Why the Pen is Still Mightier than the Keyboard

As I was saying in a previous post to Raw Light, since dragging myself out of childhood I have always written straight to a keyboard; first, onto the humble typewriter as a teenager and young adult, then later onto a computer, drafting straight onto the screen both for poetry and prose. I found it helped me to see - especially with poetry - how the finished work would look on the printed page.

For poetry in particular, line endings and the white spaces created by stanza breaks seem to fall into sharper focus in print or on screen, where on paper they are often all but invisible.

That's down to my dreadful scribble, though. Writers with cleaner handwriting than mine - or who are more disciplined at keeping their lines straight and evenly spaced - probably don't suffer from the same problem, i.e. being unable to decipher their own scrawl at a later date, let alone see how it might translate to the printed page.

But editing a poem is a different matter. There I need to escape from that clinical 'finished' air of the computer screen and get back to my scribble, to free myself up for making those necessary changes before I can start typing again.

So the ink pen comes out, as I'm a visceral sort of creature and find pencil too anaemic a medium for writing - unless making marginal notes in a book where pen marks always look like an act of desecration - and it does have to be good black ink, preferably from a fountain pen. Something that writes boldly, that feels strong and certain in my hand, a pen that means business.

Last week I happened to find some old Selfridges vouchers in the back of a drawer, dating back a couple of Christmases, and we drove into central Birmingham to spend them at the Bullring. I had intended to get my husband an expensive silk tie, something pointlessly extravagant, but then he made the foolish mistake of leaving me alone in the Selfridges stationery department before we reached menswear.

That's when I caught sight of the pen, waiting for me in a glass cabinet like Sleeping Beauty, still and silent. Deep red, naturally enough for a Scorpio, is my favourite colour. And this pen is a real beauty, smooth and red and exquisitely sensual to hold.

The assistant took it out of the cabinet for me to try, my husband's tie was forgotten, and the pen ate up all those vouchers instead ...



To return to my earlier point, I want to explain how that act of revising poems by hand actually works and why it's so important to me. And the easiest way for me to do that is probably to show the act of revision in progress.

So I've leafed through old drafts of published poems - I throw most of them out now because the accumulation of paper is simply too much otherwise - and have found a few that may illustrate what I mean. These are early drafts of a poem called Desert Mother which was published last year in my second collection, Boudicca & Co. (Salt Publishing).

As you will see from the scans I've taken of these early drafts, the title is one of the most revised and agonised over parts of a poem for me. Sometimes the right title comes to me very early on, and that rightness seems to inform the whole process of writing the poem. But in most cases, the working title keeps changing over the life of a poem-in-draft, and is sometimes still in doubt even as a book is going to print.

The body of the poem is also changed as the drafts pile up. Sometimes I return to earlier drafts and reinstate lines which have been cut, but mostly I simply discard those embryo drafts and only work on later versions when revising for publication. What I'm usually looking for are ways of economising with language and sound.

Fewer words, or more specifically, the most telling words. Clean, clear strokes on the page, rather like a striking piece of calligraphy. Also listening for the words which hit the right note at the right pitch and rhythm for that poem. All of which are tremendously difficult to achieve, especially if you're trying to achieve such a stern level of economy and accuracy throughout a poem and not just in those miraculous lines where it came naturally at the first-ever draft.

The first few and last few lines are nearly always the worst troublemakers, as these drafts show. Often a poem will simply sit in a file for several years because I can't satisfy myself with one or two lines. If I'm lucky the right version will eventually present itself. If not, the poem gets thrown away or is lost as I upgrade computers and fail to copy all the older poems on file. I rarely keep paper copies, again because of lack of space for all those fiddly drafts.

No wonder I take so long to put together my poetry collections ...

Here's 'The Rucksack'



NB. To read these drafts more closely, click on the image and a slightly enlarged version should open in a new window.


And here's 'Tomorrow, Lord'




Now here below is the finished poem - if any of my poems can be described as finished! - as it appears in Boudicca & Co. (Salt Publishing, 2006).

