledictions turns up with a little advice in song, which readers are welcome to singalong to if they wish. I also have a full collection coming out in 2013, although none of the poems in the chapbook will also feature in the collection.

There's not yet a definite publication date, but I'll let you know when that becomes clear. A good number of the other chapbooks in the series can be found here. So far, I've read Neil Addison's Apocapulco (for some reason, this doesn't seem to have its own page on the site) and Mark Burnhope's The Snowboy, both of which were really good.

Poets, Reviewers and the Broadsheets

Two short reviews appeared in The Guardian a day or two ago, both written by Ben Wilkinson. The first is a positive review of Simon Barraclough’s Neptune Blue. The second is quite a negative review of Mark Waldron’s The Itchy Sea. I’d make the following observations:

1. Neptune Blue is a very interesting book. There are similarities to Simon Barraclough’s first collection, but he’s definitely not just treading the same ground. I’m not altogether convinced by the Armitage comparison, even if I recognise the similarities Ben points out. I think Neptune Blue does resist the pigeonholing and contains some decidedly odd, mysterious poems. Anyway, it’s just the book you need for a cold, clear winter evening.

2. Some people may not have liked Ben’s criticism of The Itchy Sea, and I can understand why. I don’t know Mark Waldron and have no idea what Mark himself thinks of this review (and silence is usually the best reaction in such circumstances). If it had been my book, I wouldn’t be applauding. When a poet spends years writing and revising poems and publishing them in a book, it’s perfectly natural if they feel aggrieved when dismissed inside a short paragraph in the Guardian. I know some people say we should all consider negative reviews carefully etc, but poets are human and get cross and upset as much as anyone else.

3. On the other hand, the sting doesn’t last. The next review might be highly favourable. Someone (a reader you don’t know, not a critic or reviewer) will email you to say how much they’ve enjoyed the book. Your book will be selected by the Poetry School staff as one of their top ten books of the year – such as, this year, Mark Waldron’s The Itchy Sea! A future reviewer will ‘get’ what you’ve been trying to do, which is a good feeling. Such experiences are fun but adulation doesn't tend to come the way of poets often. Those who crave it ought to stop writing poetry and instead take up the guitar or enter the Big Brother house or try to be photographed often with a celebrity.

4. The Guardian is often criticized for publishing anodyne, positive reviews without any hint of real criticism. We can’t express a wish for a more rigorous reviewing style and then get annoyed when Ben says what he genuinely thinks. It’s not his fault that the word count he is offered doesn’t allow him to make his points more fully. It’s also clear that there’s no personal motive here. After all, he does recommend Mark Waldron’s first book, and feels that some poems in the second book are “very good”. He had reviewed Mark’s first collection very positively in the Times Literary Supplement.

5. But on the other hand again, the bland, anodyne style usually comes into play when the book under review is that of an ‘established’ poet (hard to find the right word here but ‘established’ will have to do). It’s tricky to work out why that is. It could be because the established poet is being reviewed by another established poet who would cause major controversy by writing a negative review (and consequently may elect not to review books by fellow established poets whose work they don’t like much). I’m not sure whether established poets feel that way or not, but would be interested to know. I could certainly understand why they might feel that way. It could also be that poet and reviewer are friends and review one another with regular positivity. Or it could be that the reviewer isn’t an established poet but would like to be and feels intimidated to write a negative review of someone they imagine (usually erroneously) holds massive influence in the poetry world and will nurse their grudge for decades. Or it could be that the newspaper broadsheets don’t want negative reviews of established poets and won’t publish them when they’re written.

6. Perhaps, broadsheets need to search harder for reviewers who are fair but who aren’t concerned with what anyone thinks – independent critics, poets who have stopped writing poetry, poets who couldn’t care less about their own ‘careers’ (but who aren’t, without good reason, simply out to diss those who have had mainstream success).

7. It seems wrong that critical engagement seems only to be allowed in the broadsheets when a book is written by a poet published by an independent publisher. There are occasional exceptions, almost all of them written by critics rather than poets e.g. Kate Kellaway’s review of Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees.

