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.

Muddles

A couple of months ago I entered poems for the Cinnamon Press Poetry Award competition. I thought the prize was pamphlet publication but then later realised it was for full-length book publication so embarrassingly I had to withdraw my submission. The publisher was very nice about it and wished me well in my poetry so I went ahead and submitted my poems elsewhere.

Well this morning I received a letter saying that I had made the top ten short-list for the competition which means they are going to print three of my poems in their stories and poems anthology to be published later on this year. The problem is that the three poems they've picked I've now submitted to three different poetry magazines. So this morning was spent writing embarrassing emails and probably hacking off editors of magazines I would like to publish poems in, in the future.

Normally I'm super-careful about such things and read submission guidelines very thoroughly but I don't know what's happened to me this month, I've been such a prize twit (I messed up with another sub also). Please someone tell me they've done something similar to make me feel better!

I do have exciting news which I don't know much more about but can't keep to myself any longer...Calder Wood Press are going to be publishing a pamphlet of my poems sometime next year!!!
I was delighted when Colin emailed me about it the other week. Calder Wood Press has published many Scottish poets I admire including Kevin Cadwallender, Morgan Downie, Jayne Wilding and Juliet Wilson. I met Colin at StAnza last year and he is such a lovely man, I'm really looking forward to working with him on putting together a pamphlet collection.

On the poetry readings front, I'm able to make it to the open mic night next month at the Aye Write Glasgow Book Festival. So I shall go armed with my poems and hopefully get a reading slot.

So it's been a rough couple of weeks - we all caught a nasty head cold, both kids included. But thankfully we're over it now so hopefully I'll get back to some writing.

Quite some time ago Rob MacKenzie asked me if I would give a poetry reading at one of his monthly 'Poetry At The...' events in Edinburgh, so I've been booked up for the June event for ages. Well I nearly fainted the other day when I saw whom Rob had managed to book for the other two reading slots on the night: the renowned Scottish poet, David Kinloch and the also renowned American poet Phillis Levin. I hadn't heard of Levin but I've been reading up on her work since and I very much like what I've read, to say the least.

I'm really excited about the reading. I'm trying to organise a local get-together of writers to see if there's much interest in putting on a local poetry event here in Dunoon, something I've been thinking about for ages but the thought of my first poetry reading being in such esteemed company has given me the kick-up-the-backside to get on and do something locally and hopefully at least get in a practice run. I know it's only February but I've already organised the poems I'll be reading and the order of them. In fact I practice reciting the one's I've memorised when I'm out walking, under my breath of course!!

I've also got some other exciting poetry news which I'll reveal when I know more about it!

I'm sad to be missing out on StAnza this year, it had become a bit of a yearly escape away for a few days and especially since none other than the Seamus Heaney is going to be doing readings and some lucky people are even getting to a round table reading with him!


Ruby, as you can see, is just too young to be abandoned for a couple of days so StAnza will have to wait till next year.

However...I have booked a ticked to hear none other than the Don Paterson reading with Robin Robertson during the Aye Write Glasgow book festival!!

It seems a bit silly to have Aye Write and StAnza on at roughly the same time, I'm never normally able to make Aye Write events because the budget won't allow day trips up to Glasgow in the same week as a weekend up in St. Andrews.

Anyhow I'm excited to be able to make it to this reading. There are plenty more exciting events at Aye Write with a great line up of poets and authors but being bound by ferry times I can only make afternoon events.

I've never been a huge fan of Paterson so perhaps this reading will change that. I'm really looking forward to hearing Robertson, since googling his work I know I'm really going to enjoy it.

Rob facebooked an interesting submission request from Succour.
So for all you clever people out there who do weekly poetry challenges, how about giving this a shot -

Succour: The New Fiction, Poetry and Art Magazine

Submission Details

For Succour 11, our Spring/Summer 2010 issue, we would like to invite submissions which pertain not to a theme, as has hitherto been the case, but which adhere to a pair of conditions.

Condition 1: All submissions should be written on Saturday February 6th, 2010.
Condition 2: What you write should not be an attempt to execute an idea – for a story, for a poem, etc – that has previously occurred to you. Rather, we would prefer you to write whatever happens to come into your head at that particular time.

The idea for this issue was inspired by 20 Lines a Day by Harry Mathews, in which the author sets out to follow a rule Stendhal once set himself, to write ‘Twenty lines a day, genius or not’. Mathews undertakes this project in an attempt to overcome ‘the anxiety of the blank page’; it becomes part of his writing practice, his way of starting off, getting in the zone, before going on to whatever his main writing project may be. We would like submissions to February 6th, 2010 to be written in the same spirit.

