HappenStance Press

Although the Autumnal Equinox isn’t until September 23rd, Autumn has arrived.  The rowan berries are  brilliant and gleaming, in wind wild enough to bring the leaves down in swathes. Oh hang on, you leaves, a little while longer!  The nasturtiums are fantastic too — such value for money these glorious little flowers, yellow and orange and red, They spring up every year without seeding or feeding. They love late August sun and I love them.

It’s a strange thing, the human response to natural beauty. I wonder what purpose it serves, what evolutionary logic has brought it into existence?

Meanwhile, this lesser mortal continues to create little artefacts. My mother’s narratives about her grandmother’s family (my great-grandmother and great-grand-aunts and uncles) is on its way out to to various people. There is a date error on the first page (my author mother spotted it immediately, although it escaped through all previous drafts) and a layout error later. But the cover is lovely and the content is a delight.

Who’s in the Next Room?, which comprises lyrics by Thomas Hardy as well as new work by four Dorset poets (Paul Hyland, Kate Scott, Catherine Simmonds and Pam Zinnemann-Hope), is at the printers about to emerge. Alan Dixon came up with a fabulous print for the cover — a real cracker. At the same time, Kate Scott’s individual pamphlet is at first draft stage and I have started work on some new Samplers. Isobel Montgomery-Campbell is first in the group. . . .

The Samplers hold so few poems that they’re lovely to work on. Each individual poem has to make its case irrefutably. There’ll be new PoemCards too: two are at the printers. More are waiting for their illustrations to be done by Annie-Ellen Crowe’s great-great–great-grand-daughter, Gillian.

The new website is nearly ready to get kicked into touch. Not quite. . . . The biggest thing is changing all the customers from the shop over.

At college, (my other job) it’s the start of the academic year. New students will enrol this week. Today they’ll be apprehensive, and the wind will make them even more restless. But what could be better than paper, books, new things to learn and company to learn with?

It’s very interesting flying between international cities, becoming aware how simple these things are — if you have time and money. I love the bits of time that isolate themselves like islands — the bits when no-one except yourself quite knows where you are or what you’re doing.

Old town, Geneva

On these peaceful islands drinking coffee and waiting for planes I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver and RJ Price (who is also Richard Price, the poet) The Island. And then I read The Island again (it is very good — a very beautiful little novelle from Two Ravens Press) and most of Tove Jansson again and part of Eckhart Tolle again.

And I spent a whole afternoon walking across Geneva in sunshine, stopping here and there. I read several chapters sitting beside a fountain.

Funny how things connect too (although everything connects): The True Deceiver has a foreword by Ali Smith, who was one of the judges for the Michael Marks award that so benefitted HappenStance. And Richard Price was another. Eckhart Tolle wasn’t but he knows something about peace, knows something about those islands.

Ordinarily, I read so much poetry that it’s a joy to read good prose — a kind of holiday to a different kind of consciousness. Back home now, I’m reading James Robertson’s The Land Lay Still (the title is drawn from a poem by Edwin Morgan, who died this week. Another connection.) This is a big book and complicated. I have to take it slowly. It’s my current bedside treat.

But what about the HappenStance stuff? I am a little behind my schedule, though I may yet catch up. The Crowes story is done. I made an elementary error with page layout which is annoying but probably most readers won’t notice it. The Hardy and Dorset poets anthology is done except for the cover:  Alan Dixon and I are still exchanging woodcuts by snail mail. This remarkable artist-poet has no telephone and no computer. I imagine him on his own quiet island.

Two new PoemCards are with Dolphin Press. There are others but Gillian is still working on illustration. A great deal of time has been spent replying to late submissions, considering books for review, commissioning Sphinx reviews, sending out orders, or giving feedback on poems for next year’s publications: hard to get this balance right. The website is also being worked on in the background and soon it will all look completely different. Sphinx will have a space for online interviews and features, several of which are in process. One with Leona Carpenter of Mulfran Press is finished.

In between all this, there’s chocolate. I eat Hotel Chocolat Tasting Club chocolate. I don’t eat a lot: it is expensive and rich — maybe one a day, though sometimes I miss a day and sometimes I have two . . . It seems to me not unlike reading poetry. My preferred reading method is really one a day and sometimes two (poems) but I have to read much more than that. Sometimes it does get overwhelming and then it’s hard to give the right quality of response.  A little is marvellous. A lot is too much.

