for fun, something a bit different -

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I've bought quite a few poetry books / pamphlets over the last couple of years so I thought it was about time I started reading them through systematically and blogging a little about them. So I'm going to start with Jon Stone's Scarecrow's pamphlet which is published by Happenstance.
Jon was one of the poets I was lucky enough to read with in Edinburgh the other week and I've really enjoyed reading his pamphlet.

Language-wise his poems are sheer pleasure. The first thing I enjoy about reading a poem is the words, regardless of meaning. Just the sound, the syllables, the rhymes, the visual explosions of letters. And, to be honest, I don't really know what half of his poems are about but they are laced with and energised by words and phrases that I wish that I'd thought of.
Some examples:


"Nuggets of Zingiber, fire-packed rhizomes"

"banish hag-rodeo! Bring that curio"

"get me that jake root,
that stick of mouth gelignite, brute tongue number"

"that woodknuckle jump-lead, that sting in a knock"

"the furious ting, with the jaggery,
crystals of dust and the bunch of nodules"

"splinter and splice in my trinket teeth"

Now I tell you that all of these phrases come from just One poem. It's no wonder that it was commended in last year's National Poetry Competition. It's called 'Jake Root' and you can read it here (fourth poem down).

The intensity and playfulness of language makes these poems exciting to read, this is what the blurb at the back of the pamplet says:

"This is a poet who knows precisely what he's doing, even when half-intoxicated by language and illusion: Doctor Who meets Jenny Greenteeth; Perkin Warbeck visits the same pub as Nick Drake. Prophecies, spells and lies begin to take on the nature of truth, as the Scarecrow looks up and walks...".

I admit most of the contemporary culture references of a twenty-something Londoner are lost on me, but the fact that I enjoyed these surreal, word-wild poems so much despite not 'getting' them just shows how good they are. Don't be misled by the weird and out-there subject matter and wordage, these poems are very technically aware and many of them are written in traditional form. I'll be interested to watch how Stone develops his writing in his future collection/s.

Here are some more of my favourite phrases/lines from various poems in the pamphlet:

"Pulse a bird's blink"
"A man whose head's been Morris-danced into bandages"
"His mouth / is a forge and his laugh is ironmongery"
"the night is hot and hot with the breath of Boy"
"beauty that would make a shambles of you!
"how I prefer to be a night operator, / clot of shadow"
"the stony clank of my strides"
"My mother's smile is a set of rubber kitchen knives"
"Egon is 'wolf-handsome', 'young', 'a talent'"
"who is this wastral, hook-spined, puppet-limbed"

I could go on and on  but I might get done for copyright!

I want my old template back!!!!

So the night has come and gone and it feels good to have conquered my first proper poetry reading!
I was sick all day Saturday and really thought I might not make it through to Edinburgh after all my preparation and planning  but thankfully I stopped throwing up by Sunday morning.

I was first up to read which meant I could relax and enjoy all of the other readings. All that practice of reading my poems to the kitchen walls paid off. Once I started the nerves disappeared, I looked out over everybody's heads and read my poems as if I was in my own wee house. I actually really enjoyed it!!

Phillis Levin is a lovely, dainty woman, she and her husband had been staying at St. Andrew's and they kindly said that they enjoyed my St. Andrew's poems. Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving were up from London and they both read very well, plus there was David Kinloch, a very tall and prominant Scottish poet. It was a great variety of readings and lovely just to be there and get a chance to meet and chat to folk. Everyone was very friendly, especially the other poets which was nice because I was slightly afraid of them at first!! I came away with signed copies of Levin's latest collection May Day, Kinloch's Un-Tour-dEcosse and Stone's recently published Happenstance pamphlet Scarecrows. I also won a book of selected poems of Blake Morrison in the raffle! So plenty of reading to enjoy.

Some great and funny advice on writing by the UK-born, Australian-bred and now living in Scotland poet, Kona MacPhee. I need to seriously apply nearly all of these points to myself!

