Litfest
Mark Griffiths whom we published in Watermark (Flax002) has a new collection of poetry out. In his new guise as Fernado Smith comes “Welcome to the Golden Life” published by Searle Publishing.
Copies are available now via The Poetry Bookcase, price £9.99, and Fernando has kindly supplied us with a couple of signed copies too! Yay!
The postman delivered us some shiny, lovely new poetry pamphlets for The Poetry Bookcase today. They came from Shadowtrain editor and Flax writer Ian Seed.
In his accompanying note, Ian tells us that ‘the straw which comes apart’, is his translations of the Italian poet, Ivano Fermini. The pamphlet is published by Oystercatcher Press, winners of the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award for Outstanding UK publisher of poetry in pamphlet form.
‘the straw which comes apart’ is priced £4.00and is available now from The Poetry Bookcase in The Storey.
And here is a sample from it:
carnival
on the horizon not even
was I mute but you held the pearls
and they gather around a thunderclap
the small eagle will carry the rags
sea
I haven’t added up the waves
only fire with eyes the headstones
passing among men
the tears with a great rise and fall
Ta Dah!
The next Flax anthology is shaping up very nicely – so much so that with the stunning cover image (thanks once again to Jonathan Bean) we’ve nailed that elusive title. Always one of the trickest elements of the production process once we have the writers and work in place. And invariably we go through some really bad ones – the penultimate suggestion for this anthology could have been a Bond film title I was told … not entirely the tone we were looking for.
And so chocka with some familair names and less so – all providing strong and expansive work – we’re delighted to be working with Rebecca Irvine Bilkau, David Tait, Michael Crowley, Ron Scowcroft and Jim Turner.
They’ll be be launching the anthology, ahem – I mean, An Elastic Sky, Flax022 on Saturday 16th October, 5pm in the Storey Auditorium, complete with some films inspired by some of the poems.
It’s going to be a goodie
I’m absorbed in my favourite period at Litfest over the next few weeks: anthologising and editing. We have finally made the choice of who will be in the anthology but not quite which of their poems.
My chief approach as editor is of cutting: both of the poems we select from original submissions, and of lines in those poems. I have a story about this, that when I heard made me feel quite benign in the scheme of things. Robert Crawford’s latest book is called Full Volume. Because he had intended it to be a big fat volume of poems. His editor saw it differently. And now the volume comes from the potency of the poems’ voice left in the book rather than their weight. Back to that old adage: less is more.
It is a tricky balance to strike – the poems are not mine, and nor do I want them to be. My intent as editor is to set a varied selection of work to rub up against each other, so illuminating the different voices that carry the reader through idiosyncratic landscapes and experiences. But I’d say a good editor enables the work to become more individual, more true to the writer’s voice. Letting their light shine. And this means going back again and again to the poems themselves, and keeping myself out of them – asking how they stand alone, in sequence with each other and within the anthology as a whole. So it’s a case of wood trees wood trees perspective. A merry dance in and out of the light.
And while I’m dancing (hopefully with the writers as fine partners) I’m also storing up images and ideas for the title and overall design of the piece. So far all our anthologies are pdfs and so allowed a lovely scape of images through the text, hopefully enhancing the onscreen reading experience, as well as exploring the underlying themes that hold the anthology together. The hardest decision is the title of the anthology and we normally have to go through a whole bunch of really bad ones before landing on the one that fits perfectly: in tone, image and poetry. Right now we have a sheaf of paper with a host of scribbled ideas – the bad ones that miraculously should transform into the all singing all dancing ONE in the next few days.
Wish them luck!
I’m living the high life. As if working for Litfest wasn’t idyllic enough I went on a lovely holiday recently. And what does a bod from Litfest do on his holiday? Why, he reads books.
1.The White Hands and other Weird Tales – Mark Samuels.
The weird tale was pioneered by HP Lovecraft – think of it as an Edgar Alan Poe horror story but with tentacles instead of skulls – its a form which includes authors like Arthur Machem, Algernon Blackwood, Clive Barker and China Mieville. Mark Samuels writes very pure, very old-skool weird tales, very close to Lovecraft but without the bileous racism that characterises the father of the genre. He’s not up there with the modern donjon of the gloominati Thomas Ligotti, but this collection is well worth a read if you’re a weird fanatic.