8. I had read some of Mark Waldron’s The Itchy Sea. He’s a good writer. One concern I had with it was that it seemed similar to his first collection, although I’m basing that impression on a random read through a fairly small number of poems – so it’s not something to pay any attention to. Interestingly (to me) Ben clearly implies in his review that The Itchy Sea isn’t like the first collection. That actually makes me want to get hold of The Itchy Sea and read it properly – so a negative review may not have the negative consequences people might expect.

9. Ben writes one thing that struck me as of particular interest. Whether it correctly applies to The Itchy Sea is another matter, but it does sound like a feature of many contemporary poems, those which are:

“... latching on to outlandish similes in the hope that they might lead somewhere new. You have to admire the intention...”

I’m quite fond of outlandish similes when they do lead somewhere new. Or when, as in John Ashbery et al, their outlandishness fits perfectly within the little engine of the poem. But when they are merely fashionable attention-seeking beacons or empty vessels designed to sound meaningful (Ashbery's aren't), that’s not so good.

10. I’m definitely going to read The Itchy Sea over the next few weeks and see what I think.

Short Update with Three Books

It’s been a month since I last blogged and here are my excuses...

No, I’ll save you all that. Being sorry for not blogging is faintly ridiculous. Since my last foray into blogland, I read some of my poems at the University of Basel, Switzerland along with Katy Evans-Bush (at the kind invitation of Andrew Shields) and then went out to try one of the region’s sausage delicacies with a few members of the audience. I stayed in Basel Youth Hostel, which had an affordable bar (in Swiss terms) and a buffet breakfast, and also an inevitable snorer in the room. I walked the cobbled streets and admired the window shutters. I walked along the Rhine and brought back chocolate for the family. A very enjoyable couple of days! I also took part in the Bugged! event at the fabulous West Port Festival in Edinburgh, which went really well. I read a few pieces from the anthology and later that evening went to see a fine reading by Rachael Boast and J.O. Morgan. And the submissions period has opened for Magma 53, which means that Kona Macphee and I have spent the last ten days working out a strategy for keeping up with the poems that flood the inbox daily. Working out strategies is always a good way to spend time.

But this post is really to recommend three books as much as anything else. First of all, Mark Burnhope’s The Snowboy, a Salt pamphlet of real quality. Any poet who can address a wheelchair with, “O wing-black, spectral-silver mass;/ crass imposition upon the meadow” (‘Wheelchair, Recast as a Site of Special Pastoral Interest’) deserves to be read widely, and there are many other poems which make this small collection an exciting experience. Burnhope’s ability to create memorable phrases and recast language in imaginative ways mark him out.

Secondly, Ian Duhig’s Pandorama (Picador) is a great read with a wide variety of forms and styles. You can never quite guess where Duhig is going to take you next. He seems to know about things that few people have ever thought about knowing and uses his learning lightly but with genuine emotional and intellectual impact. This collection is satirical, funny, disturbing and mysterious, often simultaneously. Moving elegies for David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant who died following years of racial harassment by police, line up alongside navvies, seed-fiddles, and ‘Closed Enquiry’ which celebrates “Santon Bridge’s Annual Lying Championship”; politicians may be barred from entering but agriculture holds plenty of scope:

cattle so huge they need individual postcodes,
rams’ horns winding up in different time-zones.

And finally, there’s Gabriel Josopovici’s Touch, which is described as a prose essay musing over “the central question of how we can feel at home in the world.” In fact, it’s a fascinating group of essays clustered around that theme, probing ideas of distance with reference to Charlie Chaplin, transgression and self-delusion with reference to Proust, power with reference to the $50m trade in Nazi memorabilia, and the difference between walking in England and walking in Egypt with a nod to Tristram Shandy (which, by coincidence, Ian Duhig also references). Touch, not mere observation, binds the essays into one. Josopovici deals with complex ideas without resorting to jargon or meaningless abstraction and there’s a passionate and intelligent engagement with the world behind every enquiry.