We will be accepting submissions to February 6th, 2010 from Saturday February 6th 2010 until Monday February 8th 2010 – thereby allowing a couple of days for typing up etc.

I blogged about the Carry a Poem campaign a while back here. Well these lovely free books were distributed throughout Edinburgh yesterday, here's the link to my story in the book about William Carlos Williams's To a Poor Old Woman.

Some thoughts on Jim Murdoch’s Living With the Truth

If you approach the novel with the idea that it’s going to be some kind of serious psycho-philosophical study into existence and the human mind then you could be forgiven for being disappointed when you begin to read the book though by the end of it that’s exactly what the novel has become.

The basic plot is that the protagonist, a lonely oldish man called Jonathan, gets a visit from Truth personified who resides with him for a couple of days and the novel is about this visit.
I’m not going to review the storyline as such as there are already several reviews of this book here. Instead I’m going to pick out some strands of thought I’d like to explore.

In all honesty, I found Truth to be super-annoying much of the time. What did I find annoying? Well his inability to be serious for any real length of time is the main culprit. What can be more serious than the truth – the truth about life, existence, knowledge, morality, afterlife etc. It’s all a big game to him. But it turns out that truth personified is not alone, there’s a whole pantheon of personified abstracts which are, to me, indicative of the Homeric Gods. Though Murdoch goes to lengths in the novel to insure that they are not quite the same thoughtless puppeteers, their essence is the same – existence is a big joke to them because they’re not weighed down with the worries / burdens of life and death.
With this characterisation of Truth, Murdoch immediately subverts the expectations of the reader and yet, as it turns out, manages to explore deep philosophical issues in an accessible manner through the use of comedy.

The parts of the book I enjoyed the most were the interactions between Jonathan and the women in his life. I really loved the scene in Jonathan’s flat when his sister, Mary, comes to visit. Truth convinces Mary to act out a scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The ridiculousness, the absurdity of the scene and the ambivalence of the characters towards one another reminded me of Harold Pinter-style scenarios. Murdoch’s excellent characterisation made this one of the best parts of the book for me.

Jonathan is alienated from life around him, he watches from the outside looking in. This is exemplified in his profession as the owner of second-hand bookshop. Life is to be experienced second-hand, not directly; the role of a book is to mediate life to its reader. Which brings us to Jonathan's curious attitude towards others, particularly women.
He had never married and, despite being lonely, had no desire to. Women are reduced to their physical being yet Jonathan is not misogynistic in the usual sense. Even when listing his sexual encounters, he never really enjoyed the actual act of sex in itself, seeming to prefer self-love. What he does desire is the physical closeness which, we are led to believe, is due to the lack of overt parental physical affection throughout his childhood. In particular the Freudian memory of eight-year-old Jonathan being harshly told off when, watching his mother breastfeed his baby sister, he also expressed a wish to be breastfed. This is then the explanation of his particular obsession with breasts throughout his adulthood, yet it is no ordinary sexual desire. Rather, the sense of not being allowed to simply touch another woman’s breasts is viewed as an injustice harking back to the unfairness that his sister should have been the recipient of the tender affection he was denied.

I genuinely enjoyed this novel. Murdoch’s strengths are in characterisation, humour and the complex interaction between strained relationships.
I’ve only scratched the surface of a couple of the themes running through the book. I haven’t even mentioned the many, many humorous exchanges or the existentialism integral to Jonathan’s perception of life.
And, of course, this is only my reading of the book which may or may not be accurate as close reading of novels are not possible in my household at the moment!

first draft


A Car, Snow-sunk...

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Oops looks like I'm in blog post overdrive at the moment!

Re-write of a poem I wrote couple of years ago on Monet's Haystacks: Snow Effect.

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Philip Gross. Heard of him? He's just won the T.S. Eliot Prize, how shameful of me, never read any of his work!

Trying to write some poems to enter into the Scotland National Galleries competition, here's one I wrote today based on a painting by Alan Davie - 'Woman bewitched by the moon'

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I've been such a rubbish blogger.
So I decided to write a random update post!

I'm not allowed to tap my feet in my house because my three year-old son shouts "mummy, don't sing with your feet"!

I normally read Plath's diaries over Christmastime every year but haven't managed to this year, I aim to read them this month though. Talking of Plath I read an interesting article in the Guardian the other day linked from Peter Steinberg's Sylvia Plath info blog: Nick Laird's Poems for a Baby. Laird states -
"I've been struck by how often, for male poets, having children roots itself in linear imagery, bloodlines, inheritance; whereas for female poets, the process is a form of replacement, of disappearing."