2. The Devil You Know – Mike Carey.
Because you’ve got to have some trash on a holiday. In this case a crime procedural in which the detective is an exorcist and the silent witness is floating around the halls of a London museum. Mike Carey is better known for his work on the long-running comic Hellblazer. This doesn’t have the panache of his comics work; the Cambridge graduate exorcist Felix Castor in Devil You Know is no match for the spiky, egotistical depressive John Constantine. Still, good light reading with a reasonably well realised world full of ghosts.
3. The Ant King and other Stories – Benjamin Rosenbaum
Benjamin Rosenbaum is an odd one, with short stories published in the superfit literary journal McSweeneys, the oddball obscuritanist scifi anthology like All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and even the academic journal Nature. This collection of short stories is all killer. The stories bounce backwards and forwards between surrealism, fantasy, sci-fi, metafiction and fairytale, stirred together with a healthy spoonful of trans/post-humanism and Jewish religious mysticism. Go out and buy.
4. The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born – Ayi Kwei Armah
A paean to depression and despair. The nameless hero of this masterwork of Ghanaian literature is faced with a simple choice; abandon his principles and join in with the “national game”, that of petty and perpetual corruption, becoming a small-time crook who perpetuates the squalor and poverty of his homeland; or continue to fail to support his family and endure their hunger, thwarted hopes and contempt. This is a hopeless novel. Nothing happens to save the main character, except that he is proved morally right – it’s obvious that this is not going to materially save him. Read when you’re feeling robust and want a deeply layered, very richly written treatise on despair and corruption.
5. The Forever War – Joe Halderman
I’m torn with this one. Halderman’s account of the alienation between soldier and society during wartime is one of the best pieces of military (and also anti-military) sci-fi I’ve read, but it’s deeply homophobic. Homophobia of the fearing rather than the angry kind, but nevertheless a real moral problem for anyone who enjoys the book. Read it for its place in the science fiction canon and its superb take on the Vietnam war, expect to be saddened by its smallmindedness.
6. Oblivion – David Foster Wallace
Foster Wallace is well beyond me, in a way that keeps taunting me to read more. The first two stories in this collection swept me off my feet. Mentally I felt like a fish on dry land – desparate for something I had taken so much for granted for so long that I hadn’t perceived it as existing. Some of the later stories settle down and become less aggressively avant garde. But for the most part Wallace plays continually with the notion of the narrator, the author, the idea of a story, the form of textual intercourse, and as many other variables as you could ever hope to pull out of written English. On top of that he manages some pretty good comedy and some staggering beautiful moments of emotional clarity. Brace yourself well before reading, prepare to be disatisfied and also to question what kind of satisfaction you ever thought you could achieve from a story.
Sad news. Trevor Matthews, who we published in West Coast, North Hill, died last week.
His work was recommended to me by Mike Barlow and I immediately wanted to read more. As I did I decided he’d be a great contributor to the three poet book we were planning at the time.
As Jane Routh says:
“As a writer he was gifted with something to say and the musical and linguistic ability to get it just right. He was overly modest about his own poetry, and I think you can hear this its quiet, poised and considered tone.
Thank goodness for the selection of his poems Flax published. Here is my warm-hearted and tender friend in ‘My Empty Valentine’; here is his quiet wit and wry humour (‘September Harvest’); his careful observation, penetrating intelligence and sense of beauty. And here too, I see now, is a sense of premonition in poems about ageing and death.
‘Lovely’ is the title of a poem Trevor wrote recently (about meeting an aphasic); and that word becomes the implied answer to its last stanza:
And that is how it ends,
him gone, the river still speaking,
light leaving the fells,
the drift and shuffle of shadows,
and me wondering
if my language were taken
which one word might I hope to keep?
Trevor’s been a lovely friend with whom to share the pleasures of poetry. He read widely, delighting in language: we had many good talks about books. He recommendations were always apt.”
