Billy Collins, review at Tower Poetry

Just flagging up my review of former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins' latest collection on Tower Poetry.

Horizon 3

Dowson’s grave, Brodsky’s dwindling reputation, Paterson’s Forward-winning collection and new Native American writing, all examined in the latest Horizon Review ...

Issue three of Horizon Review is the Poetry Issue, featuring provocative and in-depth interviews with Craig Raine, Pascale Petit and Hugo Williams, plus new poems by David Morley, Helen Ivory, Claire Crowther and many others, and a review of the Forward Prize-winning collection Rain by Don Paterson.

Countering recent accusations across the poetry world of a gender imbalance in poetry journals, women contributors outnumber men in this issue.

There is also a 'Bedside Table Interview' with A.L. Kennedy, plus essays on Shelley, Victorian decadent poet Ernest Dowson, new Native American writing and Ruth Padel. The Horizon Podcast explores the current renaissance in Midlands Poetry, while the issue closes out with another whimsical offering from columnist and Guardian-blogger Peter Robins on cookery books-cum-musicals.

Read Horizon here

Horizon Review Issue Three

• Horizon Review is edited by Jane Holland. The online review is published twice a year.

• The free magazine forms part of the Salt website which receives 2.3 million page downloads a year, 23 million hits and over half a million unique visitors.

• Irish writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir is now Fiction Editor.

• Critic George Ttoouli is now Reviews Editor.

Salt Blog Explosion

Salt Publishing has now rolled all its blogs into one page: read them here.

Salt Confidential is powering on with ideas for Christmas presents, hot-off-the-press news from the poetry frontline, and facts on fiction. I haven't posted any entries on Horizon Review since the summer though. Bad Jane!

Still, now that Horizon is about to launch its 3rd issue, the blog entries will rise again, dripping and steaming from the ... whatever that gooey stuff is under my feet.

"Villains" for National Poetry Day

It's National Poetry Day, and the theme this year was "Heroes and Heroines". The problem for me is that writing a poem about a heroic character is akin to writing the straight man in a comedy; it's hard to be inspired, and the result is often a little flat and tricky to deliver with any conviction.

Now villains ... those fit the dark art of poetry far better. Look at Milton's Lucifer!

And the day begins with the news that at last night's Forward Prizes (already dubbed Backward by some wag), Don Paterson's collection Rain (Faber) won the Prize for Best Collection, Emma Jones (also, um, Faber) won the Best First Collection with her Striped World, and, as Rob MacKenzie put it this morning, The Best Poem category was 'won by the editor at Cape who is published by Picador, where the poetry editor is the winner of the Best Collection.'

So, is it time yet for a revolution?

What we need on the ground is a public symbol of such cosy interdependences, some kind of Bastille to storm. Though even if there was one, and we stormed it, there'd probably only be a few copies of past Faber collections in there to liberate.

David Kennedy reviews Voice Recognition at Stride

Stride continues its good work online with a review by 'New Poetry' anthologist David Kennedy of the recent Bloodaxe anthology Voice Recognition.

Not everyone's cup of tea, since it doesn't conform to the 'praise everything equally' school of literary criticism, but worth a look if you prefer a bit of politics instead with your toasted teacake.

Thanks to Roddy Lumsden for sharing this link on the Poets on Fire forum.

My "Anker" Poem to be installed at Polesworth

Polesworth Poets Trail

To mark National Poetry day on the 8th October, the Polesworth Poets Trail project team are pleased to announce that the first poem installation will be take place during this week.

The poem, The River Anker by Jane Holland, has been etched into copper plate and fixed to five large pieces of Mancetter stone which were kindly donated by Tarmac at Mancetter Quarry and have been sculpted by Planet Art. The stones, which will also include Michael Drayton’s poem, To the Ancor, will be placed on the river bank in Abbey Green park close to the foot bridge.

This is the first of ten contemporary poems that will be installed over the coming weeks, the poems coming from two commissions and eight poems chosen from a national competition. The installation of these ten poems will complete the first phase of the trail which has been funded from a generous grant from Advantage West Midlands.

Project Director, Malcolm Dewhirst said “This is the culmination of a lot of hard work from a dedicated team of people who shared the vision of bringing poetry back to Polesworth. We hope that the poetry trail will attract poets from all over the world to come to Polesworth and that this will be the first of many poetry events to be held in this literary town, which saw the greatest poets of the 16th century meeting at Polesworth Abbey.”

Birmingham Book Festival - coming up!

I'm extremely pleased to be running a day of one-to-one poetry surgeries on Saturday October 10th at the Birmingham Book Festival, under the auspices of The Poetry School and along with Mimi Khalvati.