Meanwhile, here I am busily publishing a few hundred poems a year in some shape or form, while the rest of the publishing world is printing thousands more. I can’t read them all. Nobody can read them all. Nobody will even want to read them all because you can’t read that much and respond. Out of all the poems, you just want the few that stop time for you, the ones that create an island where you sit and read. Nobody knows where you are. The island stays inside you and you carry it around for a while, go back there when you need to. It becomes part of your necessary geography.

Jon Stone wrote a blog entry recently about the problem of too much good poetry, the risk (or advantage) of the poetry superhero getting lost, with the attendant danger of  poetry itself becoming secondary in an age compulsively driven to create superheroes. Somewhere, Peter Sansom says he’s interested in the poems, rather than the poets. As a reader, I agree. As a person, I can’t help being curious about the poets as individuals: what makes them tick, why they do it — even what they think poems are.

But if there are too many poets (Stone talks about the 147 entries for the Forward prize, for example), it is even more true that there are too many poems. How shall we find the half dozen that really matter to us? Some poets write so many! Each magazine editor is busy doing her or his bit to select and present and enthuse.

In 1852 , 370,000 immigrants arrived in Australia.  That was largely as a result of the Victorian gold rush. I have no idea how many of them found sufficient gold to sustain their expectations. Not many, I shouldn’t think, though it’s quite possible they found other things, including friends, lovers, jobs, lives, homes, children. Perhaps it’s the hunt that sustains us — the idea that anybody can find gold, anybody can find the true poem.

Because they are out there. I came across two yesterday.

No news from me this weekend because I am leaping into an aeroplane and flying to Geneva instead, pretending to be a powerful potentate, except that potentates probably don’t fly EasyJet.

However, a set of Sphinx reviews have just gone live on the website, including reviews of publications by David Morley, Jane Mary Wilde, Fiona Sinclair, Colin Donati, Clare Best and Carole Bromley.

An interview with Leona Carpenter of Mulfran Press will be published once I’ve worked out quite how to do this and where to put it. Interviews with Veer Press and Pighog editors are in progress.

Back soon, after eating Swiss cheese and dreaming of St Bernards.

Yesterday a day of nearly no HappenStance. It was Gillian’s birthday (that’s Gillian who does nearly all the cover images for HappenStance), so I got up, did a couple of orders and the cheques to go to the bank, then started the birthday cake. When I opened the cupboard several things felt out, including the balsamic vinegar. The top blew off and it spattered all over my face, hair and t-shirt.

Changed t-shirt, washed most of balsamic off self. Back to cake cupboard. Got out SR flour, marg, eggs, sugar, all ready to start cake. Opened flour container. Argh! Crawling with little black weevils. Threw flour away, cleaned out whole of flour cupboard, sprayed with anti-weevil spray. Began again.

So it was a Dr Oetker’s instant mix, wasn’t it? The almond one which sinks in the middle, and which sank in the middle. Filled middle of cake with cream and strawberries from Blacketyside Farm where I had tea with Eleanor Livingstone on Friday. Made two and a half jars of jam with raspberries from self-same farm shop — very expensive jam but excellent.

Cake

Packed up birthday gifts (and one jar of jam which is LOVE) to go off to Aberdour to pick up daughter and son-in-law to go to Fringe. Torrential rain meant walking through a new river on the way to the car.

However, in Edinburgh warm sunny and clear. Glorious afternoon, in fact. We went to see Dean’s Dad’s Ducks which was excellent. I recommend Dean’s Dad’s Ducks. First-rate story-telling with a few poems sneaked in. It is thoroughly enjoyable and definitely different. Absolutely performance, but not Performance Po, as such.  Nice venue too, with cafe style seats and plenty of space.

Then first session of Utter which was darker, Performance Po As Such, hotter and more claustrophobic but –good in bits, if over-miked and predicably OTT (in this case Over the Tim — three Tim performers). It was free and should be supported and the fun count was at least 75%.

