Leicester Poetry Reading & Magazine Launch coming up

Thursday, 11th December, 2008, doors open 7.30pm, FREE
Friends Meeting House, Queen's Road, Leicester.

Open mic and poetry night to celebrate the launch of Under The Radar issue 2, featuring:

Jane Holland - Editor of Horizon Review, reading from her latest Salt collection, Camper Van Blues.
Matt Merritt - Leicestershire poet, shares poems from his first collection, Troy Town.
Matt Nunn - Birmingham's finest poetic export, reading from his forthcoming collection, Sounds in the Grass.
Jane Commane - Warwickshire-based poet reading a selection of her recent work.

Plus open mic slots available - please arrive early to sign up for a place.
*
Again, anyone in the area who can make this reading, I'd be happy to see you. There will be books for sale, and I can personally vouch for the fact that Matt Nunn is very funny!

Wednesday December 3rd: "Ride the Word" at the Foundry, London

Ride the Word

Vincent de Souza, poetry
Vanessa Gebbie, short fiction
Jane Holland, poetry
Chris McCabe, poetry
Jay Merill, short fiction
also Guest Publication: The Delinquent
Speaker: Jason King, editor
Truckers' Art Exhibition
Speaker: Stefan Roman, artist

I'll be reading from my new poetry collection, Camper Van Blues, at the above reading in London next week, Wednesday December 3rd.

Please come along if you can! (There'll also be a reading in Leicester on Thursday December 11th, if that's nearer to home for you. Details to be posted up soon.)

The Foundry is at 86 Great Eastern Street London EC2A 3JL
Old Street tube (exit3) t 020 7739 6900 e info at foundry.tv
www.foundry.tv

All events at the Foundry start at 7pm and are FREE!

The Short Story

I was skimming through some dusty old computer files the other day and came across a slightly promising file labelled Short Stories.

At some point in the past - what on earth possessed me? - I decided to try my hand at that venerable but highly complicated form, the short story. Some of my efforts were published in American anthologies a while ago and promptly fell through a hole in the universe. Others remain unpublished, probably because I'm not terribly good at sending work out once it's finished. Or perhaps because some of those stories had minor problems which had to be sorted before they could be submitted, and of course I lost interest or moved on to some new project, and so the stories were left to gather cyber dust in some abandoned file.

But I've finally decided to dust them off, see if anything can be fixed, and send them out. But where should I submit them?

It's notoriously hard to place short stories, especially non-genre, i.e. 'literary' stories, which most of these unpublished ones are. I'm sure some of the regular readers of this blog could advise me with a few places, in print or online, which take short stories. Preferably places which pay, but I'd be happy with non-paying places for the moment, on the grounds that any publication is better than none!

I notice, for instance, that the estimable Mslexia has a short story competition open at the moment.

So maybe after my cyber-dusting, or rearranging, or complete disembowelling, and last minute polishing, one or maybe even two of these offerings may make their way over to Mslexia in the hope of catching the judge's eye. This, regardless of the fact that all competition wins are utterly random. (Though, of course, when you win one yourself, it was all down to talent!)

Stories can be up to 2,200 words on any topic.
Judge: Helen Simpson
First prize: £2,000 plus a one week retreat and a day with a Virago editor.
Second Prize: £500
Third Prize: £250
3 x other finalists: £100 each
Fee: £8 per story
Deadline: 23rd January 2009
Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann will read all the winning stories.

Visit Mslexia for details of how to enter.

A "Wild" Gawain

I mentioned a while back that I was interested in translating Gawain, since it's one of my favourite pre-Modern English texts, but that since everyone is doing it these days, there seemed little point in jumping on an overcrowded bandwagon.

Well, I've suddenly found an "in" to the project, and written ten poems towards it so far, mostly over the past week or so. Sequences always flow well for me once I'm into the thick of them, and although other work has now interrupted my writing, I have good hopes of getting back to this one soon without losing interest.

What I've done is not started a translation, per se, but written some short sequential responses to Gawain. Though perhaps a better description would be to call it a "wild" or parallel version.

My "wild" version mixes past and present - one of my favourite gimmicks at the moment - so I have a contemporary Gawain story and a medieval Gawain story, interwoven in a sequence of new poems. These poems both follow the thread of the original narrative and depart from it by showing scenes that don't appear there but are mentioned - off-stage scenes, as it were - or that are entirely new.

