Poeting at the Lit and Phil, Newcastle

I have a new pamphlet coming out next week. It's called ˜ and ►, which you might think stands for circle and triangle or you might know stands for record and play. A couple of poems in the collection have those old fashioned tape recorders in em and I just liked it. 

Anyway - I've left Facebook until they get a handle on all those dodgy rape and domestic violence pages so I'm just using this post to let you know about the launch event at the Lit and Phil on Wednesday 17th April at 7pm. (It's free and there will probably be wine, there always is when there's poeting going on). It's a joint launch (a jaunt?) with the poet Ric Hool whose work I'm very excited to hear. Although that does mean that I have the usual doubts about how my work will hold up in comparison... Never mind though, eh? So, there you have it. If you're in the toon next Wednesday and you fancy a spot of poetry please pop along.   

http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/SquirrelEvent.html

Deseeded's first online anthology

A couple of years ago I created a Facebook group as a way of staying in touch with the poets I'd met  through Polly Clark's Poetry in Practice course. The group is called Deseeded (if you want to find it) and every now and then I set  challenges...

New Year's Eve 2009  - write a poem a day in January... That was hard, I enjoyed writing every day but didn't like coming up with almost-poems-but-need-some-work poems. So on New Year's Eve 2010 I decided that the challenge would be to write something every day but you only had to write one poem a week.

At the end of the month I asked the group members to send me their favourites and here they are in Deseeded Vol. 1. It's my first attempt at editing and I'm really proud of the results. I'm also really thrilled to include a  poem from one of the original Poetry in Practice poets, Elly Nobbs - a gorgeous cinquain called Woodpecker.

The cover image shows a detail from a painting by my husband Daniel Stone.

Knights encountered today = 1

Saying that I met Andrew Motion tonight might be over egging things a bit. But I did. On account of buying a copy of The Cinder Path and asking him to sign it.

I’ve been quietly excited about this event for a while so when Daniel found out that he had a parent’s evening that wouldn’t be finished until after the reading I prepared myself for the possibility of missing it... luckily Marian came over from Lanchester to look after the girls. (I think secretly she was looking for an excuse to see the hamsters she’d helped the girls to pick out last week. They’ve doubled in size since she saw them which is easy to believe as they are massive – relatively.) Anyway, I’m really pleased that she came to the rescue because it was an interesting event and inspiring too.

At the start of the reading Motion talked about the fact that we forget we’re a country at war but that we shouldn’t. It made me think about the fact that I’d like to write poetry that deals in some way with the world that we’re living in at the moment. And that made me think about the fact that poems written because the poet wants to highlight a cause or reflect an injustice are often shit. If you’re not careful.

There were personal poems as well as those about war – love poems for his wife and elegies for his father and Philip Larkin. All of which showed that in order for us to create poems that have meaning for other people we should take care of the particulars, the specifics. Focus in on the details and avoid generalisations, grand ideas… it’s the small things that will lead us into a poem and make sense of it in relation to ourselves. Of course he put it more eloquently than that.  

This was definitely a reading. Not a performance. At the end Motion thanked us for ‘listening’ to him. And that was it; we’d gone to listen not to watch. So that left me wondering about my own approach to readings/performances. Can I split myself and my poems in two so that for readings my body language is understated (with less gesticulation) and for performances it becomes more about how I use physicality to emphasise the imagery and how I embody my poems? I don’t know. I’ll just have to suck it and see. I have a few readings coming up during March – all in very different settings so by the end of the month I should have an idea about what I want from myself… maybe.

One more thing. Michael Chaplin asked a question about process that led Motion to describe part of his routine of writing. Getting up early, really early and beginning to write in that space between being asleep and being fully awake. Being a ‘bastard’ about protecting that time and refusing to allow anyone or anything to eat into or take over. Now I know I’m never going to get up early to find that time – I live in a very small cottage and if I get up at 5.30am, the girls are probably going to hear me pottering about and at 7 and 4 years of age I don’t think they’ll quite buy into the idea of mummy being a ‘bastard’ to protect her writing time. No. I’m going to have to programme myself to switch off all electronic gubbins, forget the guff on TV and the latest newsfeed on Facebook (which I’m giving up for Lent btw) and head to my room at 9pm and write for an hour or two… or even just read… a writer is a reader too, yeah?

Friction Magazine

I will never get the hang of this. I write so that people will read what I write... it's easy with poetry... I want you to read my poetry... And I guess I want you to read this too but it seems too much like drawing attention to myself (as opposed to my work).

Anyway, if I can just accept that this blog is probably going to be no more than intermittent and I don't have to blow my own trumpet incessantly then I can probably limit my discomfort long enough to tell you stuff...

I submitted some pomes (yes, I know it should be poems but if I make light of it it's easier... same as doing a spot of poeting sounds less terrifying than performing) to Friction Magazine a new online journal published by Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and edited by PhD and MA students at Newcastle University and they've only gone and published one. I am pleased. Yes...

But I'm also having to beat down the vicious bastard that's loitering at the back of my head who is trying to get me to believe a number of reasons that I've been included in the first issue other than the one that goes 'they think it's a good poem'. The vicious bastard is called Evil Degs, I've had to battle her before... and I'll probably have to keep battling her before she realises that I'm not going to listen... or I am going to listen but I'm going to do choose not to believe her... or I will believe her but I'll get a second opinion from someone who doesn't live inside my head.

The poets in this first issue and are all worth a read, and then a re-read and then a trawl around the internet, bookshops and libraries to find their other work.

The Whale Road by Bill Herbert
Island Girl by Cynthia Fuller
Household Waste Only by Jake Campbell
At Longsands by Me :-)

I'm going to take time off from my evening facebook addiction and spend some time reading the fiction, non-fiction and reviews over the next few days... now if only I had an ipad to read it on...

http://www.frictionmagazine.co.uk/2010/11/07/at-longsands/

Michael Jackson made me burn my lunch

Well, not him. But news of his death when a facebook message made me realise that the reason there was a special on 5 this evening was that he was dead, not just a teaser in the run up to his tour. So as we've been writing poems about the news I wrote a poem about this news... sort of two but the first was just what I said when I heard.

Gut reaction

What?

What?

What?

?

This isn’t right.

This is wrong, yes?

The Questions

Who do I remember?

You then, when you were still young

beautiful, untainted?

Or then, when your transformation

didn’t shock but intrigued?

Or then. When you’d gone too far

disfigured, body dysmorphic?

What do I remember?

The 1986 letter I never sent

saying maybe, one day, we could marry?

Or the music that filled childhood afternoons

classics that filled dancefloors?

Or the twisted media obsession

old skeletons that wouldn’t lie down?

What should I remember?

Maybe just the music