When we set off back to the station the roads were sealed off, with ambulances and fire engines all over the place, and police. We found out why when we finally made it to Waverley. A man was on the North Bridge, obviously threatening to jump, and the assembled crowd had found yet another street fest event, one even more exciting than most of the others, because real and potentially involving death. Poor soul up there on the bridge. Poor human race for goggling at the spectacle of misery and despair. Some of them were even filming him. I suppose we had all inadvertently become witnesses to his story. You can’t help looking. You can’t help wondering.

Ah well. Nose now back to grindstone. Night Brings Home the Crowes has gone to Dolphin Press. I feel even more sanguine about it after hearing Dean’s Dad’s Ducks, a show which celebrates the stories that families generate because if nobody celebrates these stories, they get lost.

Mary Crowe - Gillian's great-great-great grandmother

The Crowes were my great-grandmother’s family, a family of bakers. I bet they didn’t have weevils in their flour. I bet they used their flour too fast for weevils to get a look in! My mother, Kathleen Curry, has collected as many of their stories as she can remember. The last chapter links directly with Dean’s show and with the central significance of Cake, because it’s about a piece of parkin, and Dean Parkin himself shall have a copy soon.

This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!

It doesn’t rain in Midhurst apparently. Not like here. So we had a very nice time visiting beautiful gardens and I took our photograph on automatic through the teapots.

Moving Life with Teapot

There was serious work going on too though. For some time, a pamphlet has been in hand called Night Brings Home the Crowes. Written by my mother (Kathleen Curry), it tells as much of the story as we can recover (from her memories and a few other sources) of the Crowe family — that’s my mother’s grandmother and her nine siblings. It will mainly be of interest to family, but there is some lovely period detail that others will also enjoy, I think.

Anyway, one of our tasks this week was careful proof-reading, page by page, and collecting a few more photographs to go in. The publication, with luck, will be finished and go to the printer this week.

And yet another publication under scrutiny this weekend has been my own next collection, which John Lucas of Shoestring Press is publishing. It’s due some time in the autumn – perhaps October – and although I got it together, more or less, a good few months ago (in fact, last summer, I think), I put off finalising it until the ultimatum came.

Which it did, while I was dipping in and out of A Field of Large Desires, an anthology of Greville Press poems, brought out just a few months ago by Carcanet (I thoroughly recommend it — the contents are different from anything you will find elsewhere). Astbury’s Greville Press is, of course, chiefly and justifiably renowned for poetry pamphlets. In the preface to this book-length volume, Grey Gowrie says,

Poems are best read [ . . . ] with but few of their fellows. The great collections of great poets are useful for reference but hell to read. A slim vol is okay; a pamphlet best of all.

Increasingly, I agree. My Shoestring Press book will be a slim volume, but even at that, it’s weighing down the world with more poetry. I hope Plot and Counterplot justifies its place. We’ll see. When your main task has come to be publishing other people’s work, you end up feeling bizarrely guilty writing poems yourself. Like counselling people to smoke less, while cultivating your own cigar habit on the side.

Anyway, this week I’ll also be working on the Thomas Hardy pamphlet, amongst other things. Thankfully, the submission period is now over, so letters to poets are off the agenda, unless they’re poets in progress, as it were. I’ve been amused to find that several people have congratulated me for publishing Selima Hill’s winning pamphlet, which of course I did not. I haven’t even seen it: it hasn’t come in to Sphinx for review. Speaking of which, there are a couple of reviews nearly ready to go up too. Another task for today.

I’ll conclude with a bit of James Reeves (another under-rated poet) from the Greville Press Anthology. It’s titled ‘The Prisoners’, and every second line should be indented, but I can’t make Wordpress do that for me (if anyone reading this knows how, please tell me):

Somehow we never escaped
Into the sunlight,
Though the gates were always unbarred
And the warders tight.
For the sketches on the walls
Were to our liking,
And squeaks from the torture-cell
Most satisfying.

I feel this week as though I’ve read more poetry than anybody else in the world. It’s an enriching experience, in some ways, reading a great deal of verse — I mean bookfuls every day. At the same time, it’s frustrating because  what I really like is spending time with an individual poem, turning it inside out, trying it on for size. Perhaps that’s why I like doing the pamphlets: typing out each poem by hand, getting the feel of it, hanging it outside on the line to dry.