As you can see, the title has now become the more self-explanatory 'Desert Mother' and the subtitle clearly indicates where the original inspiration for this poem came from, i.e. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. To emphasise this, but also to give the poem added context, I merged the original rather vague 'mother and father' lines into a more authoritative, framing reference to prominent members of the communities, namely the Sisters and Abba Macarius.

It's a plain-looking poem on the page, maybe even a little clumsy in some of its line ending. But in performance, it can be an extremely effective piece of poetic theatre.


Desert Mother
(After Fortitude 38 and 39, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers)

My cell is the pillar of cloud
where God spoke to Moses.
It’s the furnace I stand in,
morning and evening,
an intolerable column of fire
between me and God.

Each day I pack my rucksack, peer out
at the desert. The Sisters
weep for me. Abba Macarius
prays for me. I press
imaginary footprints into the sand,
my hated cell shrinking
in the distance,
nothing but a hot dusty hell
I’ve crouched in
these seventeen years.

And each night
I lay down my rucksack for a pillow
and praise God
saying, ‘Tomorrow, Lord.
Tomorrow.’

Writing in Cafes

I love writing in cafes. Writing any old thing, prose or poetry or articles or personal letters. I even enjoy doing my Ancient Greek in cafes, if I can manage to haul all the books I need along to the place in question. Prose can demand research materials to hand, earlier pages, or a synopsis to glance at now and then. But when writing a poem, all you really need is some paper and a pen or pencil. It's the ultimate portable art.

I usually write poetry longhand these days, using a proper ink pen, a fountain pen preferably, with strong black ink, something that will sink into the paper. And the paper doesn't have to be in some beautiful arty loose-leaf book, though I do occasionally use those. Often I find the best poems emerge out of scribbled lines on tattered envelopes, with many false starts and crossings-out, developing later into something worth saving.

I used to write all my poems straight onto the computer, even at the very start of my writing career when I was hammering away at some archaic Amstrad, but at some stage I started to enjoy writing whilst sitting alone in my greenhouse or my camper van and that slowly changed the way I worked. I no longer have either a greenhouse or a camper van - alas, I miss them both terribly! - but I still tend to write first drafts of poems longhand now, usually in a cafe.

Today I was working on a poem for teenagers that I've been commissioned to write. It didn't quite come right, but I've made a start on the idea and there are odd little shreds in this first draft that may appear later in the final poem.

It would have been nice to finish that new poem today. But I've not been well this week - a bad chest cold and a threatened ear infection - so I don't blame myself too much for not getting a poem right at the first attempt. Sometimes you do have to worry at poems, let them go for a few days, maybe chip away at them from time to time, not force them to emerge before they're ready.

So instead I came home and started to draft something up for one of my other blogs, the one I use to document the home educating of my three youngest children. We went off to visit the Anglo-Saxon Reconstruction Village at West Stow in Suffolk last month, and I've now finally posted up the various photos I took, plus some general information about the Anglo-Saxon village, on my 'Home Schoolers in Warwickshire' blog.



If you're interested, you can find that blog at everydayschool.blogspot.com.

A Cyber-Offering to Albion

I was trawling various sites tonight, researching some ideas I have on writing a sequence of British mythology-inspired poems, and found this on the site of a dear friend of mine:

"The bard mediates the past to the present, certainly; but her role is also fundamentally to praise. Though she mediates the past, she lives in the present, and her role is to use metaphor to unconceal the being of things. Using her language, by likening unlike things, she is able to cleanse our vision and let us see the world afresh, letting us feel our way into a new connection with reality. The bard is one who renders-strange; she uses language to defamiliarise the world, only to hand it back to us a second later, made new, so that we can experience its wonder afresh.

This is why cliché is not just bad poetry – it’s the opposite of poetry, because it deadens our experience of the world. This is also why writing bardic poetry isn’t just an attempt to write down your feelings as a kind of therapy; it must break new ground. The bard’s consciousness must revolve and rhapsodise around another being, to reveal its nature, its inner being. It is from metaphor that we can lay hold of something fresh. The bard should lay the world before us in its prismatic brilliance."

Mark Williams: Grove of the Stars


On reading these words, I felt strangely moved to steal them (with permission) and post them up here alongside this photo, taken last week on the edges of the ancient forest of Thetford, and the following poem, written in about 1998-9.