That's my poem and a short bio up at the Poetry At The... blog for the poetry reading next week, can't quite believe we're into June already!
I'm really looking forward to hearing Phillis Levin, I very much like what I've read of her work on-line and she's a wonderful reader of her poems (you can hear her read some of her poems here). Also reading will be David Kinloch who lectures in Creative Writing at Strathclyde uni, and Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving who are both editors of Fuselit magazine. So feeling a little nervous about reading in such good company!
I've read quite a few tips on-line on preparing for readings but I'd like to know your number one tip that you always keep in mind when doing a reading or what especially bugs you about poetry readings.

It'll also be nice just getting to Edinburgh for a change. Might get a chance to pop into the Scottish Poetry Library or a wander around the National Galleries. There's no chance of getting home because of the ferries which means a whole night in Edinburgh, child-free!!

I picked up a copy of Palgrave's famous poetry anthology The Golden Treasury the other week from a local charity shop. It's in brilliant condition too, well it was before I started dog-earing the poems I like! So I'm reading my way through it and pleasantly enjoying Shakespeare's poems in particular, whom I never read enough of. I love this song from The Tempest which is of course an important reference point for Plath -

Full fathom five thy father lies:
of his bones are coral made;
those are pearls that were his eyes:
nothing of him that doth fade,
but doth suffer a sea-change
into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
hark! now I hear them, -
ding, dong, bell.

But even better than reading it is hearing it sung, so gorgeously -

Thanks to a link from Todd Swift's Eyewear blog I've just watched a wonderful interview with W.S. Merwin. I bought Merwin's latest collection The Shadow of Sirius the other year after reading this most gorgeous poem of his in the New Yorker.  In the programme Merwin says that Pound advised him to write 75 lines of poetry everyday and went on to say that Merwin, being so young at the time, wouldn't have anything to write about therefore he should learn a language and translate!

Some quotes from Merwin:
"poetry rises out of what we don't know"
"a theme that runs through all poetry and language is a feeling of loss"
"grief...is the beginning of language"
"poetry begins by hearing, listening"
"the background of words...is the nourishing dark...that is always with us"


I heartily recommend the programme,  it's 52 minutes long and available to watch here.

Writing Methods

Why is it so hard to write poems? I love reading about how poets come to write their poems, their thought-processes, what triggers them etc. I think I think too much about the process, I'm too self-conscious, too aware when I start writing. I've got this mad idea in my head that I want every poem I write to count, to be really meaningful to me, to tell me something. And because of this I struggle to write a poem just for the fun of it. It's counter-productive, this self-imposed pressure is immensely inconducive to writing. So I gather my images, page after page of groups of scenes that I try to find meaningful homes for. The images are the easy part, a walk by the river or in the gardens and the images come but not just nature description, images with real emotional weight. But finding the right narrative home, the story that these images come from is the real struggle. I'd love to know how everyone else writes, some people don't like to talk about their processes but the analytical part of me is greedy for detail about such things.

Goodbye Sorlil, Hello Marion!

Yes, I've finally decided to come out of the closet.
In some ways I'll be sad to see the back of sorlil. I coined the name when I created my first blog which recorded my first full pregnancy and the first couple of scary years of parenthood. We had agreed on the name Sorley for a boy and Lily for a girl hence sorlil!

I met up with Colin the other day to talk over the pamphlet, he thinks possibly early next year for its publication. It was a funny feeling handing over my poems, almost like a purging of my poetic self. I certainly feel 'lighter' for it somehow.

Issue 4 of Horizon Review is running a bit late but hopefully it'll be online sometime this week and with my St Andrew's poem, Cathedral Ruins at Night, in it!

The poetry magazine Anon has recently introduced a new online admissions system where you can create an account and log-in at any time to monitor the status of your poems. I think this is a fantastic idea! Like most people I'm pretty fed up with the merry-go-round of submitting, waiting, waiting, wondering whether to email and chase them up, wondering if they bother to reply if they don't want your work etc etc. Where as here I can have an obsessive day and check the 'status' of my poems ten million times or forget about it for a few day knowing I can check up on them anytime!

*** edit***
Horizon 4 is now online and here's my poem! A really enjoyable issue with poems, art, fiction, reviews, essays and an interesting collaborative poem by two Calder Wood Press poets!
Also, Anon has accepted one of my poems for publication in their next issue!!
I apologise for the excess use of exclamation marks in this post!

