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!
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!
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
This week Andrew Forster, poet and Literature officer of The Wordsworth Trust is reading work from his second collection of poetry, Territory, with Flambard. His first was Fear of Thunder. So we thought to have a chat with him about his book and what went into it: 
SH Territory has a wonderfully wide notion of territory, opening with a social historical perspective, looking at the mining history of Leadhills. How much do you see the role of poet as historian? What obligation do you feel to make social observations?
AF I don’t really think of the poet as a historian as such. For me, in this book, it was about engaging with particular places. History is always going to be a part of that, but in a place like Leadhills the history is still very visible. The name of the village alone parades its history, the cottages are still much the same on the outside as they would have been when the miners’ lived there, and the landscape still contains the legacy of leadmining in both the remains of the mine workings and the fenced enclosures I refer to in ‘Shafts’. The history is very much a part of the place.
The same is true of the poems set in Galloway and Cumbria, where the landscape was very much shaped by its history.
In a poem like ‘The Cinema Organ’ I play with the idea of the past still being there even though it’s no longer visibile, but if you ‘ve had a relationship with somewhere that changes you can’t help having a sense of how it used to be. I don’t see this as nostalgia, it’s just about catching the whole spirit of the place.
The question of obligation to make social observations is a tricky one. I wouldn’t say I felt it as an obligation but I do engage in the world and my work wouldn’t feel really complete if it didn’t have that social dimension. It’s just the way I see it. There some wonderful poets whose work is very insular but still has the power to touch people – John Berryman springs to mind – but my work, at the moment, tends towards the outward-looking.
SH You say, “at the moment”. How much do you have a clear sense of where you’d like your writing to develop?
AF I’m open to possibility really, but I think it’s important not to close off potentail avenues. The Territory project has been going on now for some time. While not being totally rigid it did dictate the broad type of poem that was going to be a part of it. There’s something both restrictive and comforting about that at the same time. Finishing the project gives both a sense of freedom and a sense of loss. I do have a couple of ideas for longer projects that may or may not materialise, but for now I’m just writing poems with no greater agenda, and seeing what happens.
SH Many of the poems use striking, bold language. What do you think this says about your approach to your subject matter?
AF I think that the language in my poems is very much at the service of the subjects. I’m trying to capture something that I can see and feel around me, which isn’t to say that I’m not tuned in to the sound and rhythm and other qualities of the language, because I am very aware of all those things, but it’s the subject matter that’s leading the poems. When I say, in ‘Shafts’ that ‘the fences are rings of strange celebrants/ linking hands, refusing to disappear’, for example, I’m making use of imagery but I’m using it to capture the atmosphere and qualities of what I’m writing about, rather than letting imagery lead the poem.The Canadian poet Don McKay talks about ‘the moment of poetic attention that is pre-language’ and it’s that I’m trying to capture.
SH I was reminded of many other poems as I read the book, including ones by Frost, Hughes, and Duffy. How much of a dialogue are you having with previous poets (consciously or unconsciously)?
AF I think every poet is constantly in dialogue with other poets. Sometimes this is simply a single poem which has triggered something in us and sets the process going, sometimes it’s something about a poet’s approach that resonates with us. I’m aware of the influence of Elizabeth Bishop in my poems. The way she looks so closely at something that it begins to resonate in all kinds of ways is something that has always struck a chord with me.
In Territory, there are two particular books that I’m conscious of having a dialogue with. James Lasdun’s Landscape with Chainsaws and Kathleen Jamie’s The Tree House. Territory was in progress before I came across either of them, but they both, in different ways, helped me sharpen my ideas and better articulate what I was trying to do. The Lasdun is about picking out a life in harsh conditions, and though his life in the wilderness of upstate New York is infinitely more marginal than mine was in Leadhills, there are things in common. Despite the fact I drove to work every day it is a very remote place, 1500 feet up in the hills of South West Scotland, and daily life felt like it was very much on the edge of things.
My dialogue with the Kathleen Jamie collection was of a different kind. Although it is a themed collection addressing nature in the same way as mine is, there is very little of the personal in her book, and the poems seem to be deliberately removed from specific locations in order to make them universal. My poems deliberately set out to capture the spirit of particular places, and to explore my relationship with them. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong here, it’s just a difference in approach.
SH: How much do you think poetry is in danger of being trapped in a dialogue with itself rather than speaking to a wider world? I know some of youd work is on the school curriculum. How has this affected you writing?
AF I don’t think the two things are mutually exclusive. For me that dialogue is about helping find ways of both approaching and framing the subject, and crafting poems that have resonance for readers.
The GCSE inclusion hasn’t affected my writing at all. It remains to be seen whether it will in the longer term but I don’t think so. Interestingly, when the exam board first contacted me they said that they thought my work would really resonate with teenagers because the subjects were universal and the poems were really accessible.
I’ve done very little schools work and I’ve nenver really thought of myself as a writer for teenagers, but clarity and accessibility are very inmportant to me. I want the poems to have enough substance that they bear repeated reading, but I also want them to yield that meaning to their readership.
SH Terrority feels like a clear progression from the childhood themes in The Fear of Thunder. How aware of this were you? How deliberate do you think it was?
AF The main difference is in the way the books arose. Like many first collections, Fear of Thunder was a selection of poems written over a considerable period of time. It was structured into themed sections, giving the impression of narrative, but it wasn’t written like that. Territory, in contrast, took on the shape of a book fairly early on.
I’ve always written about nature and landscape, and the final section of Fear of Thunder contains poems about places, but when I moved to Leadhills in late 2001 I started engaging with the landscape in a much more systematic way. I had initially thought about including some of the Leadhills poems as a seperate section in Fear of Thunder but I held them back, feeling that they were different in a way I couldn’t really articulate at the time. A few years later, when Fear of Thunder was due to be published, I started thinking of a new project and began to revisit the Leadhills work in a more deliberate fashion.