Working with Trevor, as his editor, was a pleasure I won’t forget. He was generous in his knowledge, open to debate about his writing and eager to support all we did to promote his work: recording Handing Down for Youtube and reading at the many events I arranged around the county. He was patient in the midst of my often over-enthusiasm and quietly adamant in the face of disagreement. Perhaps this was down to his long experience as a paediatrician. His passion for poetry, his and others, illuminated his work and I think his life.
If you would like to make a donation in memory of Trevor to his favourite charities, they are: Water Aid and Smile Train. Vivian and family would like to thank everyone for their support, kind thoughts and cards.
Curiosity
The shelf held so many files, some of them labelled
Finance, or Gardening, or Income Tax
but the one that made me smile
was just called ‘Interesting Things’.
Afterwards I opened it, and there were
cuttings from newspapers, pictures,
little objects, stones, dried seed cases,
pages from guide books and obituaries,
things he would have looked into,
examined again, given the time;
at the end I found one, the black ink fresh
the last and lightest box of all
that read, ‘Still More Interesting Things’.
Trevor Matthews. 8 April 1934 – 3 August 2010
With the Forward Prize shortlists announced a couple of weeks ago, we’re working our way through the First Collection category, and particularly enjoying Helen Oswald’s Learning Gravity for its concentrated quietness, Sam Willets’ New Light for the Old Dark for the strange glow of love that comes out of the darker corners of experience, and Steve Spence’s A Curious Shipwreck for its fantastical exhuberance. And there’s still the other three to chomp our way through: Hilary Menos, Abegail Morley and Christian Campbell.
While in the Best Collection Category we already know how much we loved Robin Robertson’s Wrecking Light (nightmarishly intense interactions with nature) and Sinead Morrissey’s Through the Square Window (sustained delight on things we loved in our childhood). Both of whom happen to be reading at Grasmere on Tuesday 31st August for the Wordsworth Trust. And are looking forward especially to getting our mitts on Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability and Lachlan Mackinnon’s Small Hours. There is also the unavoidable slight dip in the excitement at this category being full of F&F, Picador and Carcanet, compared to the First Collection’s range smaller presses. It seems so predictable.
The judges for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction today, Tuesday 27 July, announce the longlist for the prize, the leading literary award in the English speaking world.
A total of 138 books, 14 of which were called in by the judges, were considered for the ‘Man Booker Dozen’ longlist of 13 books.
The longlist includes:
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan – Picador)
Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin – Fig Tree)
Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Books)
Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Andrea Levy The Long Song
(Headline Publishing Group – Headline Review)
Tom McCarthy C (Random House – Jonathan Cape)
David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Hodder & Stoughton – Sceptre)
Lisa Moore February (Random House – Chatto & Windus)
Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin – Hamish Hamilton)
Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House – Chatto & Windus)
Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic – Tuskar Rock)
Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky
(Random House – Jonathan Cape)
The chair of judges, Andrew Motion, comments:
“Here are thirteen exceptional novels – books we have chosen for their intrinsic quality, without reference to the past work of their authors. Wide-ranging in their geography and their concern, they tell powerful stories which make the familiar strange and cover an enormous range of history and feeling. We feel confident that they will provoke and entertain.”
Peter Carey is one of only two authors to have won the prize twice, in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. In 1985 his book Illywhacker was shortlisted for the prize and Theft: A Love Story was longlisted in 2006.
Three authors have been shortlisted before: David Mitchell (twice shortlisted in 2001 for number9dream and in 2004 for Cloud Atlas), Damon Galgut (in 2003 for The Good Doctor) and Rose Tremain (shortlisted in 1989 for Restoration). She was also a judge for the Booker Prize in 1988 and 2000.
Howard Jacobson has been longlisted twice for his book Kalooki Nights in 2006 and for Who’s Sorry Now? in 2002.
The 2010 shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 7 September at a press conference at Man Group’s London headquarters. The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010 will be revealed on Tuesday 12 October at a dinner at London’s Guildhall and will be broadcast on the BBC Ten O’Clock News.
The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction will receive £50,000 and can look forward to greatly increased sales and worldwide recognition. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, will receive £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their shortlisted book.