I've never been able to write on demand, well I could but the result wouldn't be pretty or worth much. Unlike swiss, who seems to have little problem turning his daily life into poetic epiphanies, I sit on my reams of imagery waiting for the 'thing' that's going to give it substance and meaning. So that, probably laziness, and the endlessness of household chores are my excuses for not having any new poems to post at the moment.

I'm not much of a short story reader but lately I've been devouring Robin Jenkins' book of short stories -Lunderston Tales. It has to be an excellent writer who makes you look at people differently and even value them more than you did previous to reading their work. I love Robin Jenkins' stories, they make me laugh, give me insights into the life and thinking of people around me. They are literally about the people around me. Jenkins spent the last thirty years of his life living just outside of Dunoon, where I live. His fictional stories are based on real people and people I recognise. These people exist everywhere of course but luckily for me Jenkins' stories are very much based locally which means when I walk down town I imagine I could be living in one of his stories.

Incidentally, Brown's latest gaffe reads like it's straight out of a Robin Jenkins story! - 'The Pensioner and the Prime Minister'.

Very exciting news for Plath and Hughes fans - the British Library has recently published a cd of all Plath's recordings including interviews with Plath and Hughes not publicly available since the original broadcasts, a live recording of Plath reading 'Tulips', Plath describing her experiences of being an American woman in England as well as Plath and Hughes talking about how they met.

The Spoken Word CD is 73 minutes long and includes a booklet containing an introduction by the Plath scholar Peter Steinberg of the excellent Sylvia Plath info blog where you can read a review of the cd here. The cd can be purchased here.

A nearly eight minute podcast taster from the cd can be heard here.

With it being the holidays I've not had much of a chance to get into writing but I have been thinking a lot about poetry book covers and I'm curious to know how people decide on the cover picture or design for their book - whether they go for a nice picture that ties in with the theme of the book or maybe a striking picture that's more specific to the title of the collection, and what kind of covers people prefer when buying a book.

I really like the cover of Robin Robertson's The Wrecking Light. According to the inside cover it's a painting by Sam Morrow. It doesn't bear direct resemblance to the title and I don't think the apples are a reference to any particular poem but it is a beautiful picture. To me the black background conveys the darkness at the heart of many of the poems with the apples representing the fragile beauty and sensuality of nature which at times blends with human nature. And of course apples are a potent symbol of innocence, knowledge and sinfulness. I was planning on buying the book because I'd just heard Robertson read from it and really liked his poems but if I hadn't heard of the author or the poems and just saw the book in a bookshop I would definitely have picked it up for a look because of its cover and title.

I also really like the cover of Anne Sexton's All my Pretty Ones (notice a theme here of black backgrounds!!). The purple flower against the black seems darkly feminine which is one way you could characterise the poems, I'm afraid I don't know what the flower is so I can't really speculate on its significance.

I guess my preference is nature as a symbol against a dark background!

Just for fun - a Wordle of a bunch of my poems!

books, books, books

I recently ordered some poetry pamphlets from Calder Wood Press and now that they've arrived I'm even more excited about my pamphlet next year.
They are beautiful, colourful, sturdy pamphlets printed on gorgeous silky paper.

I've only flicked through them and can't wait for some proper quiet time to read them:
Sky Blue Notebook from the Pyrenees by Jayne Wilding
Local Colour by Judith Taylor
A Hesitant Opening of Parasols by Lilias Scott Forbes

You can read sample poems by them on the Calder Wood Press website.

I also ordered Colin Wills' Sushi & Chips collection (published by Diehard Books but also available through Calder Wood Press) which I'm looking forward to reading.

Finally, swiss has just had his first full-length collection published by Calder Wood Press, I am the happy owner of a copy.

stone and sea is a gorgeous collection of 44 poems which I'll be blogging about in more detail in the future but right now I'm just enjoying.

I don't feel so jealous about those of you who are heading up to St. Andrews for StAnza 2010 now that I can snuggle up with my lovely signed copy of Robin Robertson's latest collection, The Wrecking Light.