I was very taken, as they say, with a little pamphlet of poems by A C H Smith, a  Greville Press pamphlet. Smith has written lots: novels, plays, ‘novelizations’, libretti, thrillers, non-fiction — but his Wikipedia page doesn’t mention poetry. This brief selection, with a foreword by Tom Stoppard, consists only of ten poems (though one, ‘Structures of Cancer’, is a long one). Something about the quiet particularity  reached out and grabbed me. I’ve read so much lately where lines break arbitrarily or to achieve some kind of fracturing effect — attempts to render the text as ‘poem’ rather than a set of words. But here is a man who just offers a handful of beautiful phrases, and they add up to a great deal more. The opening of ‘No 11, The Polygon, in Winter’ is:

You are potential in this room’s air, about
To condense, always about. The flowers I bought
Last summer still imperishably bloom
On my desk, except when I look for them.

For years I used to think all poetry was about either love or loss. These days I think love and loss are simply two sides of the same coin. This little pamphlet has just enough poems in it. You could read it for a long long time and dispense with much else.

On the other hand . . . I’m working on a pamphlet of poems by four contemporary Dorset poets (Kate Scott, Pam Zinnemann-Hope, Catherine Simmonds and Paul Hyland), all responses to poems by Thomas Hardy, and some of the old poet’s poems are in there too.

Thomas Hardy

Doing this, of course, took me back to The Complete Poems, all 954 pages of them. I recall having an argument with Angus Calder about Hardy’s poems: not all of them were all that great, I said. But Angus was for having the bard’s absolute calibre in every word. It is so much easier to be nice about huge works by dead poets. At least you know they can’t rush off and write another 500 poems and brandish them.

I’m inclined to think Hardy wrote some bad lines, as well as quite a lot of poems I could live without. But then some of them have such lovely bits in them and all of them have that beautiful musicality and playfulness of form.

And occasionally one just catches you with a little shock, like static electricity, and you cannot imagine how you didn’t notice it before.

There’s much that contemporary writers can learn from Hardy at his best, not least the power of what is not said. Here’s ‘In the Moonlight’:

‘O lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave,as no other grave there were?

‘If your great gaunt eyes so importune
Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon
Maybe you’ll raise her phantom soon!’

‘Why, fool, it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is no such joy for me!’

‘Ah — she was one you loved, no doubt,
Through good and evil, through rain and drought,
And when she passed, all your sun went out?’

‘Nay: she was the woman I did not love,
Whom all the others were ranked above,
Whom during her life I thought nothing of.’

The submissions month continues. My brain is now full. I’ve read a lot of poetry and sent back a lot of comments.

At the same time, many new HappenStance subscribers have arrived, which is marvellous. Perhaps it’s because I’ve stopped being backward in coming forward. Now I just say (especially to people sending submissions) ‘Please subscribe’. It doesn’t cost much and it builds the readership. And it’s the easiest way to find out how things work here.

I was worried the Michael Marks Award would mean loads of submissions and no sales. I was wrong. It increased sales slightly but made little difference to submissions. All the packets coming in are interesting; some are good (more than I can publish). The strongest have an impressive track record in magazine publication, across the UK (not just in Scotland or Wales), as well as online. There are hidden secrets, of course, in terms of which publications bring most kudos. It’s fair to assume, though, that the harder it is to get poems accepted in any one outlet, the more impressive it is when it happens.

Some poets spend ten (or more) years on style and method, placing things gradually more successfully in the best magazines. Others have work published here and there (lots on line) and think they’re ready for a pamphlet collection. It all depends what’s meant by ‘ready’. By and large, the second lot are nowhere near as good as the first, though they may be original in unpredictable ways.

Not everybody has a decade to work at it. Increasingly, people are coming to poetry late and with a sense of urgency. That’s understandable too. But poems have their own kind of time.  They won’t be rushed. Only a handful will survive  anyway. In some ways, publication is the least of it. The maturing poem (like good wine), and the privilege of making one, is the magical thing.