Sometimes I throw in phrases from the medieval text, or hint at them in passing, but generally, this is all original work. As usual, no guarantees that the sequence will work out and be published in the future. But it's started me writing again with energy after a dry period, and I'm happy enough with that.

Birthday!

It's my birthday tomorrow - 21 again! - so I'm celebrating it here by posting up this rather marvellous compilation of kd lang stills alongside her smoky version of The Joker:



And to follow that, this is a birthday-related poem from my first poetry collection, published by Bloodaxe Books in 1997, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman:

Cherchez la Femme

There is rain
on the windows when I am born
no cries
into a cold November.
The midwife is Caribbean,
complaining of these British winters
even as I slide
into her arms.

Rain becomes my season.
I walk out under the dark clouds
like a missionary
preaching the world of the wet.
I kneel on the earth,
put my face to the dampness
like a child
hidden in her mother's skirt.

Later, unable to wear lace,
I finger photographs
of beautiful women.
Run my hands along lapels,
loving the coarseness of a country tweed,
the brisk crease of a man's shirt.
I sit apart,
smoke French cigarettes,
unfiltered,

my room dark with desire.
Each night it falls at my window
like sharp insistent rain.
My desire is insatiable.
It has many names.
Watching through streaked glass,
I know none of them.

Winners of the Stephen Spender Prize 2008

My apologies for not blogging this past week. I have the best excuse in the world; I was writing. Eight poems in the last seven days, to be precise. Which is particularly pleasing, given that poetry had slowed to a trickle for me in recent months (following the somewhat apocryphal deluge of the summer).

The sudden outpouring is due to a new sequence, of course. Sequences always get me writing with more ease and fluidity. More on that later, since though I've rushed in with the first few poems, the overall structure is still in the process of being shaped in my mind.

So, back to the Stephen Spender Prize 2008.

Joint Winners of the 14s-and-under prize:
Paula Alonso-Lalanda - 'Let's go to the Market!' by Gloria Fuertes (Spanish)
Scarlett Koller - 'Roundelay' by Charles d'Orleans (French)

Winners of the 18-and-under category:
Daniel Galbraith (FIRST) - Amores I.V. by Ovid (Latin)
Iwona Luszowicz (SECOND) - 'In Remembrance of Marie A.' by Bertolt Brecht (German)
Rupert Mercer (THIRD) - Catullus VIII (Latin)

Winners of the Open Category:
Imogen Halstead (FIRST) - Amores 1.1. by Ovid (Latin)
Jane Draycott (SECOND) - an extract from Pearl (Middle English)
JOINT THIRD PLACE:
Emily Jeremiah - 'Theorem' by Eeva-Liisa Manner (Finnish)
Timothy Allen - 'Broken Heart, New Lament' by Nguyen Du (Vietnamese)

The winner of the Open category, Imogen Halstead, is currently in China and couldn't make the award ceremony. So Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, agreed to read the poem in her place. To make her win even more astounding, Imogen is actually 18, and was the original winner in the 18-and-under category. However, the judges decided that her presence there was so powerful as to be unfair to the other poems entered, so she was 'bumped up', in the words of one judge, to win the adult category instead.

For me though, the most powerful and mesmerising poems of the evening undoubtedly came from Daniel Galbraith and Rupert Mercer, talented young writers in the 18-and-under category with two highly idiosyncratic translations from the Latin, and Jane Draycott, whose extract from 'Pearl' was beautifully and sparingly written.

After the readings, we mingled. The awards were being held at the Venezuelan Embassy in central London, a packed hall with tiered seating and a generous raised platform for the performers. Some extraordinarily tasty red wine was served, and a selection of canapés. Lady Spender was there, along with a smattering of other Spenders, Valerie Eliot (the widow of T.S. Eliot), and other luminaries of the poetry world, including Josephine Balmer, one of the judges and herself a fine poet and classicist.

I spoke at length to Matthew Spender, founder of the new 14-and-under category, whose speech had strongly criticised the government as 'not sympathetic to the idea of studying foreign languages in schools'. He considers these prizes for younger translators a 'reproach' to the government for their apathy, and I have to agree with him.

Heaventree Press founding editor Jon Morley, who published my 'Lament of the Wanderer' translation earlier this year, was also there that night, along with Susan Bassnett, a pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Warwick. Susan was one of the Stephen Spender Prize judges, and is herself an expert in a number of languages, including an old favourite of mine, Anglo-Saxon.

Taking the train back to the Midlands together, the party atmosphere continued for another hour, with an enthusiastic discussion of translations, 'poets we have known', and what each of us is currently working on.

