Féile Filiochta

Hmmmm. I’ve tried twice now to email my entry the Feile Filiochta Poetry Competition, closing date today, and it’s twice been returned to me with the message, “Recipient’s mailbox is full.”

Clear out your mailbox, competition administrators!

***Third time lucky - I think - on Friday evening. So I may have managed to enter this competition after all. Entries were free, so there was nothing to lose.***

Boris Johnson Book of Verse

It appears that buffoon politician, Boris Johnson, has produced a collection of poems – that’s if you stretch your definition of what might be considered a ‘poem’ by several miles.

The Guardian reviewer, Stuart Jeffries, is scathing:

“As you will notice, Johnson has a gift for assonance not heard since Alexander Pope wrote the Rape of the Lock (this will be the quote they use on the paperback edition - just see if it isn't). By which I mean, there are lots of duff rhymes…e.g…

'Every child's a human being,/ not a piece of Plasticine.’”

But is Jeffries scathing enough (he tried his very best, I admit)? Why does anyone put up with plonkers like Johnson, give them book deals, buy their books, vote for them?

And I thought I was half-kidding with my Johnson-Mapanje piece a few months ago. Shudder… Perhaps it gave Johnson the idea to write a bloody poetry book!

Poetry Readings

Take a look at this very funny post on poetry readings by puthwuth.

Monkey Tides

I’ve finished drafting a couple of reviews for Orbis, a UK print magazine. One of them is of Prop by Peter Jaeger, born in Montreal and now based in the UK, very much on the avant-garde side of things.

I knew I’d read something about the collection before online and then remembered it was in a mini-review by Rupert Loydell in Stride magazine (you have to go three-quarters of the way down the page to find the comments relating to Prop). Rupert Loydell comments on one of the poems, this one:

need was cooler than a shout
for drifting anchored loosely

pulling here & there
the monkey tides lap up

against the sun-bleached
logs, how they come & go--

what anchor but a yellow petal
gust of wind or even

saying, “Look at the way this…poem moves between emotion ('need'), abstraction ('monkey tides') and the purely visual & notated ('sun-bleached logs').”

I don't refer to this poem in my review, but I read it very differently. I could be entirely wrong to do so. I separated “monkey” and “tides” – so that you have this drifting matter pulling at a (real! but dead) monkey which the tides act on by lapping it against the logs. The tides (and perhaps also the monkey and logs) “come and go” and the only anchor is the inconstant petal in the wind – a fascinating final image coupled with a deliberately tailed-off fragment “and even”

When I read Rupert Loydell’s comment, I googled “monkey tides” and came up with nothing. That doesn’t mean anything in itself. Because something isn’t in Google doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist (even if some people find that hard to believe), and in any case, Peter Jaeger may have liked the idea of “monkey tides” and decided to invent the phrase. It’s certainly no stranger a phrase than the opening “need was cooler than a shout.” The appearance of an actual monkey would be unique in this book (and hence unlikely), but it’s not impossible, given that some of the poems are set in parts of the world where monkeys are plentiful.

It does make me reflect on the open-endedness of meaning in poetry. This is very different from the vagueness and lack of clarity that afflicts beginners’ poems. Peter Jaeger skews syntax and grammar deliberately to create phrases which can mean one thing or another depending on how a reader chooses to connect the words together. This open-endedness is seen as a strength by some critics, as it allows interplay between the poem and the reader. There’s no sense of definite meaning decided on by the writer. But others would demand a degree of clarity from writers, that they should try to say what they mean, or at least avoid confusion by making images sharp and clear, even if readers then bring their own interpretations to the text.

In other words, does it matter whether there’s a monkey in this poem or a specific type of tides? Does the writer have a responsibility to guide readers one way or the other, or is such confusion part of the joy and fun of poetry?

Minnie Riperton

Her high notes are legendary and the very last one in the song is almost beyond belief, but it's the emotion she puts into the song - the seeming effortlessness of it all - that made Minnie Riperton special.

And she was a one-hit wonder, dying of breast cancer at the age of 31.

"...Please stay with me while we grow old
and we will live each day in Spring
because loving you has made my life so beautiful..."

