HappenStance Press

How did it get to February already?  Ah well, it’s wet, it’s driech and dreary, but the Spring is on its way. The pussy willow is budding. All the spring bulbs are well through in the front garden. Two little patches of snowdrops have survived the snow.

Meanwhile, on the HappenStance front, several publications have nearly made it into existence. Already with the printer are the Ruth Pitter Conversation, Chapter Four of the HappenStance STORY (yeay!), Robin Vaughan-Williams’ The Manager and tomorrow, all being well, I’ll take a surprise addition, Jon Stone’s Scarecrows.

In Chapter 4, I talk about scheduling and how some things in the schedule always disappear (for good reasons) while other things appear that were unplanned. Scarecrows is one of the latter. I offered to do a publication for Jon ages ago. He had other plans at the time, plans which (for the moment) haven’t materialised. So he mentioned this fact. I knew he was good. I’ve always known that. Send me some poems, I said. He sent his recent Gregory application set. Wow. Quickly I put a pamphlet together of some of these very ‘finished’ (but weird) poems and Gillian did some cover images yesterday.

I say “quickly”, but nothing here happens quickly. “Quickly over about ten hours” is what I should say, though at least I don’t get in such a mess with InDesign as I used to, the practical side of things being at last much more straightforward.

We’re not quite done yet, but Scarecrows will go on sale at the same time as The Manager, and there’s something very pleasing about that. Both deal with the surreal (in very different ways). Both are young male poets. Both have an intoxicating sense of energy surging through the work. (That, of course, is not necessarily a good thing. There’s a lot of intoxicating energy about these days in poetry, some of it splashing all over the place in a wild and furious fashion. But these guys aren’t like that. The work is controlled, intensely controlled. I think they’re both gifted and unusual writers.)

Anyway, we’ll see what you think, right?

Meanwhile, Sphinx 12 is nearly done. An interview by Chicken is in process: I bet that’s a first ever. The review function has slipped behind but I’ll be catching up within the next two weeks and sending more pamphlets out to reviewers, of which there are now a very large number. There needs to be a lot of them, in order to manage three reviewers for every publication. Most of them are Reader Bs (see below) but there are at least two Reader As.

So — have you read Bow-Wow Shop 4 yet? Some fascinating comments from James Sutherland-Smith and Carol Rumens about the stage of good old British Po. Editor Michael Glover describes the mag as “an endeavour to bring poets together to talk, sensibly and intelligently, about the past, the present and the future of poetry. ”

There’s certainly some sensible, intelligent conversation in this issue and the Bow-Wow Shop index is unmissable! Great stats.

• An estimated 50,000 unpublished poets in the UK. Is that all?
• Most extraordinarily generous advance against sales offered by a publisher to a poet during the early 19^th century: £3,000, by John Murray, to George Crabbe for Tales of the Hall (1817-19). Phew. Changed times.
• Sum offered to – and rejected by – Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet laureate of England, to undertake reading tour of America in 1862: £20,000. Well, would you do it for that?

But it was the debate that drew me in most. Sutherland-Smith talking about reviewing. He thinks a lot of reviewing is a bit woeful. True. Poetry needs to be precise, he says, and should be “supported and advocated by a criticism that is both forensic and passionate. Without such criticism, good poets will continue to write unnoticed unless they are capable of putting themselves about in the current media circus.”

I’m not sure that it’s criticism that gets good poets noticed. Not unless the criticism is written by specific people in very specific places, although I do, very much, care about the quality of poetry reviewing (hence Sphinx’s attempt to contribute to this in a meaningful way).

Martin Bax wrote to me not long ago and one of his notes (he has marvellously illegible handwriting but not quite so illegible as John Lucas) queried whether it’s sensible to have all these poets reviewing other poets. It does seem illogical. Playwrights don’t generally review other playwrights; they just get on with writing plays.

But then not all poets review. I’m of the opinion it’s good for them to try: I think reviewing makes people read carefully (or it should) — really carefully. And that then informs the writing, or should. I also think reviewing can improve a person’s prose writing. And if they can’t write good words in the best order, why would they think they can manage the best words in the best order?

Carol Rumens must agree with me because she says “too few poets write criticism”. She talks a lot about Reader A and Reader B (Sutherland-S prefers the notion of a continuum). Reader A (this is Seren editor Amy Wack’s terminology) is the “intelligent general reader”. Reader B is “the specialist”. In poetry terms, Reader B is a poet or wouldbe poet. When it comes to discussion of ‘reaching new audiences for poetry’ (sigh), what it means is trying to sell poetry to people other than poets. Not just popular anthologies but the more difficult stuff.