This is by way of a cyber-offering to Albion/Alba towards the successful completion of my new project. Perhaps also for a shift from praising to prophecy, as Mark might put it, which feels like frightening territory to enter, though as I wrote once: "Nothing to be done but the crossing:/a still moon drifting dark water ... '.

Birth of the Medicine Man

Nobody knows how, but I sprang
fully-formed from a hole
in the ground: steam accompanied me
and earth shook
with its legs drawn up
as I was squeezed like toothpaste
out of that great darkness.

Once I started to live
it was seen I had an extra rib
the width of a finger.
But this is not all.
My heart, stomach and liver
were found to be crystal.

When I was old enough to dream
I began to remember
how they took me
away from my family,
told me to run
and shot bullets of quartz crystal
after me. One entered
the white space of my head
and spoke to me. It said

'Fall to the ground, fall down
and let the river run over you.'

So I fell and the fathomless river
ran over and around me. Fish
drummed their heels
on the thin skin of my ankles
and when I emerged
I could breathe fire and see
inside solid objects.
I saw a spirit trapped
in the mountain rocks.
I heard its voice
in the mouth of a cave. It said
'All things have their story.'

Listen to the four winds.
All things have their story.

'Be Mine' anthology of love poems

Just a quickie to let you know that I've got a poem in a brand-new anthology called Be Mine, an anthology of love poems edited by Sally Emerson (Little Brown, 2007). It's the same poem, THEY ARE A TABLEAU AT THE KISSING-GATE, which appeared in Picador's anthology All the Poems you Need to Say I Do.

Sorry not to have been posting here much recently, but if you take a quick peek at one of my other sites, POETS ON FIRE you will immediately see why! I've been very busy changing the look of the site and posting far more photographs (mostly taken by me at poetry gigs across the UK) and little snippets of news and tips about live poetry and spoken word.It's taken some time to change the look of the site, but now things should settle down a bit and maybe I'll actually be able to post here instead!

Let me know if you think the red font on POF is too much. I like it myself but my husband made odd faces ...

Jane x

Poetry readings, chocolate muffins and rhinos.

I was due to travel down to London this weekend for the Penned in the Margins radio show, but recently found out that it's 'resting' for a few months, so I'll have to content myself with the local action, plus an eagerly-awaited Cambridge reading in April and a trip to Whitechapel on May 3rd to read at the Whitechapel Gallery there. I have to admit to keenly looking forward to the Cambridge trip in particular because it will give me an excuse to use my membership cards for Mickey Flynns, the Cambridge-based independent 9-ball pool club!

This may seem a trivial thing to a non-player, but the Uk pool market is more or less dominated by a series of large chains, mostly Rileys - even some of the smaller chains appear to be owned by Rileys, simply operating under another name, so there's not much to choose between any of these UK chain-owned clubs in terms of variety and a different approach to marketing cue sports. In other words, independent clubs are few and far between, and it's always a pleasure to visit one whenever I can. Which isn't very often, as the Midlands - where I currently live - is dominated by Rileys clubs.

But I digress.

So I'm off to do those poetry readings later this spring, and there are a few other interesting gigs lined up too, notably a Reading-based monthly poetry night run by AF Harrold, which I'll be 'doing' in June. I'm also hoping to organise a bookshop reading in a few months' time, but I was ill last week, which kept me away from such business matters due to a loss of voice, and now I keep forgetting to ring the bookshop owner to thrash out the details.

Such organisational skills! Tomorrow, Peter, honestly.

I've also forced myself to seriously re-write - ahem, this is now about my fifth serious re-write on this - the first few chapters of my children's fantasy novel, basically with an eye to sending it off in the next few days to another prospective agent. I've actually only sent this manuscript out three times so far, which means it could still be early days!

But I do get dreadfully knocked back when agents show absolutely no interest in my work and so assume that the book - or whatever - must be dire and only worthy of being binned. But, of course, it may not be. I have to clng to that hope, gird my loins, do some re-writes where I feel necessary, and send the blessed thing out again to another victim. I mean, agent.