First Poetry Gig at the Great Grog

Last night’s readings at the Great Grog Bar (by Roddy Lumsden, AB Jackson, Andrew Philip and myself) went really well. I couldn’t single anyone out, as all the poets were excellent, each with a completely different style. I had hoped for just a few more people in the audience, but it wasn’t a bad number, especially given that it was the first poetry event in this venue. More importantly, everyone seemed to enjoy the show, the atmosphere was good (candles on the tables, dimmed lighting), the poetry was of high quality, and the Great Grog’s wine and draught beer was as fine as their advertising claims.

I know Andrew Shields wanted a setlist from every poet. Here's a record of my own set:

1. The Haunting
2. Accident
3. The Listeners
4. Back to Rome
5. Benediction
6. The Innocents
7. Light Storms from a Dark Country
8. How New York You Are

And AB Jackson has just emailed me his setlist:

1. Foxes
2. Office Talk
3. Acts
4. Apocypha: the Apocalypse of Judas
5. Apocrypha: Adam lay miraculous
6. Apocrypha: Abraham
7. Blackbird
8. Acoustic Mineral Wool
9. Missing
10. Lauder's Bar
11. Stammer

Roddy Lumsden has added his setlist to the comments box, but I thought I'd add it here:

1 Against Complaint
2 Shoreline Charismatic
3 Keepsakes
4 Moments of Pleasure
5 My Reptilian Existence
6 Higher Still
7 Tricks for the Barmaid
8 Ludlow
9 The Hook
10 Luck Expressed as a Fraction
11 Contagious Light
12 Against Conceit
13 Ornithogalum Dubium
14 Land's End
15 Sammy's Noodle Bar & Grill
16 Stone Tape Theory
17 A Transatlantic Creed

And finally - what you've all been waiting for - Andrew Philip's setlist.

1. The Invention of Zero
2. Man With a Dove on His Head
3. Pilgrim Variations:
i. The Departure Board
ii. Escape Velocity
iii. To the Naked Eye
iv. Eschatology for Dummies
v. Ice Storm
vi. No Thread to Follow
vii. Futurology
viii. Fire Storm
ix. Via Negativa
x. The Welcoming Committee
4. Notes to Self

Poetry Gig

Just in case any readers from around Edinburgh don’t know this is happening, I’ll paste details of this Sunday’s poetry gig at the Great Grog Bar below. It’s been publicised via the Scottish Poetry Library mailings, the StAnza mailing, Facebook, Poets on Fire, the Shore Poets, a HappenStance Launch, two blogs, and I’ve sent emails to everyone I know in the vicinity. And yet, I’m still concerned that about 5 people are going to turn up!

A great line-up of poets will be reading in the Back Lounge of the Great Grog Bar in Rose Street, Edinburgh (walk up Hanover Street, turn left at Rose Street for 30 metres).

Roddy Lumsden
A. B. Jackson
Andrew Philip
Rob A. Mackenzie

Sunday 4 November 2007, 7.30pm
Free Entry

The Poetry International website’s UK section has just given a page to AB Jackson. Some good new poems of his there. Check it out!

Nothing to do with the reading, but Richard Price now has a page on Poetry International too.

TS Eliot Prize 2007 Shortlist

The shortlist for the TS Eliot Prize 2007 has been announced, one of the UK’s biggest awards:

Ian Duhig The Speed of Dark Picador
Alan Gillis Hawks and Doves Gallery Press
Sophie Hannah Pessimism for Beginners Carcanet
Mimi Khalvati The Meanest Flower Carcanet
Frances Leviston Public Dream Picador
Sarah Maguire The Pomegranates of Kandahar Chatto & Windus
Edwin Morgan A Book of Lives Carcanet
Sean O’Brien The Drowned Book Picador
Fiona Sampson Common Prayer Carcanet
Matthew Sweeney Black Moon Jonathan Cape

I like a few of these poets, but my first reaction is to feel it’s a rather conservative, predictable list of names.

As far as publishers go, I make the score:

Carcanet 4
Picador 3
Gallery 1
Cape 1
Chatto & Windus 1

which means 0 for Faber & Faber and Bloodaxe, and no debut on the list for Salt or Shearsman (so no Luke Kennard or Claire Crowther), let alone any of the smaller presses. That's nothing new of course.

The two surprises are Allan Gillis (whose book I must take a look at, as he lives in Edinburgh) and Frances Leviston, whose debut collection is still to be published (so impossible for me to know how good it is). **Actually, I've just realised that it was published today.**

Can Edwin Morgan do it? He probably deserves a lifetime’s service award, and there’s some great stuff in A Book of Lives, but I don’t think it’s his strongest collection.