Meanwhile, huge effort going on in the background getting the next set of Sphinx reviews together. The website (thanks to Michael Marks) is about to get a radical overhaul. And another wee project is in hand too, involving some silliness and fun. More on that anon, but here’s the lovely cover image, courtesy of Gillian Beaton.

Honeysuckle in my garden (given to me by Eric Cochrane)

Summer in Fife has gone away again. Yesterday it rained most of the day and was grey and chilly. Meanwhile news reports persist of heat waves and droughts in England. No need to water the garden here. And who cares? The smell of honeysuckle in the rain is amazing. And lilac. I have no lilac in my garden but I love lilac in the rain so much I would tramp miles just to breathe it in.

Last week was spent achieving much less than expected (as usual). This is submissions month and they have been steadily arriving. However, it’s been good carefully reading them and finding interesting things in every envelope. I am predisposed in favour of those who have researched the press. It isn’t difficult to find out something about the way I work. Nor is it rocket science to have read (and sent feedback on) some of the publications.

I also brood a lot about this business of expecting a poet to promote and sell the work, since some people sending work in clearly haven’t thought about this side of things. I don’t like the idea of poet as promotional whizzkid but without their active involvement, sales will be low. I go daft doing flyers and publicity, and sending out things to those and such as those, and PBS choice and Callum Macdonald and Michael Marks, and review copies and word of mouth. Even then, so much more could be done if I had more time. I’m endlessly grateful to my own poets, most of whom are wonderfully effective in drumming up trade — and not just for their own publications — for HappenStance in general.

Chris Hamilton-Emery says somewhere that not all poets want to sell their work. That sounds crazy but there’s truth in it. Poets want readers but not the messy business of selling. Poetry should be purer than that, poets uncontaminated by filthy lucre. Publishers are obliged to get contaminated. Otherwise, they can’t stay in the business of printing the next harvest from Mount Parnassus. Although it would be nice just to give the poetry away. Secretly I do quite a lot of that.

Generosity’s an underrated poetic attribute. Generous poets buy (and help promote) the work of their friends and peers. I learned this early on, when my first collection was published. A couple of established poet friends sent for several copies and passed them on to friends. I was deeply touched (and surprised), but I remembered this, and have done it for others since. What goes around comes around, as they say in Fife. Generous poets sell well because their friends and peers return the favour.

I’ve been working on the current set of Sphinx reviews too. It takes a long time to edit all the work and subdue it into the correct format (three reviews on each pamphlet). Assembling three reviews, doing the edit, working out the stripe rating, getting it into web format and posting it on the website takes at least an hour per pamphlet, and currently I’m working on 21 of these, with some still to come in.

I’m planning to give some sort of fanfare to those with the highest rating this time: Sphinx high-stripers. Not money, but kudos. Here’s a useless but interesting fact: the mistaken idea that ‘kudos’ is a plural noun has led to another word, ‘kudo’. You could, theoretically, be awarded one kudo. How many kudos did you expect, kiddo?

Opening envelopes, closing suitcases.

I now have a whole new vocabulary about eyes. Myodesopsia, operculum, vitreous humour, entoptic phenomena. Wonderful words and especially relevant to aging myopic people such as myself. Then there’s the less delicate word ‘floater’, which makes me think of a jelly fish.

I acquired my first floater just under two weeks ago. I was driving to work and a little dark thread swam across my left eye.  I wondered if it was a migraine aura, though I don’t get visual disturbance with my migraines. It wasn’t. It persisted during the day in a delicate and fairly unobtrusive way. On the way home, I dropped in at our local chemist and asked the pharmacologist whether I should be worried. No, he said. Very common. For some people these things float about all their lives.

And the thread did reduce to a little blob with a grey dot in the middle of it. I got my GP to take a look at my eyes — just in case — and she said everything looked fine. Her parting words were: ‘But if you ever get something like a curtain descending over one part of your eye, a partial loss of vision, come back right away. We’d need to act on that quickly.’

I am a natural optimist and a pretty healthy person. No curtains for me. Or so I thought . . .

A week ago yesterday we drove off for a week’s holiday, with a lot of books and the potential for miles of sleep. We arrived. We unpacked. Suddenly I got a little, rather pretty, flashing arc to the right of my right eye. Like a small firework display. I sat down for a bit so see whether this was a migraine sign or what. Nothing much happened. It came and went, specially when I moved my head quickly from side to side.