The rejection knock takes a few months out of me, in terms of being able to work with confidence, while I recover. Such a long time! Then I tell myself nice things and start the horrible process again.

But at this rate it could take years to place this novel. Maybe decades. And with the amount of doughnuts and double chocolate muffins I'm eating to cope with the stress of it all, I may not have decades! So I have to be strong and make sure that, when/if I get another rejection at this attempt, I will dust myself off more rapidly and get the sample chapters and synopsis out again to another agent within days rather than months.

I'm beginning to think successful writers need to have hides like rhinos. Either that or be completely naive. Now which would I prefer?

Head down, horn up.

New Year, New Poetry

Greetings and my best wishes for 2007, everyone. I know it's been a few weeks since my last confession but I've been trying to pretend I'm a normal balanced human being and not addicted to the internet. It hasn't worked, however, so here I am again, to tell you the latest news about my world.

I've got a number of fun and lively engagements to read from my brand-new poetry collection, BOUDICCA & CO, this spring. The first will take place this coming Sunday, January 21st, at the Fox in Leamington Spa, when I have been invited to appear as Guest Poet at Sean Kelly's monthly poetry gig, an always popular live poetry event here in the Midlands entitled PUREandGOODandRIGHT.

You can discover more about this particular event by clicking this link to the relevant entry on POETS ON FIRE.

Future readings are scheduled for London, Cambridge, Reading, Coventry etc. I'll write more about the next poetry reading as it approaches.

*

Also, brilliant news for my poetry publishers, SALT, a Cambridge-based initiative run by a husband and wife team, Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery. I received this email today about their recent shortlisting:

Salt shortlisted for innovation in the inaugural Independent Publishing Awards

CAMBRIDGE, UK (Salt Publishing) Salt has been shortlisted for innovation as part of the IPG's inaugural Independent Publishing Awards. The prizes, organised in association with The Bookseller and the London Book Fair, celebrate the very best of independent publishing in the UK. They will be presented at a Gala Dinner at the De Vere Grand Hotel in Brighton on 3rd March.

19 industry experts were involved in choosing the shortlists. The seven shortlists showcase 22 different independent publishers. Salt, selected for its efforts to reinvigorate poetry sales, is up against Faber & Faber in the category of Innovation of the Year. Judges praised Salt Publishing's efforts to raise interest in poetry through direct sales and its website. "In one of the hardest sectors of all to make money, Salt has taken poetry by the scruff of the neck and done something new and exciting with it."

More information:
Bridget Shine Executive Director, Independent Publishers Guild bridget@ipg.uk.com Tel: 01763 247014
Jen Hamilton-Emery Director, Salt Publishing jen@saltpublishing.com Tel: 01223 882220

*

Finally, also in connection with Salt Publishing, my podcasts went live on the Salt website the other week, and it is now possible to amuse yourselves online in a few idle moments by clicking through a number of my poems in audio form, not to mention a short interview piece to camera. This is the link: Salt Publishing: Boudicca & Co.

*

Meanwhile, back at the tougher end of the wordface, I am still working on placing a 50,000 word fantasy children's novel (for 9 - 11 year olds) with a friendly literary agency. So if you happen to be a literary agent who handles children's fiction and you are not repelled by the idea of working with me, please drop me a line ...

Some Christmas Fun!

Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to all readers of this blog!

Here's a light-hearted Christmas holiday game for you to play, if you do that sort of thing, called WHICH FANTASY/SCI-FI CHARACTER ARE YOU? I found it today whilst researching a fantasy fiction short story I've been considering. It's amusing, takes a couple of minutes and you can play it by clicking on this link:

By the way, I am apparently Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek.

"Make it so!'

Fantastic Weekend

I'll be dropping into the Tin Angel tonight for the launch of SHERB, new writing from Coventry, published by the Heaventree Press. For those able to make it too, that's the Tin Angel bar on Medieval Spon Street, Coventry, and the event kicks off at about 8.30pm for 9pm, I should imagine. Here's the official stuff ...