Difficult to call. I'll say more over the next few days.

November Snakeskin

The November issue of online magazine, Snakeskin, is up. It includes two of my poems:

On the Escalator with my Daughter
Love Song from the Pot to the Kettle

Your Messages

Here’s an interesting idea from Lynne Rees and Sarah Salway. Each day of November on their blog, they invite 300-word responses to their “messages” and the best ones will be published in an anthology on bluechrome press in 2008.

Reading the guidelines and examples at the link will give you a better idea of what this is all about.

Titles and Pen Names

Yesterday, I posted my entry for the Poetry Business competition. You need to submit 20-24 pages worth of poems. The four winners get a chapbook collection of their poems published and a cash prize. It’s a well-established competition with a formidable reputation for finding high quality work. Chances of winning – as ever at this level – are slim.

One intriguing aspect is the choice of a title for the collection and of a pen-name. The title is clearly important as a collection of chapbook length requires an underlying unity. Its theme might be loose and wide-ranging, but there’s got to be something holding the collection together and the title should at least allude to that.

The choice of pen-name is another matter. Real names mustn’t appear anywhere on the manuscripts, and you might imagine that this rule is simply concerned with anonymity of submission and transparency of judging, but I don’t think so. The judges are bound to recognise poems in many manuscripts because they will have read them in magazines, competitions and anthologies. I know it will be easy for at least one of them to identify my entry and there’s nothing I can do about that – other than leave out some of my stronger poems, which would be self-defeating. So I don’t believe the pen-name requirement is primarily concerned with anonymity and, in any case, I think these judges will select their favourite entries irrespective of who has written them.

I was discussing the matter with Eleanor Livingstone on Sunday, and Matt Merritt also considered the issue on his blog a couple of weeks ago. Could it be that the choice of pen-name is part of the ‘test’? Choosing a name like ‘Jim Smith’ might suggest a failure of both nerve and imagination. ‘T. S. Stevens’ could suggest pretension and megalomania. ‘Sa Mi-Gyoung’ might suggest deception unless it becomes clear that you really are a Korean woman.

So what to choose? Clearly I can’t make public either my title or pen-name here. All I can say is that I chose them with the kind of deliberation I’d bring to writing the final line of a poem. Of course, it may turn out that the pen-names are entirely irrelevant.

Editing qarrtsiluni

The issue of qarrtsiluni that Kate Abbott and I guest-edited is now complete. We’ve concluded the issue with a real cracker of a poem (with a terrific photograph to match). Don’t miss it! I thought I'd try to say something here about the experience of editing.

As experiences go, this was a good one. At first submissions were slow in coming and I was a little concerned. However, it was probably a positive sign that people were thinking about the theme and working on their pieces rather than rushing them in.

We received a few strong pieces early on, but it was only after the first few weeks that things began to take off. It became vital to deal with submissions in as disciplined a way as possible so as they didn’t build up in too large quantities. I was surprised at the amount of high quality material we were sent, particularly on the poetry side (we could have done with more quality prose). I had expected far more bland stuff and we had to reject pieces that weren’t bad to make room for the ones which had something extra about them, that indefinable quality that demanded attention.

In the vast majority of cases, Kate and I were able to agree quickly on pieces we wanted to accept and reject. Some kept us in discussion late into the night. A co-editor is valuable. I would have rejected a few pieces of real worth had Kate not persuaded me otherwise and I think the same is true the other way round.

In a small number of cases, we worked with authors and suggested ways of improving their submissions. Some pieces needed a tweak here or there, others needed more substantial changes, but it was great when writers revised pieces and sent them back in a far stronger form. I guess that if qarrtsiluni continues to grow in readership and in numbers of submissions, this co-operative element might prove more difficult.

Rejecting submissions from friends and Internet colleagues was hard, and we had to do a fair bit of that. However, receiving brilliant submissions from people with whom we’d previously had no contact made up for it. I was so impressed by one poet’s submission (well, OK, Claire Crowther) that I went online to purchase her collection the very next day, and it’s excellent.

So it was great to be part of an online magazine that’s gaining a reputation for eclectic, quality literature and strong visual design. I hope you enjoy the issue and might consider submitting to qarrtsiluni in the future. A new theme with new guest-editors will appear sometime in early November.