Home just before midnight, I then had to hurriedly dash off a Middle English translation for a class the next morning. It was Chaucer, the wonderfully obscene Miller's Tale. From the sublime to the ridiculous!

Stephen Spender Translation Awards

Well, I'm going to brave the inclement weather and dash down to London tonight for the Stephen Spender Translation Awards. I've had a bad chest for the past week, so it's been touch and go whether I could take up the invitation to attend, as editor of Horizon Review, but I've finally decided that I will make the attempt.

Stephen Spender, of course, was not only a great English poet of the last century, but was also one of the founders of the original Horizon, back in the 1940s. And I'm interested in the translation awards, not least because I was intending to enter for the Awards this year but didn't manage to finish my translation in time for the deadline.

So I'm naturally very keen to go tonight and get a feel for the standard, because there's always next year ... !

Definitely a good night to take an umbrella though.

Healthy Food Riddles for Tescos

Sometimes I run and drip,
sometimes I’m still and cloudy.
You may have seen me with a bear.
I wish I could fly
like those who made me.
I’m the only comb
you mustn’t put in your hair.

What am I?


This riddle is intended for 5-10 yr olds, so shouldn't be too tricky!

More riddle poems, written for Tescos as part of my Warwick Poet Laureateship, here.

Having Been Tagged

I've been tagged, apparently! From what I can tell, being tagged is the blogging (or should that be 'blogal'?) equivalent of playing paint-ball and getting hit in the backside with a large splodge of pink.

So I'm supposed to link to the person who 'tagged' me. Write 6 random things about myself here. Then 'tag' six other victims.

I'm going to write the 6 random things below, because I'm a raving egotist and it's always fun for me to talk about myself. But I'm going to shy clear of tagging another six people, as I'm vaguely worried that I'll tag someone who'll consider me a damn nuisance and never speak to me again because of it.

Luckily for Bo, who tagged me, I could never consider him a nuisance, being one of my oldest friends now (in the nicest sense), and besides which I owe him a dinner. Several dinners, if truth be told.

So he gets away with it ...

Meanwhile, 6 random facts about myself, starting with the most obvious:

I was once ranked 24th in the world for women's snooker

I can't make pastry. Well, I can, but few would want to eat the results.

I've flown at Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound) on Concorde - London to New York - and seen the curvature of the earth. How many people will ever be able to say that?

My all-time favourite book is probably A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. (Harry Potter's an interesting character, but he can't compete with Ged.)

I used to run a secondhand bookshop called 'The Little Camel Bookshop'.

Family aside, given the choice between being in company and being alone, I nearly always prefer solitude.

Camper Van Blues

My third full-length collection, Camper Van Blues, has now been launched by Salt Publishing!

There should be an official reading from it at some point but for now I will be reading at the Troubadour (Old Brompton Road, London) next Monday 3rd November, as part of the Seam Magazine launch, and again on December 3rd, which is a Wednesday, with Ride the Word at The Old Foundry, also in London.

If anyone can make the Troubadour reading on Monday, I'd be pleased to see you there. Though it sounds like it may be a very popular night, so do get there early, which means by about 7.30, I think.

Other readers at the Troubadour this Monday include: Anne Berkeley, Michael Laskey, Helen Ivory, Chris Beckett, Katy Evans-Bush, John Greening, Esther Morgan, Peter Howard and Hisham Matar.

Is Verse Drama Dead?

Becket, pictured in a stained glass window at Canterbury Cathedral
We hear occasionally of new verse dramas being produced on radio or on the stage but never with any great trumpeting along the lines of 'Verse drama is back!'

Many of us would think of T.S. Eliot's 'Murder in the Cathedral' as one of the last critically acclaimed verse dramas; not exactly a recent work though, is it? Verse drama simply isn't popular. It makes people uncomfortable.

Speaking verse? As a character in a play? The concept itself sounds old-fashioned and highfalutin. As though the playwright is a little too big for his/her costume drama boots. None of us are Shakespeare or Racine, after all.

So although verse drama is still being written, it tends to be sidelined whenever it resurfaces in public - nothing of any real importance, pleasantly arty and worthwhile, perhaps, but not to be lingered over by the critics.

Can we shake off that 'worthy but dull' image of the verse drama? How do we turn around the predictable 'lovely but I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole' reaction of so many producers and publishers?

Is the effort worth making, or is verse drama irretrievably dead?