SHERB: new urban writing from Coventry: edited by Jonathan Morley and Anthony Owen, and including poems by Jane Commane, Colin Dick, Jane Holland, Barry Patterson, George Ttoouli, Claire King and Michael McKimm, with photographs of the River Sherbourne by Jane Commane and cover artwork by Paul Blakemore

and then on Wednesday night, I'm pleased to report that I'll be joining a cast of top coffee-sipping poets at Starbucks, Martineau Place, right in the heart of central Birmingham. I was asked to perform there by their new poet in residence, Roy McFarlane, and I'm even going to drag my husband along on this occasion, who rarely comes to hear me read. But I don't fancy driving back from Birmingham alone, late in the evening, with the caffeine jitters ...

In completely unrelated news, I've just spent a fantastic weekend away from home and all the dreary responsibilities that children bring, seeing my poetry publishers at Salt just outside Cambridge and also spending a large number of smokey disreputable hours at WTs and Mickey Flynns in Cambridge itself, which are both pool halls. I prefer WTs personally, as it boasts snooker tables as well as American tables for 8 and 9-ball pool, and also because it just feels right on the skin, at least before night falls and the kids roll in: a darkened hall in the afternoon, that sepulchral hush and the occasional click-thud of balls, hidden away up a flight of creaking stairs from the shopping streets ... mmm, like coming home ... and there at the bar, oblivious to the pool tables, an earnest young man reading a book on Quantum Psychology. Only in a city like Cambridge, huh?

New Readings!

For those who take an interest in such things, I'll be reading from BOUDICCA & CO. several times next week.

The first of these occasions will be on Tuesday 5th December at Night Blue Fruit, a poetry event at the Tin Angel in Coventry, with open mic slots available for those who might like to turn up and read their own. I like this venue so much I've actually written a long poem about it, entitled NIGHT BLUE FRUIT AT THE TIN ANGEL, part of which found its way onto this blog the day after I wrote it, I seem to recall, way back in late 2005 when this blog was very new indeed. It was one of my first ever posts.

Then I'll be headlining at Starbucks Poetry Night in Martineau Place, Birmingham, on Wednesday 6th December. This will be the first time I've ever read in a coffee bar. Poetry & Pints, yes. Hundreds of times, in fact. But I think Coffee & Couplets is a first!

Finally, I may also be reading on Thursday 7th December at a special dinner & poetry event in Stoneleigh Village Hall, which is near Coventry. However, this gig has not been confirmed, as the lady who invited me to read about three months ago has not been back in touch about the details. Sheila, if you're reading this, perhaps you could drop me an email?

Copies of BOUDICCA & CO should be available at each of these readings.

In completely unrelated news, I've just got hold of the PUMP IT UP! workout on DVD and tried it today. A full hour and twenty minutes of dance aerobics from warm up to chill down, with some incredibly hard work in between. At one stage my face was glowing bright red and I was worried I might not actually survive the attempt. Not aching too much tonight -- but perhaps in the morning the full extent of my foolishness will be revealed!

Readers of Raw Light - Thank You!

It's now well over a year since I launched this blog - 14 months, to be precise - and I thought it would be nice to say a big Thank You! to all those who have been reading and browsing Raw Light. I know from my visitor stats that I get quite a few browsers from the States, some of whom come back at regular intervals, a smattering of other readers from as far away as Australia and India, plus of course my many British-based readers.

It's always fun to post to my personal writing blog, though I often find it hard to make the time now that my other blog, Poets On Fire, has grown so popular. But it gives me added pleasure and motivation to know that I have regular readers from the UK and beyond who come back time and again to see what I've written.

So thank you ... and do keep coming back!

My latest news?

I've finished what I've been working on for the past three months and am now free at last to consider my next novel. I'm still 'launching' my Boudicca & Co. collection of poems from Salt, of course, with some more readings coming up in the next few months. Plus I have a non-fiction How To book on poetry to write in 2007, but the deadline for that isn't until late summer. Which leaves me plenty of time to get cracking on another novel between poetry projects, plus hopefully write some new poems. That's the theory, anyway.