While reflecting on this, I poured a small glass of wine and went to the cupboard to get some crisps. Only I didn’t get the crisps, or drink the wine, because suddenly there were swirling black rings in my right eye, so dramatic they made me giddy. It was a case of NHS 24 — could we find the number?

It was not a calm evening. We ended up — after conversations on the phone with nurses, and senior nurses and one doctor — in Aviemore (about 12 miles from where we were staying) just after midnight. There’s an all-night health centre there — who would have thought it? And the following morning, after a few hours sleep, I was in Raigmore Hospital in Inverness seeing an opthalmologist (actually two, one in training and one Master Chef).

The fear, of course, was that I might have a retina seeking to detach itself. However, that hasn’t happened.

What was going on was bits of vitreous humour coming away and, in my right eye, that  had caused a bleed, which manifested as black swirls. It is now more like looking through a bucket of dirty water with black floaty bits in the middle and these have, as the consultant suggested they would, diminished somewhat. I hope they’ll diminish more because working on screen and reading is a lot less comfortable than it was.

I can see. I spent the whole of the holiday week appreciating being able to see more than I ever have in my whole life, even though I can now see less well than I could before. I kept thinking about the doors of perception and how they can close. Somehow that made me more aware of all of my senses, especially touch. And the amazing smell and colour of the wild thyme on the hills. . .

And despite all the doom and gloom about cuts and health service and so on, what marvellous medical support! It could not have been better. Each of the professionals who spoke to me — from the NHS 24 Call Centre to the man who opened the Health Centre door in the middle of the night in Aviemore to the two opthamologists (junior and senior) in Raigmore Hospital to the hospital nurse who chatted to us in the corridor while my pupils were dilating — was so very kind and perceptive, explained so well. I felt enormously cared for. We human beings, so widely reported for atrocity and violence on the evening news, are minute by minute responsible for numerous unreported acts of kindness.

I was in the middle of writing a poem when we went away so I swiftly memorised it, just in case I couldn’t see to read it. It struck me that this would be an excellent way to slow poets down, especially those poets who write in huge swathes. There would be a new law which would decree that people could only write as many poems as they could commit to memory. Annually, they would be tested, just to check they hadn’t sneaked in a few they couldn’t recite on demand. What about it?

Overwork didn’t lead to the eye thing. Excessive reading and writing didn’t lead to the eye thing. Why first the left and then the right within a week? No idea, said the consultant. Matt, who is a mechanic by training and experience, pointed out that both my eyes were the same age and this struck me as a better answer.

But I think I will be reading a little less. And at the computer screen a little less. I was going to say ‘and in the garden a little more’ but this morning rain is hurtling down as if to reproach my temerity for watering the hanging baskets last night . . .

Lots of orders have come in so that’s task one. Lots of submissions, several of these rather interesting and some of the poets even knowing my name. And Sphinx reviews to get online this week.

I am in good humour and I hope my vitreous is too.

Sweet especial rural scene

Exhaustion has officially set in.

Gina Wilson’s Scissors, paper, stone is done. I love it. But then, I would.

Gill Andrews’ The Thief is at the printer’s. I love it. See above.

The college term has ended. Things have been put in packets and posted to all sorts of people. New submissions have started to arrive.

I anticipated that the Michael Marks Award would result in more submissions. And that most of them would not have found their way to any submission guidelines on the website. I was right. Sigh.

No-nos for people sending poems to publishers:

1. Do not write, Dear Sir, Dear Madam or Dear HappenStance (insert name of publisher). Find the NAME of the person you are sending your stuff to.

2. Ensure you have read (REALLY read) some of the publications produced by that publisher, so you can mention them like you mean it. Otherwise forget it.

3. Remember, when sending your poems to a publisher, you’re asking them to  spend cash and time printing your work, for which they will get nothing but kudos. And probably not much of that.

If, after all that, you are reading this and considering sending some poems to me, send them anyway, but hey — subscribe to HappenStance first, if you haven’t already. It is inexpensive and it is worth it. Read Chapter 4. Know something about how things work here.

Having a few days off now. Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep beckons.