Most HappenStance publications go to Reader B: poets. Most of my subscribers are . . .  poets. But there are exceptions.

At this very moment, flyers (with poems on them) are going out for Clare Best’s Treasure Ground in organic vegetable and fruit boxes despatched from Woodlands Farm. Let’s see how many of them send for the publication. Reader A, Reader A, come in. Reader A, Reader A, where are you?

There are lists, and lists of lists, and files with lists in them. My desk is a mess. I hate the desk being a mess. It directly represents the inside of my brain.

Messy desk

It’s like when you go shopping and find the previous shopper’s list inside your shopping trolley. I’m always tempted to use theirs. It might lead to a whole other way of life. Custard creams. Branston . . .

You see? I’ve been distracted already.

Today’s List

• Finish Chapter 4 (four pages to go)
• Pack up RP Conversation to take to printer tomorrow
• Do registrations for  RP, R V-W and Chap 4.
• Look at JS poems
• Send pamphlets for Callum Macdonald Award entry and write rationale (aargh)
• Suggest images to Gill for JS
• Write to TP re poems and make sense
• Send at least 2 poems to PS somehow god knows how
• Write to this week’s submissions, card to remind them about reading window, can’t read anything till July
• Sphinx tweaks
• Update sales list
• Flyer for RP
• Write JL and revise own book poems
• Make pastry
• Go shopping
• Phone mum
• Do ironing
• Hoover
• Breathe

Orders and envelopes pour through the door.
I ought to be finishing Chapter Four.

Stuck on Sphinx 12. And pamphlets. What’s more
Still haven’t polished off Chapter Four.

Migraine descends. A pain and a bore
It certainly rules out a day’s Chapter Four.

It’s started to rain. It’s started to POUR.
It’s miserable weather for Chapter Four.

Slogging at blogging is crazy.  Ignore
The rant. I am thinking . . . about Chapter Four.

Back to the keyboard. Shutting the door.
Chapter Four summons. I’m off now. Bonjour!

They are arriving from all quarters, by mail, by email, by Facebook, by hand, in my sleep and waking. Can’t keep up. Ever felt like that? Yep. I thought so.

Then you calm down a bit and one little line or so gets through with its calm, quiet voice and things are all right again.

Pile of pamphlets

Snow has gone. It’s raining poems instead. I can’t keep up with the pamphlet update. I’m trying valiantly to get the tripartite reviews edited and online, but I cannot tell a lie: I’m behind on that too.

Working on Sphinx 12 still. Great interviews with Alex McMillen (Templar) and Chris Hamilton-Emery (Salt). And I’ve got Gerry Cambridge talking about professional type-setting — must read for anyone thinking of calling in a typesetter, and GC is The Best. His work on the two recent Mariscat pamphlets, Susie Maguire’s How to Hug and Lesley Harrison’s One Bird Flying, is superb. These are gorgeous publications to have and hold. Great reading too.

Back at the range, A Conversation with Ruth Pitter — a record of Thomas McKean’s visits to her home in Long Crendon in the 80s — is mainly ready. Just huffing and puffing about the cover just now. Ruth was a wonderful person, and the end is particularly moving (and comforting).

Submissions still arriving. I’m getting less subtle. Last year I lost money on publications, quite a bit. Sphinx has a lot to do with that so I hope things will get back to a balance after the paper issue ceases. But now when poets send work I’m starting to say outright, “Subscribe. Help the press. Subscribe.” It’s not just a matter of helping the cash flow (though it does help if people not only subscribe but also buy three or four pamphlets during the year); it’s the whole business of establishing a good quality reader base. I like subscribers who tell me what they think of the publications (good or bad). It’s important. Lots of them go on to become Sphinx reviewers too. I think quality reading and quality writing are inextricably bound up. Most of the poets I’ve published stay subscribers too, and the invisible network grows. I am grateful to them.

If a person sending me work doesn’t seem to have taken an interest in the publications on the list, makes no mention of reading or liking them, a feeling of intense (and unreasonable) gloom starts to afflict me.