Here I am at the Tin Angel in Coventry earlier this year, testing out a tentative new poem of mine called 'Gawain's Horse' - now published in the latest issue of The Nail, an Oxford-based poetry magazine, and in my second collection, Boudicca & Co.

Jen Hadfield & Almanacs

I've been having some email conversations recently with a poet called Jen Hadfield, who lives some 600-odd miles north of London in the remote Shetland Islands, so I thought I'd post something up here about her work as she is only just beginning to make her mark on the UK poetry scene.

Jen Hadfield was born in Chesire in 1978 and is half-Canadian, as I understand it. She's published one full-length poetry collection with Bloodaxe, entitled 'Almanacs' (you can buy it here on amazon.co.uk), and is also an artist - click here to find some of her work at the Peedie Gallery, Orkney. For samples of Jen Hadfield's poetry and more about her life and various preoccupations, you can visit her website Rogue Seeds.



Her poetry is both delicate and muscular, which is an odd combination; I think it's the form which seems delicate to me, and the language which comes across as muscular. Living in the Shetlands, Jen is obviously influenced by that rugged scenery in terms of language and imagery, yet the forms she chooses tend to dance around, refusing to be pinned down and often inhabiting odd parts of the page, reminding me of some avant-garde work I've read, though rarely as opaque!

In spite of the rural Scottish connection, these are not poems about wild flowers and seascapes, although those can be found in her work, naturally enough. Instead, there's a sophisticated world-trekking mindset behind her poetry which requires a far larger - and wilder - canvas than the simple mainstream lyric, and the characters she adopts in her narrative-style poetry suggest an eccentric novelist or playwright working in a tighter form. Which is not to say that poetry isn't her form, just that she appears to be doing something very different and more ambitious with it in comparison to many of her peers. Basically, Jen Hadfield's first collection of poetry is Gordon Wardman's Hank meets Alan Warner's Morvern Callar meets High Plains Drifter. Confused? Well, that's what Google is for.

She's at work now on her second collection, Nigh-No-Place, amongst other things. Definitely one to watch ...

Reading in Cheltenham this Sunday

This Sunday evening, November 5th, I'll be running an hour-long poetry workshop in Cheltenham, followed by a reading from my new collection BOUDICCA & CO with open mic session. It's being held upstairs at the Beehive Pub, at "Buzzwords" which is a regular poetry event, from 7pm onwards.

For those only wishing to hear me read, or to read their own work, the poetry reading and open mic session begins at 8pm, upstairs at

THE BEEHIVE PUB
13 MONTPELLIER VILLAS
CHELTENHAM
GLOUCESTERSHIRE
GL502XE

I'm keeping my fingers crossed there won't be too many loud bangs - November 5th being bonfire night! - during my reading, but if there are, the atmosphere will probably suit my poetry, many of the poems from the Boudicca sequence being concerned with war!

If anyone browsing this blog can make it, I'd love to see you there!

Jane

The Nail, Autumn 2006

A new issue of THE NAIL is just out and lying on my desk. THE NAIL is an eclectic magazine coming out of Oxford - edited by Dave Todd - which looks in particular at the live poetry scene in Oxford and beyond. This new issue of THE NAIL features spanking new poetry by, well, me, plus many talented live poets such as AF Harrold, Alan Buckley, Rob Gee, Peter Wyton and Nina Davies.

Besides its vibrant cover, the magazine is also illustrated throughout, with photographs and some highly atmospheric line drawings.


Even if you don't usually buy the smaller poetry magazines, THE NAIL is useful because it has two pages of live poetry and performance listings at the back of each issue, letting people know what's on where in the Oxfordshire and Reading areas. You can buy THE NAIL from Dave Todd - pictured left in MY hat! - by contacting him for details: davetodd @hotmail.co.uk or send contributions with SAE for return to Dave, Hammer & Tongue, 16b Cherwell Street, Oxford, OX4 1BG - though you really should buy a copy first to see the sort of work he prefers.

On Fame

Tidying my book shelves in advance of an influx of my own slim volume, in largish numbers for selling, I found a beautiful little green-backed 1897 edition of ‘The Lyrical Poems of John Keats’, heavily ornate, decorated with gilt flowers and leaves both on the spine and front cover.