Shore Poets Tonight

More live poetry again tonight, this time at the Shore Poets. The line up is impressive:

Gillian Allnutt (“her work is at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron” – Denise Levertov)
Christine de Luca (queen of literary Shetland)
James W Wood (yet another HappenStance poet, and a good one)

from 7.45pm at the Mai Thai Bar, down from the Scottish Poetry Library in Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh.

New HappenStance Launch

I’ll be off soon for a new HappenStance launch – four new chapbooks – at the Scottish Poetry Library this afternoon, 3pm. The titles are.

The Oboist’s Bedside Book – Margaret Christie
The Body in the Well – Gregory Leadbetter
The Longing Machine – Marcia Menter
Poems for Alice – Michael Munro

I’ve read poems by Margaret Christie and Gregory Leadbetter before – both excellent poets. I don’t know of the other two, but I could lay bets on them being good.

How to Win the National Poetry Competition

Well, entries have to be in for the UK National Poetry Competition by 31 October and poets throughout the country will be making those last-minute, oh-so-important alterations to propel their poems into the limelight.

I thought I’d pass on a few tips. I did get a poem commended a couple of years ago, and after much thought, I think I know how to get into the top three this year. But I am generous and don’t want to keep the information to myself. Choose from among the guidelines below. Following more than one suggestion is recommended.

1. Paste photographs of your children to your entry. If you don’t have children, use someone else’s.

2. Make sure someone dies horribly in your poem, especially a spouse, lover or child, even if they are still very much alive in real life. Play the sympathy card to the max.

3. If you feel that last suggestion lacks integrity, arrange to have someone kill you in a particularly brutal way. Your entry should be called, “My Last Gift to the World.”

4. Submit all your entries on pink paper, the more luminous the better.

5. Never type your entry. The more eccentric the handwriting, the better your chances will be of winning. Red pen or yellow felt-tip are the favoured options. Judges like that personal touch.

6. Crayon drawings around the margins of each page are a good idea, particularly pixies and kittens. They may distract the judges from that lack of subject-verb agreement in line 34.

7. Scour magazine archives in libraries for early poems from the judges that never appeared in their collections. The judges will probably have forgotten all about them. Enter them as your own work. An uncanny echo sounding in the judges’ heads will predispose them in your favour.

8. Write poems which explore the relationship you had with a dead grandparent. It’s all about making your poems stand out from the pack and no one else will think of that one.

9. Don’t be limited by the maximum 40-line rule. If your entry has 6,476 lines, join as many lines together as possible. Long poems are difficult to write and are bound to impress the judges.

10. Remember to attach copious notes that explain points the judges may have trouble grasping. After all, they can’t see inside your mind and you want them to be sure of the size of your intellect.

11. Use words such as eldritch, ontic, topos, and chthonic, as often as possible.

12. Be careful to avoid any resemblance to poetry in your poems. This is really important. Most poetry isn’t really poetry at all. Copy a section from a rail timetable or a guide to Windows Vista and chop it into lines. The shorter the lines, the more gravitas your entry is likely to have.

13. Judges enjoy novelty packages. Fold your poem into a paper aeroplane and seal it in a padlocked metal box. A key is optional as the judges will also enjoy trying to get into the box without one.

14. Spray your manuscript with a powerful unisex scent. Entries are anonymous, but if a judge thinks you want to sleep with him/her, it’s bound to make a difference.

15. Submit a sestina using all three judges’ names as end-words. For example, this year (judges - Michael Schmidt, Penelope Shuttle, E.A. Markham), you could begin:

“You must be taking the proverbial Michael!”
Maria exclaimed, “You think I could be Schmidt-
-en by the likes of you?” Earl glanced at Penelope,
who must have lied to him. If only a space Shuttle
could lift him to a distant galaxy. The initials E.A.
had been carved into a oak tree near Markham

village, and as Maria had once lived in Markham,
Penelope had put two and two together. “Michael
is better looking than you and belongs to the E.A.
posse,” Maria said, “but you don’t know Schmidt!”
It was now important that Earl caught the last Shuttle
bus home, even if he had to share it with Penelope...

...er, and so on...

16. Submit a ‘concept poem.’ For example, write a different word on each sheet of a toilet roll. Invite the judges to piece them back together in the correct order.