It’s not their fault. They just don’t understand how it works. They probably still think publishers are powerful and anonymous people who have vast power to sell poetry all over the place. Poetry is hard to shift, especially if you want it to go to people who will read it — not just the aunts, uncles, cousins and writer-pals of the poet. Sphinx (among other publications) has tried to open up the truth of all this — all the stories of all the independent publishers, the self-publishers, the poet — but it’s only ever had a relatively small readership. And it takes time.

The very nice people at Inpress invited me to join up. They help sell stuff. They produce a very nice brochure too — and a poet friend sent a copy recently. But there are two problems with that. 1. You have to pay for their service. 2. You have to send them a stream of information, jpgs of book covers, marketing information etc, as well as doing all this for your own website, for the various other places you have to send it and so on. That takes time.

Time! The most precious thing in human existence, with the exception of Health.

And even with a special offer and online only, someone who is not making profit has reservations about paying an agency to do what you’re already doing, unless you’re wholly convinced they are doing much better, or more advantageously.

The box the digital scales came in

The December/January submissions have been coming in. One interesting poem included the word twitten, which led me to look it up and find it was one of those lovely words for alleyway – like vennel in Scotland and — amazingly – snickelway in Yorkshire. So I started another Wordnik list, after finding other dialect words in Wikipedia, and adding vennel to the Wikipedia page because it wasn’t there. All these things are how I mean to, but don’t, get started in the morning.

Improvements in the new year include a proper digital scale, so I can now weigh parcels properly before covering them with expensive stamps. Before I weighed them on the old pounds and ounces shop scale in the kitchen and did the conversion mentally. Roughly. Not very clever really and meant that I usually put on more stamps than necessary just in case I’d over-estimated.

Submissions always make me think I should rewrite the submissions page, since several people do seem to miss the point. But perhaps they wouldn’t read it anyway. It would be nice to think they’d read one of the HappenStance publications, for example, before applying to join the gang, as it were. Oh well.

I’m working on

• Sphinx 12
• Sphinx online reviews (four more went up last week)
• a prose pamphlet which comprises a long and fascinating conversation Tommy McKean had with Ruth Pitter
• Chapter 4 of the HappenStance Story
• Robin Vaughan-Williams’ grim, funny, haunting, beautiful The Manager

As usual, too many things by half. But at least I can weigh the packets accurately.

Scales weighing treasure ground in grams

Welcome to 01.01.2010—but this, though written this morning, has only just been netted. My attempt to write the blog this morning was foiled by, yet again, a non-responding server. This happened exactly two weeks ago. On that occasion, I spent an hour testing everything in existence, running up and downstairs, checking the phones, the wires, the netgear . . . This time I know what the problem is. It is HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM ORANGE. I suppose I should change my ISP because this is fearfully irritating and twice in two weeks does seem to indicate there is a bit of a Problem.

However, there’s a technical name for the kind of person I am, though I can’t remember what it is. It is the opposite of what I am supposed to be educationally (an ‘early adopter’). I guess in internet-server-provider terms I am a Late Adopter. I foster the idea of changing but I don’t ever actually commit.

Or I’m just a person who loathes the hassle of going through the change procedure. A stupid person. It’s why I’ve been with the same bank for the last 30 years, why I’ve never switched from Scottish Gas, no matter how irritating they may be, why my telephone line is still BT.

And it’s why I’m writing this blog (or not writing it) in a Word document. And it’s why I won’t be able to email my daughter (whose landline connection was cut by BT just before Christmas when she attempted to switch to Virgin) or my son, for whom at the moment it’s the only form of communication because his Swiss mobile is out of credit and he’s in Edinburgh.

Oh technology! Oh wonderful white wintry world in which we find ourselves this morning! Thank you God for books. Those old-fashioned papery things, one of which I am going to go and read, happily.

Happy New 2010, with or without technology!

LATER THE SAME DAY (sheepishly)

I telephoned Them (Orange) by evening because nothing had got any better.  That was after I had phoned a whole website (via my phone which has net access) devoted to Problems With Orange. It confirmed my worst fear.

But nothing ventured, nothing gained. It also gave all the expensive phone lines to ring so I did this. The guys at the other end of the phone were patient and very helpful, despite a poor line and heavy accents. One even went to get another one who might have better advice from one using netgear from a Mac. Whiloe they were asking me to check the things I’d already checked, I thought Id’ try unplugging the router and plugging it back in again. Two weeks ago I did this and it had no effect. This time, the effect was instant. Back on line.