Review: The Best British Poetry 2011

I wasn’t sure whether I would like The Best British Poetry 2011. I know some of the poets in it and was fairly sure I would like their poems but I was more interested in what I’d think of the rest. I tended to avoid reading the British mainstream (until, of necessity, I had to engage with it through becoming Magma’s reviews editor) and much preferred to spend time with American and European poetry collections, along with a few Scottish favourites, and I had the fear that an anthology of British poems selected from magazines would contain too much bland and boring work.

I have to say that my eyes have been opened. I really enjoyed some poems in this anthology from writers I knew by name but had somehow bypassed. It’s certainly a positive introduction to contemporary writing in Britain – a far wider range of styles and schools (and both the famous and lesser known, both the established magazines and the new) than is customary in British publications. I will pay more attention in future. Poems that struck me (not counting those by my friends) included those by Emily Berry, Judy Brown, Fred D’Aguiar, Sasha Dugdale, Ian Duhig, Giles Goodland, Patrick McGuinness and Deryn Rees-Jones, and there were several others I much enjoyed. OK, there were also poems that struck me as pretty ordinary, but nowhere near as many as I had expected, and no one is ever going to like everything in such an anthology.

Fred D’Aguiar’s ‘The Rose of Toulouse’ got my attention with its opening section in which the streets are “not a scene for former slaves”:

Or their feisty descendants, wearing their life
Savings, nursing wounds from history, no track
Record in an ocean with bones for a library.

The poem is an evocation of French city life, into which is woven a subtext centring on the poet’s children and another one focusing on justice and domination in history. At the back of the anthology are 40 pages of short author biographies and a few paragraphs on the poets’ impetus for writing their poem. I noted from Fred D’Aguiar’s reflections that the poem seemed to me to be about more or less what he also thought it was about.

That wasn’t always the case. Sasha Dugdale’s ‘Shepherds’, according to its author, “is an elegy for the last dwellers on the [South] Downs, and a hymn of praise to the hills themselves.” Now that she mentions it, I do see how that makes sense. But I felt the poem centred on questions of religious faith. There’s an ambiguity at its heart – the Bible-carrying shepherds also read the earth’s Bible – the one written “in chalk, in rabbit droppings, and lady’s smock” which now has “no meaning for anyone, except the shepherds/ Who are gone.” The pastoral world of the Bible (both the literal one and the metaphorical Bible of the earth) is rendered unreadable in an urban age. That may be a statement of how the poet views the world, but the elegiac tone also suggests to me that something seems lost by this shift.

I found the variance between my own interpretations of poems and those proffered by the poets to be a source of considerable fascination. Both the writer’s and the reader’s ideas are admissible, of course, and a difference between them isn’t evidence of failure on either side. It may even point to a welcome complexity that the poem can’t be summed up in explanatory prose. Several poets expressed a discomfort about offering comment on their poem and I felt an initial scepticism at first glance, but I have been won over. It is simply interesting and doesn’t negate other readings. Now and again, I did realise that I hadn’t read the poem carefully enough and saw it with new eyes after reading the author’s thoughts. Sometimes, the comments were just a little pretentious..., but not as often as you might expect in an anthology of poets.

I am always happy when poets come across as unusual people and when Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch confessed (in her prose comment) that “lining objects up on tables has always fascinated me” and that she attended a “table etiquette course in Somerset three years ago,” I found new reason to trust her advice in her poem, ‘Table Manners’:

..........................Do not remove your shoes or
show any flesh. Tilt your soup’s light towards
her, like an invitation to swim. Sip
as though you’re working on it.

Perhaps not all of that will impress on a first date, but I hope someone puts it to the test. But remember the sting in the tail, that "cutlery is a code" and "ten to five means it's over." Don't say you haven't been warned. So, yes, there are more good things happening in British poetry than I had expected and The Best British Poetry 2011 will offer, to most readers, a number of welcome surprises and send them rounding up the back catalogue of at least a few of the featured poets.