17. Use text language as often as you can. Choosing such a poem as a winner will give the judges street credibility, even if you turn out to be resident in a nursing home.

18. If all else fails, start referring to yourself “as one of the UK’s most important poets of all time” in your blog and in every poetry board you can find on the Internet, and everyone will eventually come to believe that you, at one time, did win the competition or at least should have done.

Some of these techniques will not work with this year’s judges who, unfortunately, appear to be people of great integrity. So think of it as a practice run for future occasions. And who knows, you might get lucky!

Mary Margaret O'Hara

With 'Miss America' (1988), she recorded one of the greatest albums of all time, and topped it off by not following it up! Apparently she still plays low-profile gigs around Toronto, but that's rather far away from me. So I'm delighted to find this video clip of her performing in her unique style.

John Llewellyn Rhys Prize Shortlist

The Guardian reports on the shortlist for this year's John Llewellyn Rhys prize, which is awarded to a writer aged under 35 for a work of fiction, non-fiction, drama, or poetry, has been announced – but contains no poetry or drama.

One of the judges, Peter Hobbs, talked about the submissions (which are made by publishers);

"There was very little poetry and drama at all," he said, suggesting that with big publishers restricted to three titles every year, it is difficult to reflect the diversity of their output. "It's partly market forces," he admitted, "the novel is what sells, much more than short stories, poetry and plays."

Fiona Sampson, editor of Poetry Review, responded;

"It's a bitter irony that awards have been subsumed into the battle for sales," she continued. "Literary prizes are one of the few things that might offset publishers' whims and the logic of the bottom line."

Publishers and booksellers already make decisions about which books to promote most heavily, she continued, and awards that only consider the books put forward by publishers will only replicate those decisions, giving shortlists the air of the three-for-two tables at the front of big bookshops. "Literary prizes ought to be leading the way, rather than responding to market forces," she added. "Prizes will have to change if they want to be taken seriously."

I couldn’t agree more. But there you have it. Publishers, understandably I suppose, note how prizes can greatly increase sales. They submit books they think will sell, given publicity, not the books they think are best. And poetry drops even further from the public eye because it doesn’t get onto the prominent displays that bookshops reserve for prize shortlists.

If publishers are able to submit three books each, it surely makes sense for the competition rules to insist that publishers must submit books from three of the four categories, ensuring that drama and poetry have a chance of a fair showing. But I don’t see that happening in a hurry.

The Act of Making

George Szirtes has posted some interesting thoughts on The Sensation of Making a poem. And he invites other writers to email him (the address is on his home page) with articulations of their own.

Andrew Shields has responded. And I started a PFFA thread on the subject.

Poets in Velvet

My wife doesn’t read much poetry, but devours novels – hundreds each year of all kinds. She indulges, now and again, in a spot of chick-lit. At the moment, she’s reading a book called The Chocolate Lovers’ Club by Carole Matthews.

On page 183 of this novel is the following paragraph:

The poetry book that’s being launched is an anthology and I notice that there are several of the contributors mingling nervously with the guests. You can tell that they’re poets as they’re wearing mainly velvet clothing with lots of scarves and some of them have on jaunty hats.

Velvet? Lots of scarves (inside!)? Jaunty hats? Does that description scream 'poet' to you?

To be honest, she could probably spot the poets far more easily by those who'd start re-arranging her first sentence to read:

The launch is for a poetry anthology and I notice several contributors mingling nervously with the guests.

Submissions

I have the idea of sending poems out in late October and November. I already have batches of poems at three magazines, but I will know either way from at least two of these by early November. I’m working on what I imagine to be eight of my strongest unpublished poems – mainly tweaking and minor re-orderings, but in certain sections I’ve also tried making imagery more unpredictable and compressing some of the prosy bits into something resembling poetry.

The UK National Poetry competition entries need to be in by 31 October. There are two or three magazines I’d like to have a shot at. Deciding what to send where is always a problem. I could easily send a potential national winner to be rejected by a magazine editor, or send a poem the magazines would snap up and even pay me for to the wastepaper bin at the National Poetry competition HQ.

Is there such a thing as a 'competition poem'? I'm not convinced that there is, and the judges this year - Michael Schmidt, Penelope Shuttle, and E.A. Markham - may spring a few surprises.

Anyway, for the moment, I’m going to keep working and hope that things become clearer towards the end of the month.