I went to the Don Paterson / Robin Robertson reading on Saturday and it was great. I have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to Paterson's work, it just doesn't really do it for me. Which is odd because he's one of the foremost influential and accoladed poets of our times, and he's Scottish! So I feel I'm really missing out on something.

Robertson, on the other hand, with his dark, surreal but exact, open-ended poems laden with myths, symbols and landscapes, I find inspiring.
I did enjoy Paterson's reading and he came across as a really nice person. But the poem I enjoyed of his the most he attributed Robertson as a major influence in the writing of it!

The reading was in the beautiful Mitchell Library, the same room where, on Thursday night, I read two of my poems as part of the open mic event. I wasn't nervous about reading but I did forget to breathe properly so that by the middle of the first poem I was running out of breath! During the second poem I had to deliberately concentrate on breathing and the reading of it was much easier. I think it takes the first couple of poems to get into the flow of reading your work, I noticed that Robertson didn't look at the audience once while reading his first poem but after that he seemed to relax into a rhythm of reading.

At the book signing when I asked Robertson who his influences are, he mentioned Geoffrey Hill whom I've come across here and there but never really read properly. Now I'm curious to read more to see what way he has influenced Robertson.

A poem in memory of the three Russian asylum seekers who jumped to their death from a Glasgow high-rise flat on Sunday morning.

Citizens of the Sky

The morning scent of spring

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Apparently in 1992, the UN General Assembly designated the 22nd of March each year as World Water Day!

The Unesco Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science at the University of Dundee are, this year, hosting an online interactive event and other events on that day throughout Dundee. They are looking for links to poems about water. So if you post a water poem on your blog and link to their page they will link to you also (you have to send your link to this email. Thanks to Rachel for the heads-up, check out her three water poems here, plus Colin has one up on his blog here.

Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows that water features very prominantly in my poems, well that's because I live next to the beautiful Firth of Clyde (pictured above)!.

Here's a watery poem of mine which I wrote almost exactly a year ago when I was pregnant with my daughter.


Heliotropism

Waves rise from nowhere
like the water pearl

wrapping its layer
upon layer within
my mantle folds.

A lochan is gathering
its cushiony hold
under my skin,

a sea swelling
in my bones.

The air is fresh with snow
and the faint halo
of a daylight moon.

I’m walking into the light
and wondering,
if like a sunflower,

you’re turning,
heliotropic,
in my womb.

So in-between the usual daily house/children busyness, today I've been battling with finalizing the line-breaks on a poem to be published in the next Horizon Review. It's finding that balance between how I read the poem, how it looks on the page (screen), and imagining how other folk are going to read it.

I mainly break my lines according to natural pauses when I read it aloud and what I particularly want to emphasize. For a long time (so it seemed to me) I was stuck writing in three-line verses, I found it hard to shake that off. Now I've found a freedom in not keeping to the same number of lines in every stanza but this introduces the problem of when to have a stanza break and how does it look on the page if, for instance, I have a three-liner followed by a two-liner followed by a one-liner!
Anyway, I think (I hope) I got there in the end.

Very much stuck on a poem at the moment, I have plenty imagery and theme but it's not working, I think I'm trying too hard to force it together. So often I feel when starting a poem, from the very first line, that I'm working toward reaching the end of it as quickly as possible so as not to mess it up!

I had the wonderful experience last night of discovering poems by a poet I had not come across before that have completely blown me away. I was randomly listening to poets reading their poems at the Poetry Archive website (a fantastic resource) when I clicked on the name Jean Valentine. The rich imagery, the dream imagery and the tautness of her language appeal to me hugely. I can't wait for a chance to order a book of her poetry.

For any Hughes or Plath fans - Interview with Frieda Hughes on Radio 3's Private Passions, it's available for the next six days. Includes her choice of music from Classical to AC/DC!

I'm listening to it as I write this and it's giving me the shivers, she sounds so like Plath - the same smooth, deep, very articulate voice despite the fact that her accent is quite different.
An artist and poet in her own right, Frieda (isn't that just a lovely name?) Hughes has published three collections of poetry, several children's books and held numerous exhibitions of her art work.

Thanks to Peter at Sylvia Plath Info blog for the link.