The Best British Poetry 2011, ed Roddy Lumsden, is published by Salt, £7.99

Magma, Issue 49, and the E-Newsletter, Issue 12

The new Magma, issue 49, is all ready and you can read a few poems and articles from it online, including my review of Katherine Gallagher's Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems (Arc £11.99), Alan Wall’s Doctor Placebo (Shearsman £8.95) and TEN: New Poets Spread the Word ed. Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra (Bloodaxe/Spread the Word £8.95).

In addition, if you sign up to receive the free bi-monthly e-newsletter (halfway down the page at the link to sign up), you’ll find me doing the ‘subscribers workshop’ in which I comment on a poem someone has asked for help with (perhaps 'set loose to run riot over someone else's poem' might be just as good a way to put it, but I hope it's a constructive riot), along with articles on ‘poetry and catharsis’ by Jacqueline Saphra (which includes a nice mention of Andrew Philip's collection, The Ambulance Box) and a review of Matthew Sweeney’s The Night Post (Salt 2010) by Laurie Smith. Definitely worth signing up for.

From John Tranter to Jennifer Aniston

February always makes me feel tired. It doesn’t matter whether the weather is stormy or simply chill, whether the sky is low and grey or high and blue. There’s just something about the month. It’s so relentless, a winter that lasts and lasts and lasts and has been lasting since last November and may well last until well into April if we’re unlucky.

Last night, I was reading John Tranter’s Selected, Urban Myths: 210 Poems, and was enjoying it, but there came a point when my brain wasn’t taking anything in and I did something I wouldn't have done at all if it had been summer – I switched on the TV, and there was Jennifer Aniston. As usual, she was playing Rachel from Friends, but in a movie about how some bride-to-be (Aniston) suspects that The Graduate had been based on her parents and goes around trying to find out whether the rumour is true or not. Somehow, I watched this for about half an hour. Complete nonsense. It’s hard to believe that so many millions can get poured into rubbish like this while virtually nothing is given to marketing and distributing poetry.

But this is the world and “we’re all in this together,” as Disney and David Cameron tell us, an alliance almost as unholy as the current coalition. Except we’re not in it together. There is plenty of room for opposition, for not playing. I switched off and went to sleep, wondering why it had taken me so long. There are worlds it’s best to have nothing to do with whatsoever.

Salt Books Winter Sale

Until the end of January, you can buy books direct from Salt and get 33% off the price – the real price, that is, not the inflated Amazon one (see below). The Opposite of Cabbage is listed at only £7.19 in the Salt online store. With 33% off, that should be less than a fiver. Use the code HGW45R13 for any purchases at Salt.

From a review in The TLS, by Carrie Etter:

Rob A Mackenzie's first full collection inhabits present-day Scotland in all its livliness, banality and bad weather... Mackenzie's vigorous urban language, often employed in declarative sentences, vivifies it all... The Opposite of Cabbage impresses with its distinctive style and energetic exploration of 'the way we live now.'

Now, something very odd. Amazon UK appear to have doubled the price of books published by Salt. The paperbacks are on sale for anything from £15 to £18. It must be a mistake, but Amazon are rather taking their time to sort it out. In connection with this, I had a weird dream two nights ago. I won a competition. The bizarre prize was that the winner had to buy both The Opposite of Cabbage and a rail ticket to Newcastle, by debit card. It cost me £26 for the book from Amazon, and the rail ricket was for the next day, when I was working and couldn't travel.

Happy Burns Day 2011

It is Burns Day, and I’ll be tucking into haggis, neeps and tatties tonight. Always a good thing when a duty is so pleasurable. My haggis will be of the normal variety. I have tasted vegetarian haggis and it wasn’t so bad but, nevertheless, Alexander Hutchison’s poem, Surprise Surprise!, written in 1984, always makes me laugh every time I read it. It’s from his outstanding New & Selected Poems, Scales Dog, which would have been a massive bestseller in a better world.

I have a vague hope of making it to the Burns flashmob at 1pm today outside St Giles Cathedral, where anyone can join in an improvised rendition of A Man’s a Man for A’ That, but time may be against me. Peggy, from the Scottish Poetry Library, shows you how it’s done below.