In terms of stylistic developments, I think Territory is much tighter. I think of the poems as both containing more of me and less of me at the same time. There’s much less scene-setting, less context, but I think the level of engagement is deeper.
SH There are many poems about animals throughout the book. These are wonderfully documentry, avoiding mythologising the creatures. The creatures seem to occupy the borderlines that mark territories. How much were you looking for this in your encournters? Did the animal poems become a project?
AF I think that the animals create the borderlines to some extent in that they make us question the whole notion of our territory. You can see this with the poems about animals that very obviously ‘intrude’, the mouse, the damselflies, the rabbits and others, but I think it’s there in the other encounters too. I did become influenced to some extent by current thinking about ecology, and started to question the way we meet these creatures.
It’s not just about geographical borderlines, though, and I do touch on mythology in a few cases. ‘The Hare’ for example, is a real hare but the poem explores its symbolic qualities as well as its physical ones. ‘Encounter’ itself, where the speaker doesn’t recognise a muntjack deer, laments the lack of mythology to some extent.
These poems did become a project wihin a project, and it relates back to yuor ealrier question about dialogue with other poets. I began to explore the possibilties of differet kinds of ‘animal encounter poem’, from the stricly documentary to the ones that start to take us into more imaginative realms. I wanted to explore the nature of animal encounters, to try and get close to what it is that happens to us when we have an encounter with an animal.
SH Thank you, Andy.
A couple of Andrew’s poems feature on the Poetry Channel, Radnoti’s Notebook and Woman Sewing. He also has a Facebook fan club. And both his books are available from Impress
If you’ve been into the Poetry Bookcase recently, you’ll have seen a selection of the rather lovely poetry books published by Templar Press.
Templar Poetry is now in its fifth year and is currently inviting submissions for the 2010 Templar Poetry Pamphlet & Collection Prizes. As you may know the prizes offer an opportunity for four winners to have their submissions published in Templar’s widely praised pamphlet format, and to to submit a full collection for later publication. Templar are committed to publishing excellent new poetry and are delighted that three of their first collection poets have been shortlisted in major book prizes, and several of their pamphlet poets have gone on to receive recognition in many awards and prizes.
Templar appoint a new judge each year and all work is read anonymously and judged purely on merit. Submissions may be sent online or by post and the latest date for submission is 8th May 2010. This year the Judge is Pat Winslow, herself one of the previous winners of the Pamphlet Prize.
Shortlisted poets have the opportunity to have poems published in Templar’s annual anthology, from which they also occasionally commision full collections. Many of the poets published in Templar’s anthologies have also gone on to have their work published by other poetry presses and recognised in other major poetry prizes.
The four winning writers, along with anthology poets, are offered an opportunity to read at the Derwent Poetry Festival in Derbyshire, where Templar celebrate the publication of their new titles each autumn.
Recently the role of the pamphlet (or chapbook) in contemporary poetry in developing and opening opportunities in the writing careers of new poets has been more widely recognised with the establishment, in 2009, of a major new prize, the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, supported by the British Library and the Michael Marks Trust. This prize is a significant recognition of the role of the poetry pamphlet throughout the British Isles in offering modern poetry to new readers and audiences.
Further information is available on the Templar Poetry website.
If you didn’t read The Guardian on Saturday, you missed the great treat of a conversation between writers Mark Haddon and Paul Farley.
But don’t fret. Here’s the link.
This year, Valentine’s Day stretched into a weekend. So Litfest responded accordingly, by stretching the normal 12 point font into something a little larger, printing poems from North West based poets up on the walls of the NICE bar here in The Storey Creative Industries Centre.
This is what some of them look like:
Apologies, if you can’t read them properly, I took the pics on my phone. Although it’s also a cunning ploy since if you’d like to read them, you’ll just have to come over…
We’ve just taken delivery of copies of the first ever issue of Cake, the new poetry magazine that describes itself as Lancaster Literary Magazine. It has risen from the oven that is Lancaster University, edited by two of its undergraduate students, Andrew McMilland and Martha Sprackland, with Professor Paul Farley as associate editor.
Although the poems and reviews inside come from further that the university campus, combining familiar names (Woolworths by George Szirtes opens the magazine) with ones I hadn’t come cross before. It is perhaps fitting to the ambition of the magazine (cited in the impassioned editorial) the magazine closes with Amy Blakemore, also to be found in Bloodaxe’s Voice Recognition, celebrating new poetic voices for the 21st century.
It’s half four on a Friday. It arrived an hour or so ago. I’ve found a swooping variety of celebration, regret, unease and play in the few poems I’ve read. I like it.
Apparently the editors have ambitions for the magazine’s production values, so I can only see it going from strength to strength and we’re proud to be stocking the first I hope of many.
If you’re curious, then come down to the Poetry Bookcase and have a leaf …
Earlier this year it was announced that the Lancaster poet and writing teacher Elizabeth Burns won the first Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets for her collection, The Shortest Days.
The £5,000 prize was set up to highlight how effective pamphlets – defined in this case as a booklet of up to 36 pages – can be in introducing new poetry to readers. The Shortest days may only be 12 pages long, but was praised by the judges for it’s use of “a limited, light palette, which creates special, lyrical effects, particularly with her use of snow, and the colour white… this is gradually layered across the book, and all the judges felt that the play of light over the whole book was really very moving. It combines skill and direct engagement with the reader.”
“The Shortest Days” is published by Galdragon Press. The initial print run has already sold out, and the pamphlet is currently listed as being out of print, but luckily the Poetry Bookcase has copies still available. Act quick to get your copy.
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