Though I have several other editions of his works - letters as well as poems - I had forgotten that I owned this particular nineteenth century edition. Very much a pocket Keats, and unashamedly lovely.

Picking it up, the book fell open at the following poem; wonderfully serendipitous, given that I have just published a new collection of poetry myself and am wondering how well - or poorly - it will be received.


ON FAME

Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsy - will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper’d close,
Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gypsy is she, Nilus-born,
Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards! repay her scorn for scorn
Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

John Keats, 1818

BETA BLOGGER -Time to Swop Formats

Okay, I swopped POETS ON FIRE over to the new advanced Beta Blogger system last weekend. Now it's the turn of my Raw Light blog.

If the site takes ages to load once the switch has happened, or if you spot any other problems like dead links or whatever, or even if you just love or hate the new look of Raw Light, please let me know by emailing me or leaving a comment below this post.

Here goes ... abracadabra!

PS. Just to add to this, having now switched over to Beta Blogger, there are some teething problems. Like not being able to post poetry up in the sidebar except as a list (posting it backwards, one line at a time, which is an odd but very interesting procedure!) and also having some trouble getting the new layout to load fully.

So please forgive any strange things going on for the next week or so, as the new format beds in. Hopefully, all will come right in the end.

Jane

Boudicca & Co. is now out there and available to buy!

Nine Years On

Friday 13th may be unlucky for some, but for me, it's an immensely important occasion and one I refuse to be superstitious about. Today, my second collection of poetry Boudicca & Co has gone live on the Salt Publishing website, which means it's now in print and available to buy!


It's nine years since my first poetry collection was published by Bloodaxe, amidst a flurry of exciting publicity. It seems an incredibly long time ago, yet some of the poems I wrote immediately following the New Blood tour in October 1997 - just after Brief History of a Disreputable Woman was published - are in this new book, and they still feel and sound as fresh to me as they did the day I wrote them.

So why did I wait so long before publishing my second collection? Well, it certainly wasn't because I'm a slow writer! I must have written nigh on three hundred poems, at least, in the interim between that first book and Boudicca, but I was advised that the vast majority of my poems were not up to scratch and so I dumped many of them soon after they were written. Possibly the wrong move, but I guess we'll never know.

Some of the rest I also eventually binned out of sheer lack of interest, others I stupidly lost in a wearying series of house moves, still others were eaten by dead computer drives. An entire verse play called Umbra disappeared. I stopped writing in the end and only began again, very tentatively, towards the end of 2004. The individual poems that remain from that dark time, the ones I kept copies of and refused to stop believing in, are true survivors and I'm very happy to see them in print at last.

I shall not be waiting - let's hope so, anyway! - another nine fairy-talesque years before producing my next collection. New poems are already simmering in the 'possible' pile. But in the meantime, I have a new and extremely handsome book of poetry to sell and I sincerely hope you will all consider buying a copy of Boudicca & Co ... before the first print run sells out!

Jane

Here's the link to BOUDICCA & CO.

Poets-I-Used-To-Know, Poetry-Magazines-I-Still-Miss

Well, the Ancient Greek exam is finally behind me - results at Christmas, I'll admit to them only if I pass - so I now have a small amount of time free each day for writing poetry.

But is that what I do, first day 'out of school' - write some poetry? Of course not, that would be too sensible. No, instead I spent a few hours tonight trawling the net in search of amusement. Not the porn stars on pink lilos type of amusement - I used to bother with that sort of thing when I was single, but now the pop-up ads just drive me insane - the poets-I-used-to-know type of amusement.

Here for instance is KM Dersley, who may have said hello to me at the Small Press Fair one year in Newcastle, possibly 1996, after we had been corresponding on a poetry matter.

As I recall, he came shuffling up to me in a duffle coat, heavily rucksacked and looking at me sideways. I was on a stall flogging, or trying to flog, copies of Blade, the poetry & critical magazine I used to run before my brain ran out of energy for such adventures. We talked and then he moved on to the next stall. And here I find KMD again, ten years later, still poeting and online at the Ragged Edge website and writing about precisely that experience; the 'Magazine Rigmarole' as he calls it in his poem of the same name ...