Horizon Review, Issue 5

Issue 5 of Horizon Review, edited by Katy Evans-Bush, has just gone live. Poems, reviews, articles, short stories and much more. I have a poem in the issue called Eggy.

Review: 'Alex y Robert' by Wena Poon

I met Wena when she was in Scotland last summer for the Salt Scotland launch and then at various times during her residential fellowship at Hawthornden Castle. It’s possible that this novel might have sneaked under my radar if that hadn’t been the case, but I’m glad it didn’t because Alex y Robert is an absorbing read from start to finish.

The story is of Alejandra Herrera (aka ‘Alex’), a young American woman who wants to be a bullfighter in Spain. She has some pedigree in that her grandfather was a famous matador, she speaks fluent Spanish, and she has done some training in the USA, despite the misgivings of her parents-by-adoption (her mother and father were killed in a car crash when she was a child). She goes to Spain and makes contact with Roberto de la Torre, a rising star in the bullfighting arena, whose grandfather was a matador contemporary of Alex’s granddad.

It isn’t exactly plain sailing. Public opposition to bullfighting, at home and abroad, is growing. The majority of people in the bullfighting scene are opposed to women-matadors and will have nothing to do with them. There are close-shaves and crises of confidence. The recession is threatening many venues and promoters. The press is often contemptuous. Roberto has his own personal and public crises to deal with. Will Alex ever realise her dream of fighting bulls in the great arena in Madrid?

The narrative speeds along with real fizz and energy, but not at the expense of character development. Wena Poon artfully structures the novel so that it switches between present and past without the flashbacks seeming in any way obtrusive. They build up a sense of who Alex and Robert are and the issues that face them, including the issue of their own relationship, which is the subject of much gossip. You’ll end up caring about the fate of the two main characters (and some of the supporting roles), whatever your feelings towards bullfighting. The competing, passionate attitudes towards the art (not a ‘sport’, we are reminded) are dealt with in a fair and subtle way. Wena Poon obviously researched deeply, not just the bare facts, but the inner psychology of matadors, managers, fans, and those vehemently opposed to the whole thing, and weaves it seamlessly into the narrative. She questions too-easy assumptions of cultural superiority (from all sides) and revels in their inherent contradictions, perhaps well illustrated by the scene in which Roberto meets up with his friends, Paco and Ana. Ana has been reading VirtualPeña, a website for women bullfighting fans:

Paco asked her when she became interested in bullfighting. She retorted that she was not, but VirtualPeña was addictive. She added that she supported women in any kind of activity that men didn’t allow them in, even though she taught yoga, was vegetarian, and opposed the corrida, and yes she was a bundle of contradictions, and did the men at the table have a problem with it?

This is a literary novel which is also a page-turner, an exciting story which is intelligently organised and very well written. It also asks questions on identity, on how opinions are shaped and cemented, on tradition and modernity, on danger, beauty, cruelty and violence, and shirks nothing. My advice: get some olives, pour a large glass of fine Rioja, and imagine that it’s sunny outside. Pick up this book and start reading.

(Alex y Robert, by Wena Poon, was published by Salt in 2010, and is currently priced at £6.07 (free postage worldwide) at the Book Depository. The book’s Salt Page is here, and contains useful information, and the button to buy it there now works!

SPL Podcast

I’m featured in the Scottish Poetry Library podcast this week, chatting with Ryan Van Winkle about my mysterious middle name, what I’m writing at the moment, form and structure, Magma, revenge and ego, criticism, and various other matters. I also read two new poems. That’s in between saying ‘you know’ and ‘um...’ and ‘kind of’ a few hundred times too often.

If you'd like a good poetry collection recommendation, you need look no farther than Ryan's Tomorrow We Will Live Here, published last month by Salt. On sale at the Book Depository for only £6.98 at the moment.