Here are some more details of the festival:

The Birmingham Book Festival (6th – 29th October 2009), in its tenth glorious year, presents... Nick Hornby on ‘Juliet, Naked’, Kate Mosse on novels and readers’ groups, novelists Sadie Jones and Kate Pullinger in conversation, BBC Radio Four’s A Good Read and the final of the BBC Radio Four Poetry Slam (recorded for broadcast), John Boyne, author of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, David Edgar on writing plays, Paul Griffiths on Ophelia, Robert Goddard, the crime writer, George Monbiot on the future, Karen Armstrong on faith, Richard Hamblyn on extraordinary clouds, Jo Toye on The Archers, thriller writer Roger Ellory launches his new novel, Lindsey Davis talks about her new book, Brian Keenan on his life and times, the Tindal Street Booker Prize authors (Catherine O’Flynn, Gaynor Arnold and Clare Morrall ) and many more writers and performers, also workshops and seminars.

We also have a wonderful Readers’ Afternoon on Saturday 24th October with novelists Jenn Ashworth, Mark Illis, Jeremy Page and Amanda Smyth with special group booking discounts for readers’ groups and groups of readers!

Do come to events, take part in workshops, become a Festival Friend... for more details of everything and to join the e-list visit Birmingham Book Festival | 6-29 October 2009. Follow us on facebook, on twitter and read our blog.

Poetry Olympics

Poetic Swings and Prose Roundabouts

John Keats, probably not having any trouble writing prose and poetry at the same time, unlike me

The kids go back to school next week, and I can already feel that inexorable swing back toward prose happening inside. I wrote another poem today in my rebranded, reshaped Gawain sequence, but it was an effort. The easy glide of mid-summer poetry is dissipating. I may only have a few more days of composition left in me. Until next time, that is.

I want to write something about Hughes, so that's been flagged up mentally and is now occupying some space where my own work was. And I'm studying Romantic and Victorian poetry over the next academic year, which means I have Keats and Hopkins permanently at my bedside - metaphorically speaking - and though I love them both deeply, they are not the stuff new poetry is made from.

But last week, oh last week, I wrote something good. Not in the Gawain sequence, but a stand-alone lyric. I was very pleased with it. So pleased, in fact, it may keep my toes warm all winter.

Horizon Review is due out in another few weeks, too. More work of a non-poetic type. So it's back to school and back to prose. But until that last leaf falls from the tree, I shall keep squeezing the remnants of poetry out as best I can.

The Big Salt Facebook Vote

Three posts in one day. I'm having a rush of blood!

I also forgot to mention the big Salt vote-fest on Facebook. What is the most important book Salt has ever published?

You'll need to login to Facebook (or register if you're not already in the system) in order to vote here.

Katy Evans-Bush: The Poetry Workshop

And I forgot to flag this up, for those in the London area: a new poetry workshop, being run by Katy Evans-Bush, whose poetry is published by Salt and whose Love Ditty of an 'eartsick Pirate, an affectionate and hilarious take on Eliot's Prufrock, in Piratese, can be found at the Horizon Review website.

Katy's workshop will meet at the Lamb Pub, 94 Lambs Conduit Street, London WC1
6.30-8.30pm, Wednesdays
The price is £125 a term
Starts September 23rd

See Katy Evans-Bush's website for details of how to join.

Reviewing (and the importance of the line-break)

I seem to go through phases in my writing. Some months it's prose fiction, others it's poetry, and still others it's reviewing. Not that I don't mix and match occasionally, but prose and poetry do feel like natural opposites - enemies, even? - and so try not to do both at the same time, or not without experiencing a little inner tension.

This month, I've been writing some new poems, revising old ones, and also working up to a handful of reviews I've got in hand, one bunch for Iota and the other for Poetry Review. By working up to them, I don't mean girding my loins, i.e. mentally preparing myself, but reading the books in question, making a few notes, and generally allowing the poems I've read to circulate creatively in my mind.

It's an instructive exercise, reviewing. Having to formulate your thoughts on someone else's poetry can make you return to your own work with a more analytical eye. Or it can make you despondent, if the poet you're reviewing happens to be very good!

Something that has a strong effect on me at the moment is the line-break. I'm becoming a little obsessed, perhaps, with the ramifications of the line-break. It was always a defining moment for me in the poems I have written, but it now seems, more than ever, the key to a good poem. Or perhaps, deeper than that, the key to what kind of poet one is or becomes.

So when I review books of poetry, one of the most important things I'm instinctively - rather than overtly - noticing as I read through, is the line-break. Which really means, I'm listening to the rhythms of the poem even more than I'm listening to the surface meaning, because in a bad poem the line-break struggles against the meaning in a clumsy and inapposite way, and in a good poem, the line-break hands you the sense and feel of the poem both aurally and visually, without effort.

This was meant to be a post about reviewing, but perhaps it's secretly a post about the importance of the line-break. Which is indeed the very thing vexing and exciting me this morning.

Gawain, Again

I'm rather relieved this week because, after months of impasse on my Gawain and the Green Knight sequence, I am finally clear about its structure and general direction.