Forget technique, forget impressing us: write from the heart, write with your own voice

I won't embarrass the poets by naming them, but at a London poetry reading the other night I really did want to leave before the end. Which is rare for me, someone who has sat through some of the most excruciatingly bad poetry ever produced on this planet. But it really was almost more than I could bear.

Sitting at the back, where a hurried exit would have been spotted by friends, including some of the poets themselves, there were moments when I felt like an animal caught in a trap, desperate enough to consider gnawing my own leg off in order to escape.

The poets whose work particularly offended me were introduced to us as brilliant, innovative, talented, highly thought of, the best young ... etc.

And then they stood up and read reams of tiresome poetry clotted with pointlessly arcane references, foreign words they embarrassingly couldn't pronounce correctly, Latinate phrases for the simplest thoughts - 'ambulate' was used instead of 'walk' at one stage - and all of it in tones of such grave, deliberative pretention, I feared they were in fact eighty-year-old retired church wardens trapped in the bodies of healthy twenty-somethings.

For pity's sake, I wanted to say, write from the heart. Forget technique, forget Greek prosody, forget trying to impress us with your erudition. Life is what impresses us. Give us life in your poetry, raw and beautiful and - above all - honest, and we will forgive you any number of faults.

The voice you need is your own. So use it; not someone else's, least of all poets who have been dead for hundreds or even thousands of years.

But of course, they wouldn't have listened even if I'd stood up there and then to tell them. Because other teachers had been there before me, well-meaning but not up to the task teachers, and poisoned their minds and their talent, to the extent that their poetry has - not surprisingly - died. All that's left is the fossilised husk they read out to us that night, and the instinct to bolster their own work with the words of other, more dynamic, long-dead poets.

I hope to hear them again in the future and be proved wrong.

"Start the Week" this Monday, 9am

Just to let you know I'll be talking about Horizon Review on "Start the Week" this Monday, 20th October - at 9am, if you're ever up that early on a Monday! - which is BBC Radio 4's flagship arts programme.

The other guests with me this Monday are Rupert Goold, theatre director - who's currently directing Pete Postlethwaite in King Lear, along with Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Audience at the Gielgud Theatre, Pinter at the Duke of York AND Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane - also Duncan Wu, writer and biographer (his most recent work is a biography of William Hazlitt) and Jackie Wullschlager, chief art critic for the Financial Times, who's just written a comprehensive tome on the Russian emigré artist Chagall.

If you miss it on Monday, "Start the Week" should be available for about a week using the Listen Again facility on the BBC Radio 4 website.

I'll be visiting the Poetry Library at the South Bank afterwards, having lunch with poet, critic and creative writing tutor George Ttoouli at the Poetry Society, and generally swanning about London in search of lattés and good poetry.

Ah, the life of a literary editor ...

To Translate or Innovate?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x

It may be possible to do both, but I've been wondering recently whether I should do some translation work next or write something completely new.

I'm studying Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original Middle English this month, so of course my fingers are itching to write a new and truly contemporary version of that - sure, everyone says of each new translation of SGGK that it's 'contemporary' but I mean genuinely so, with contemporary references instead of axes and helmets etc. and not following the original form - but whenever I start to consider how I might come at that poem in an original way, I remember someone saying to me recently that everybody seems to be translating these ancient and venerable poems at the moment instead of writing brand new epics. Almost as though poets are scared of pushing ahead into new poetic territories right now, and prefer to look back instead at what's already been achieved.

So part of me is keen to make a new translation or version of some ancient work, and part of me is excited by the thought of creating something utterly new.

But what?

End of the Laureateship

So, about a week ago, I very cheerfully handed over the Warwick Poet Laureateship to Cathy Whittaker, who will hold that post from 2008 - 09, and am now free as a bird. She says, ironically. In fact, I have so many irons in the fire right now, I'm in serious danger of burning my little pinkies.

I'm now studying at Warwick part-time (part-time has actually worked out as four days a week though, so it's more like full than part-time), sending out my teen fantasy novel in the hope of finding a buyer, continuing to work on new poems, editing issue two of Horizon Review, and possibly adapting my long poem "On Warwick Castle" for the stage.

In other words, life is challenging at the moment (especially when it comes to finding somewhere to park at Warwick University!) and far more pressured than before. Hence the absence of blogging in recent weeks.

Indeed, I've had to turn down several offers of work this month alone because I simply don't have time to squeeze in any more commitments. But no doubt as the year moves on I'll grow accustomed to this more rapid pace of life and feel able to take on new projects. For which, watch this space!