I wouldn't get on very well at committee meetings,
would rather be at home
reading Scarlet Pimpernel stories
or one of Rider Haggard's soap and tsetse fly sagas

Later in the same poem, he quite accurately - if cynically - describes the motivation of poets to part with hard cash in exchange for poetry magazines they despise on the off-chance that this purchase may somehow enable them to get their work in too, since

If that shit counts, then maybe their crap does too,
and everyone can then sit on the dung pile and
smoulder together.

Nada the Lily. What a classic. And Umslopogaas. They don't make tragic heroes like that anymore.

Everything I know about tsetse flies I learnt from H. Rider Haggard.

But not all (small press) poetry magazines are/were unadulterated rubbish.

What about Joe Soap's Canoe? The Wide Skirt? Sunk Island Review?

The poetry world seems to be shrinking even while the magazines proliferate ... shrinking down, down, to the few that still matter (to me, that is).

When will any of us get excited by a new magazine again? By which I mean the sort of little magazine that spurns the establishment whilst making its strong new ideology heard above the wastepaper-bin fodder.

Ah, those heady days of wide-eared poetry innocence ...

Second Prize and a Poetry Reading!

This National Poetry Day (Thursday 5th October) I found myself in the stately Great Hall at Warwick Castle, surrounded by suits of armour and sitting three seats away from the Mayor, as the winner of Second Prize in this year's Warwick Words Festival poetry competition, judged by former Birmingham Laureate Julie Boden. My poem was called 'The Sound of Guitars' and after reading it to the assembled dignitaries - it was the launch ceremony of the 2006 Festival - I was then awarded my various prizes: a generous book voucher, a copy of Andrew Motion's new memoir of his childhood, In the Blood, which I can't wait to read, a recording of Julie Boden's poetry called Beyond the Bullring, and a copy of her poetry collection Through the Eye of a Crow (Pontefract Press), which seems, at first glance, to be heavily inspired by my own favourite poet, Ted Hughes. All in all, quite a treat for a cold and rainy Thursday night in October!

The winner, Helen Yendall, was crowned as new Poet Laureate for Warwick, taking over from Brenda Tai Layton, with her winning poem 'Kettle'.

Today, Saturday 7th October, I'm reading at the Thomas Oken Tearooms near Warwick Castle as part of Brenda Tai Layton's Poetry Cafe event, which runs throughout the Warwick Words Festival.

If you're in the vicinity, my particular performance slot runs from 1.30pm to perhaps 2pm. But I should imagine that's a moveable feast! I'll be reading poems that will appear in my brand-new book, Boudicca & Co., which is due out from Salt Publishing in a matter of weeks. Also a few poems from my first book, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman, which is now available for sale at a considerably discounted sum!

Hope to see you there!

Warwick Words Festival

Just to let folks know I'll be reading some poems of mine at the Warwick Words Festival next weekend, on Saturday 7th October.

It won't be a lengthy reading as it takes place in the Thomas Oken Tea Rooms next to Warwick Castle and is part of the 'Poetry Cafe' which is running there throughout the Festival. If you're in or around Warwick next Saturday and would like to hear me read - and maybe stick around afterwards and say hi - then I'd be pleased to see you there.

The reading should take place between 1.30 - 2pm and is free, though their tea and scones probably won't be. There'll be other local poets performing or reading their work all that day and on Thursday and Friday too, if you're interested in coming along for the whole Festival.

For more information on all the other workshops and poetry/literary events available that weekend, try the Warwick Words website.

Who else should you be reading?

I have just, whilst trying to avoid writing my novel, found this great website at www.literature-map.com where you type in the name of a favourite author and the website will instantly generate the names of other authors read by people who like that author's books. It sounds a little dull, put like that - it's not, damn it! - but just go and try.

Personally, I think it's rather cool, especially the way the names sort of starburst and jiggle about on the page as they spread further and further away from the original named author. It's like a bomb going off and the bits flying everywhere. But in slow motion. And without hurting anyone. Hard to explain, better just go see what I mean - here's the link: www.literature-map.com.

I'm not listed by the way. Sob.