I was surprised to read this in relation to my recent baby poem which has the line about the trees and I becoming white shadows of ourselves. My primary thought was about post-pregnancy body shape, of me becoming a shadow of my former pregnant self. Now I wonder if there is an unconscious replacement thing going on here. One example Laird uses to support his theory (?) is from Plath's Morning Song -

"I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand"

Laird picks out Plath's use of the word effacement, "the act of one thing erasing another" as the key thing. But what he doesn't mention is that effacement is exactly the word every full-term pregnant woman wants to hear as it refers to the thinning of the cervix, one of the indications of the body preparing itself for labour.
But I loved Laird's comment at the end in reference to his newborn baby: "I find myself holding the wee dote on my knee thinking, now surely to God I can get a poem out of you . . ."!

On another note, I've been reading in various blogs and things about the lack of lit crit written by women, one of the usual explanations is that we are too caring and nurturous by nature to step easily into the big bad world of literary criticism. Personally I think this is nonsense, women in academia are able to scrutinise just as thoroughly and mercilessly (if need be) as the next bloke.

I got my Edinburgh Review in last week, really enjoyed reading it - it was a Czech themed issue and I did Slavonic studies for a year at uni and loved it, in fact one of my old lecturers has an article in it! Anyway there was an interesting essay by the poet John Hartely Williams titled 'Speaking of You' in which he certainly doesn't set out to pull any punches. He writes -

"Nowadays those who consider themselves to be poets think they should write poetry, but this is quite wrong. The last thing one should want to do while writing a poem is write poetry. The whole project of writing a poem ought to be to dodge the image of itself that confronts it in the mirror. (not sure what he means here) Writing poetry...involves you in questions of vocabularly. One might give up on vocabulary altogether and stop thinking. That way you might arrive at a poem".

Williams describes himself as a warty poet who has eschewed vocabularly and stopped thinking and this enables him to write poems as opposed to poetry.

Although I get the point about poetry as opposed to poems, I love language, I love words. I love playing around with images, sounds and language but I also know that that amounts to very little if there isn't a poem in amongst those words, sounds and images, if there isn't that unknown thing that makes itself know to me (at least partially) by the end of the poem, of what the poem is actually about. I'm strongly in favour of the stop thinking part (not easy to do) but giving up on vocabularly and sticking with plain language, I don't think so.

1st draft

untitled

Snow flowers
decorate the riverbank.

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Well it's that time of the year again - time to stock up on poetry books.

With it being my birthday last week I bought the lovely big volume of the Collected Poems of George MacKay Brown which I've been keen to purchase since watching the GMB programme as part of The Poet's Guide to Britain series on the BBC a while back. I'm absolutely delighted with it.

I ordered Sarah Sloat's chapbook In the Voice of a Minor Saint which I'm really looking forward to coming in. If you haven't already, check out her blog - one of the funniest, original and constantly surreal writer I've come across.

I'm also waiting on Claire Crowther's The Clockwork Gift to come in. I bought this off the back of reading her poems in several magazines and thoroughly enjoying them.

And today I ordered several chapbooks from HappenStance. I cannot recommend enough Happenstance publishing. It's a fantastic, mainly pamphlet, publisher. Scottish poets such as Rob MacKenzie and Andrew Philips had their first publications with Happenstance. This year Alison Brackenbury joined the author list by publishing a chapbook with HappenStance.
A great range of high quality poetry at SUPER CHEAP prices, really!

For under £30 (including postage) I have just ordered -
A HappenStance Subscription (which includes a free chapbook of my choice and discount on all other chapbooks)
For my free chapbook I chose -
Slug Language by Anne Caldwell

Other chapbooks I ordered are -
The Body of the Green Girl by Paula Jennings
Embracing Water by Deborah Trayhurn
Shadow by Alison Brackenbury
a Three pamphlet lucky dip

and three issues of Sphinx magazine - 11, 8 and 7. Sphinx magazine has features about and interviews with independent poetry publishers, self-publishers and poets. Also it reviews pamphlet publications.

So all in all that's one subscription (which includes postal undates with sample extracts of new publications), seven chapbooks and three issues of Sphinx magazine all for less than thirty quid, how can you beat that? And they're all beautifully produced.

But it's not all poetry, I did buy a work of fiction - Jim Murdoch's first novel Living with the Truth. I've been following Jim's blog for quite a while now and he always surprises me with his very interesting and very well researched posts / essays. I've always enjoyed his writing so I thought it was about time I bought one of his books and this is what I'm currently reading.