It all happened rather suddenly. I was just browsing my file of poems, tidying things up and pondering the shape my fourth collection might take, when it struck me that instead of just vaguely picking out key moments in the poem, or key emotions, and writing poems around them in an ad hoc fashion, I should follow the traditional division of the poem into four Fitts and restrict myself to writing only three or four poems for each Fitt.

For this new-and-improved sequence, I selected four of the poems I had already written and jettisoned the rest. Then I started writing some new poems in a more linear way, choosing key scenes rather than floating about the topic.

I was also concerned to change the style of the poems themselves. To regiment my earlier disorganised margins, I pulled in all off-set lines to the left-hand margin and capitalised the first word of each line. This seemed to give the growing sequence an air of "difference" from the other poems I've written this year, and also some faked, much-needed gravitas.

Having done that, and written some new poems in this new format, I then discarded the capitalisation, which had served its purpose, and allowed some of the lines to drift back into their earlier positions, away from the left-hand margin. But I am keeping the majority of lines flush with the left for the moment, as that formal discipline does seem to be working on the whole.

I'm still not sure whether the sequence is any good, by which I mean worth publishing. But it has some good moments. It's definitely something to keep tinkering with, on and off, with a spanner and an oily rag. My Sunday sequence.

Looking Back

I've written a handful of poems in recent weeks about my childhood and teenage years: Proustian reminiscences, holiday snapshots, family portraits, that kind of thing. It's a well-worn genre within poetry, and that fact alone makes me worried. Is it the poetic equivalent of a mid-life crisis to suddenly start writing poems about one's youth?

They're not desperately bad, these poems. One has just been accepted at Poetry Review, and I'm fairly confident of placing a number of others in magazines over the next year. They are honest poems, written - thanks to a general lack of it in my family - without sentimentality. They appear to work well in a stand-alone lyric sense, and easily earn their place in my fourth collection.

Yet somehow I'm uneasy about having written them and about wishing to write more, which I definitely do. There seems to be a positive wellspring there, looking back at my past with older eyes, and any gush of new, publishable poetry must surely be welcome after twelve years in the game.

But am I really the sort of poet who writes 'nostalgia'?

Being Honest

Hopefully not another blind alley, since I've lost myself in a few of those recently, but I'm writing poetry again after a short break (not dried up but forcing myself to concentrate on prose this summer, since, as David Morley advised me a few months back, we all have to eat and prose tends to pay where poetry doesn't).

I didn't want to write any poetry again until the autumn, but my poetry had other ideas ...

The most important thing for me at the moment, in terms of writing poems, is to be honest and not get sucked into making empty gestures, by which I mean the 'telling' last line which explains the poem, or the genre piece which points to nothing beyond itself, and other crimes against poetry.

The danger is that in not wishing to be too damned honest - i.e. gushing or becoming too realistic/mundane for poetry to bear it, so that it breaks apart into prose - I may err on the side of being too laconical or obscure.

Artifice or artistic integrity. Dirty great hints to the reader or embarrassed dumbshow. Where are the dividing lines? What are the differences?

Mort à la poesie

Some mid-summer break entertainment for you. "Death to Poetry." And a very odd film to accompany that sentiment.

Review of The Wanderer on the Happenstance site

I just found a groovy short review of my Heaventree-published pamphlet translation of the Anglo-Saxon classic, The Wanderer, on the Happenstance website.

Thanks to Matt Merritt for that. Not sure how long it's been there, but it's a great review and much appreciated. All those rather painful months of work on The Wanderer ... and now I can be sure at least one person enjoyed it!

P.S: Yet More Reviews, Summer 2009
There's also a charming review of Camper Van Blues (reviewed by Sarah Maskill) and a highly complimentary review of The Lament of the Wanderer (reviewed by David Morley) both in this quarter's issue of Poetry Review, which is entitled "Cosmopolis" and can be bought online or via most good bookshops.

Gawain: Loved, and shining with it

Loved, and shining with it, tin cup champion,
you step out, stand hard
in winter gleam, sunshine. Armed
with your lance, ice-tipped,
you’ll drive forth
along the motorways of Britain, Coldplay
cast on for company,
the blow that awaits you hidden;
still loved, unlost,
a lily.

Poetic Justice: feminism and poetry

Ought to flag this new development up in between poems from the Gawain sequence. Feminists, and proto-feminists, follow this link. Anti-feminists, best not to.

As if I didn't have enough to do these days ...

Poetic Justice

Gawain: "The scaly dragon, surprised"

The scaly dragon, surprised,
seizing one metal-gold thigh in his teeth ...

Sorry, folks, but a few hours after posting this poem, I received an email reminding me that it was about to be published in Trespass Magazine. I had somehow forgotten to note that acceptance down in my files, and thought the poem was okay to post up. Apologies to Trespass, I've removed it now.

Ho-hum. I'll find a replacement once I'm back from the dentist. Assuming I ever come back from the dentist, that is.