During my Laureateship, I wrote my long poem, "On Warwick Castle", and published that last week along with other Warwick-related poems in a pamphlet from Nine Arches Press, plus wrote several locally commissioned pieces, as well as six riddle poems for Tescos and sixteen poems to accompany Anand Chhabra's photographs in the Warwick Words Poetry & Photography Exhibition. I also visited a few schools in the region as Poet Laureate, and performed at a number of social events, including a rather delicious fish and chip fund-raising supper at the medieval Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick.

Meanwhile, although I shall miss being so closely involved with poetry in the Warwickshire region, I'm excited to be turning back to my own personal writing projects, and wish the new Laureate, Cathy Whittaker, all the very best in her year ahead!

How on earth do you pronounce that?

Okay, yes, I'm ridiculously snowed under with work and study, and can't blog, even to bring you up to speed with the great sea-changes that have taken place in my life recently.

Instead, with apologies, I bring you a site I stumbled across today when checking how to pronounce a French place-name: Forvo.

All the words in the world. Pronounced correctly.

How useful is that?

The TLS, Horizon Review, and Throckmorton's Bookshop

I'm very happy to say that Horizon Review made the back page of the TLS this week. My colourful past as editor was flagged up for comment rather than any of the many excellent - some of them award-winning - poets, writers and critics in this first issue, but all publicity is good publicity, as they say.

I'm now selecting new poetry for the second issue, commissioning new critical articles, and looking for literary reviewers. This last is proving harder than I'd imagined. It appears I know only poets and poetry-lovers.

So if you're highly literate and critically engaged - or at least prepared to be - and fancy a crack at reviewing some brand-new literary novels later this year or early next, give me a shout.

I read some of my new work at the Atherstone Arts Festival, Warwckshire, today. Wine was enjoyed afterwards by myself, my fellow readers, and some of the audience in Throckmorton's Bookshop. An excellent bookshop to visit if you're in the area, and not least because they stock several of my books!

Critics Inc.

CHROMA: Want to learn how to review Poetry?

Found this fascinating. A London-based Poetry School course on how to review poetry, with well-known critic Charles Bainbridge. A very worthy thing, I suspect, teaching people how to review.

If it was even remotely possible, which it isn't, I'd take this course myself. It sounds marvellous and I bet some of the post-class pub conversations would be worth the trip too. If you think cramming fifteen poets onto one table at the pub could make for a bitchy conversation, just imagine the potential ding-dong between fifteen poetry critics.

On the Delicate Art of Blurb Writing

Found this deliciously ironic blurb on the back of Faber's Poet-to-Poet Series edition of Hart Crane's poetry selected by Maurice Riordan:

Harold Hart Crane was born in 1899. He spent much of his life in New York City, where he worked irregularly as a copywriter. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926 and his most famous work, The Bridge, in 1930. A reaction against the pessimism in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, it is a love song to the myth of America and its optimism encapsulates the excitement and energy of the Jazz Age. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932.

"Leap from the crags, brave boy"

The Dhoon

Leap from the crags, brave boy
The musing hills have kept thee long
But they have made thee strong
And fed thee with the fullness of their joy
And given direction that thou might'st return
To me who yearn
At foot of this great steep
Leap! Leap!
So the stream leapt
Into his mother's arms
Who wept
A space

Then calmed her sweet alarms
And smiled to see him as he slept
Wrapt in that dear embrace
And with the brooding of her tepid breast
Cherished his mountain chillness
O, then what a rest!
O, everywhere what stillness.


That was the Victorian Manx poet T.E. Brown writing about one of the Isle of Man's most secluded but spectacular National Glens, the Dhoon.

I'm afraid that I can't be bothered to get the formatting right - I could be here all night, fiddling with it - so apologies to dear old TE, for whom 'A garden is a lovesome thing, god wot!'

The photograph above shows me sitting 'midst the bluebells in Dhoon Glen and was taken in the spring of 2000 by the late Roly Drower, musician, poet and political activist, with whom I was in a relationship at the time.

I was recently contemplating changing that photograph as the 'official' picture on my home page - since it's nearly ten years out of date now - and felt rather sad, remembering the happy circumstances in which it was taken and knowing I couldn't hang on to it forever.

The TE Brown poem seemed startling apposite when I came across it on the Dhoon Glen site, which is why I've reproduced it here, unashamedly corny though it is: 'Leap from the crags, brave boy/The musing hills have kept thee long ... //O, then what a rest!/O, everywhere what stillness.'