So not Orange’s fault then. My Netgear’s fault. The mannie on the phone said I should regularly check my router by resetting it (namely switching it off and on, something even an eejit can manage).

I said, ‘Do you think it’s sign that the box is not very reliable and I should get a new one?’ (Mug born every minute.)

‘You can get one direct from Orange,’ he said hopefully. ‘But you may need to upgrade your Broadband connection to a higher speed . . .’

Oh well, tomorrow it is 01.02.2001. That’s quite an interesting date too, and it might be a better day than today. And I did manage to contact both of my children, and we did meet in Edinburgh and restore Chris’s glasses to him, and it is not snowing. Hurray!

Birds in the snow (courtesy Ron King)

The Delve Tways of Crassless

sorry cakeless

Oranges (courtesy Clare Best)

sherry useless
blurry glassles
cherry missmas

slurry gespiss
hurry upness
lost addresses—
Holy Moses—

marry postess
mistletoeness
very stressmas
merry kisslas

It’s here! Treasure Ground, the last publication of the year, finally done — and it looks gorgeous. I get very parental about all these productions but I am particularly pleased with this one. The collection is a sequence  of connected pieces, all arising from day to day life on Woodlands Organic Farm, and it threads its way across the seasons. You need to read it from beginning to end (not, as I often do, backwards).

But Clare (happily for a typesetter) tends to write shortish texts which fit neatly inside one page. They don’t crowd their way down to the bottom line, and there’s space to start them well under the header. I mean, I know poetry is about sound and form and sense — not just how it meets the eye — but some people’s poems are so much easier to present well than others! And Robert, at Dolphin Press, found some lovely dark brown (nearly black) paper for the flyleaves: not a bad representation of the colour of Lincolnshire soil. . . .

Many things are a bit different this time. Lots of these poems originally went out inside vegetable boxes to Woodlands customers, and now 1800 flyers, flagging the appearance of the pamphlet, will go out the same way. It will be the most promoted of any of the pamphlets I’ve ever done — fascinating to see what the result will be. I do hope people who eat organic broccoli and cauliflower and parsnips and carrots  will also want to send for (and read) the poems. I’m optimistic.

For some VERY annoying reason best known to technology, WordPress is resistant to my uploading a picture of Treasure Ground this morning. HTTP error, huh? It’s something to do with Mac not talking to Wordpress, I think. Instead of scanning, I’ve just photographed it. That seems to work. Sigh.

This is the thing. When this web world works it’s wonderful. When it stops, what kind of ontological panic grips the world of the addict? I must have become an addict without knowing it. My server is Orange and on Friday night, orange not only didn’t rhyme with any other word, it didn’t work at all.

I reconnected every single connection, tested everything. Four account connection faults. Stupid me. The server was down. It’s happened before, but not for ages. Now it was good for me to have a whole night without checking emails, shop orders and that stupid Twitter feed. But did I feel good about it? No. I felt terrible. Like I had just been shut out of my mental home or something.

Yes, I ought to change my ISP. Like I should have changed my gas and electricity but didn’t. I did, however, change my car insurance this year, and the building and contents. Maybe . . .

Treasure

It’s been cold this week. Not deep snow like in part of the States, but serious frost so you slip all over the place on your way out to the car.

I’ve been filling post boxes with packets again – issues of STORY 3 going hither and thither, as well as fresh orders to send out, and at this time of the year, the boxes are often already full of Christmas stuff. Friday night and much of Saturday was spent finishing and printing flyers and review slips and updating mailing lists and publications lists. How long it all takes! The subscriber Christmas mailshot is started but it’ll take a good number of hours yet to complete, and I haven’t begun on family and friends.

The last publication of the year, Clare Best’s Treasure Ground, is at the printer’s. Once that is away and the Christmas cards and presents are posted, I might have a day without working. Yeay! I forget how much time the brass tacks take up.

More treasure

Anne Stevenson sent me a copy of the latest publication from Candlestick Press, The Twelve Poems of Christmas. What a lovely little pamphlet — a gorgeous cover. In some ways I associate anthologies with Christmas. Twice, as a child, I got lovely glossy backed anthologies then. How I loved them! That’s how I first met Charles Causley and Edwin Morgan — even Dylan Thomas and Charles Dickens, in extract. It was like getting treasure.

Which brings me back to Treasure Ground. . . . It really is.

Rob Mackenzie has posted a wonderful review of Mark Halliday’s pamphlet. What a delight.

No panic here . . .