Poetry Readings and Setlists

Good reading last night at the Lit and Phil in Newcastle, despite the inclement weather and my sense of direction that turned a dead straight two-minute walk from the train station into a twenty minute circular tour of the city centre. The audience wasn’t huge but they had my admiration for turning up at all in the middle of a sleetstorm, which I’m sure would have kept some people from making it. The building itself is impressive and, although I didn’t have time to do more than glance at what must have been tens of thousands of books in its library, it looked like a splendid archive. There were four Red Squirrel poets (Tom Kelly, Eleanor Livingstone, Kevin Cadwallender and Alistair Robinson), and two of us from Salt (Andrew Philip and myself). Sheila Wakefield, editor at Red Squirrel and organiser of the event, for which grateful thanks, was MC. My set-list was:

1. Sky Blue

2. Everyone Will Go Crazy

3. Plastic Cork

4. Theology

5. Voice Mail

6. A to Z Route Map for the Soul

i) Ahem

ii) Baby

iii) Car-less

7. Nocturnes I and II

8. Fallen Villages of the North

9. How New York You Are

The first three and last two are from The Opposite of Cabbage and the middle section is new-ish.

And here’s my set-list from the Betsey Trotwood in London, from last week:

1. i. m. Norman MacCaig (working title)

2. The Look

3. Moving On

4. Fence

5. Soundings

6. Bladerunner

7. World Class

8. Untitled

9. A Creative Writing Tutor Addresses His Star Pupil

10. While the Moonies are Taking Over Uruguay

Poetry Reviews and Revenge

If you’re anywhere near Newcastle, please come along to the Lit & Phil on Wednesday evening (24th November, 7pm) where I’ll be reading with Red Squirrel poets Kevin Cadwallender, Tom Kelly, Eleanor Livingstone, Alistair Robinson, and Salt co-conspirator, Andrew Philip. It’s a benefit gig for the Lit & Phil, so well worth supporting. I should mention my trip to London last week. I’ve written about the launch of Magma 48 on the Magma blog. My reading the next evening at the Betsey Trotwood with Simon Barraclough, Claire Crowther and Roddy Lumsden was also very enjoyable. Not a massive crowd but they seemed to like what they were hearing, and it was great to hear fine new poems from the other readers.

I did a quick podcast with Ryan Van Winkle yesterday, which I guess you'll be able to hear online some time soon. One question he asked was about reviewing, whether some poets respond to criticism by taking ‘revenge’ and if I have ever suffered from that kind of attitude. I answered by saying that I thought poets didn’t tend to react in that way. They might smart at a negative comment in a review, but most get over these things quickly. Also, that I wouldn’t know if anyone, for example, had blocked me from a festival, prize or magazine because they were miffed at something I’d said about their work. It’s not as though they’re going to tell me, as that would obviously make them look pathetic. I certainly haven’t noticed anything like this so, if it’s happened, it’s not made any difference to me.

I thought about the question afterwards (I often compose better answers to questions after an interview). I still believe what I say above, but I guess there are some people who react to any negative opinion on their work with life-long hatred and will take any opportunity to damage the critic, often in ways well out-of-proportion to the perceived ‘offence’. Well, that’s the way it goes. It’s vital for critics and reviewers not to bother about such things and to write what they think with a degree of integrity. Such revenge-poets, who believe themselves beyond criticism, who somehow think their work is perfect and without any weakness worth mentioning, are still living in Toddlerdom, stamping their feet on their bedroom floors for all eternity. They’d be better not to publish at all if they assume the reaction is going to be universal hero-worship.

It’s with this in mind that I made a solemn vow a while back (unfashionable as solemn vows may be). I promised to myself that I would never allow personal feelings about an author to influence any review I write. If that person has made negative or positive comments about my work, I won’t allow that to affect how I read or comment on their work. If I find that impossible, I simply won’t review their book. Someone else can do it. The same goes for reviewing well-known, ‘influential’ poets. I determined not to allow their position to affect a review, either positively or negatively. I’ve seen reviews published in journals by Poet X on Poet Y’s new book, on how ‘wonderful’ and ‘brilliant’ it is, and then six months later there’s Poet Y reviewing Poet X using those exact same words. That represents the death of criticism and I don’t want any part of it. To paraphrase Morrissey, 'It paves my way, but it corrodes my soul.'