Chaired by Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, the 2010 judges are Rosie Blau, Literary Editor of the Financial Times; Deborah Bull, formerly a dancer, now Creative Director of the Royal Opera House as well as a writer and broadcaster; Tom Sutcliffe, journalist, broadcaster and author and Frances Wilson, biographer and critic.
The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award
Final countdown to the UK’s most popular poetry prize for young people
Deadline for entries 31 July 2010
“Becoming a Foyle Young Poet is about more than just winning a competition. It is like being given the keys to doors you didn’t know existed – suddenly there are clear directions you can take your poetry in. Entry is free and can be done instantly online – what are you waiting for? Let your poem be heard!” Phoebe Power, Foyle Young Poet of the Year 2009
If you are 11-17 years of age, the Poetry Society’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award opens up exciting opportunities for your writing to be recognized and given the chance to flourish.
Since it began 13 years ago the award has identified some of the most exciting new voices in contemporary poetry. These include Caroline Bird, who after winning the award had her first collection of poetry published aged just 16, Jay Bernard whose first collections Your Sign is Cuckoo girl was published in 2008, and Richard O’Brien who set up the highly successful e-zine Pomegranate with other young writers. Many past winners can also be seen performing their work at festivals across the UK such as Latitude and the Big Chill.
It doesn’t just acknowledge this new talent – it provides an opportunity for this talent to flourish. There are two prizes available for the fifteen overall winners. The 14-17 year olds get the chance to attend a week long residential course at The Hurst in Shropshire, one of the prestigious Arvon Centres, where they will be tutored by this year’s judges Jane Draycott and Luke Kennard. The younger age range winners (11-14 year olds) will receive a visit to their school from a professional poet, followed by distance mentoring. The Award also incorprates a year-round programme of activity aimed at encouraging creativity and literacy in schools, providing poet-led residencies, mentoring and a range of free resources including lesson plans and poetry book sets. It also champions and celebrates committed schools and teachers across the UK.
Whatever happens, don’t let uncertainty stop you entering that poem. As one of this years judge’s Luke Kennard confesses:
“I lie awake at 3 a.m. thinking of reasons not to send my work off. Maybe I’ll write something better next month or next year. The more enlightened part of me knows that one of the best poems ever written is William Carlos Williams’s apology for eating someone else’s plums; that we can only understand the great themes, the political, the spiritual through specifics and in strange, small, and seemingly insignificant things. So all I’m saying is don’t be like me lying there terrified at 3 a.m.: send in your work!”
The deadline for the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award is 31 July 2010. So what are you waiting for? Sending in a poem may be your first step toward becoming one of our great poets of the future.
Enter online or download an entry form at www.foyleyoungpoets.org or you can request an entry form by emailing fyp@poetrysociety.org.uk.
Launch! Launch!
This time, the latest Flax anthology – number twenty one, key to the door, and all that … This Road We’re On is our first anthology that has a connecting theme – relationships, specifically the pot-holed journey that is our search for companionship, love and acceptance.
It wasn’t intentional, just the best stories that rose to the surface of submissions all happened to be concerned with them, so we organised them into an arc and hey presto! The supremely talented Carys Davies wrote the introduction, raising the point that we’re continually interested in how relationships work, or don’t work and the communications that occur within them.
These stories offer a spectrum of interpretations, although, sadly, none are particularly positive. Is this tragedy/conflit an essential element of fiction? Do we, as some of discussed on Wednesday night, not want to read about people happily living together? Is it true that “all happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion”?
Read the anthology and let me know …
Annie Clarkson, one of the contributors had this to say about the launch itself.
The cover photo is by Jonathan Bean and is of the old Lancaster Regal cinema wall 
- the poster and the wall no longer there – to make way for a new Travelodge – make of that what you will. I absolutely love it.
As ever, coming up with a title for the anthology was hard work, but once we’d landed on the notion of journey and then roads and then the slow rolling rhythm of This Road We’re On, the designer, Anat Kaivanto, had little difficulty selecting this pic of Jonathan’s. I love it for the quality of image, for all its local associations, for its metaphorical resonance.
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