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.

StAnza 2011

I hope to get around to posting something vaguely more detailed about StAnza 2011 on here at some point soon... once the tiredness has worn off, which will probably occur some time around the middle of next week. In the meantime let's just say that I had an amazing, amazing time.

I left Newcastle at 6.25 in the morning on Saturday (so I had to get up at 5.40 (!)) didn't get to sleep till around 2 the following morning and then travelled back down on Sunday afternoon to family life, work and slamming. (Btw I'm very pleased to say I made it to the semi-final of the Lamplight Poetry Slam in Stanley yesterday... hold on... ST ANdrews, STANley...  I wonder where I could go next to complete a STAN-based hat-trick of towns.)

Anyway, back to StAnza - Here's a list of the events I managed to get along to during the 29 hours I was in St Andrews. 

Poetry Cafe for Breakfast: History

In Conversation: James McGonigal

Five O'Clock Verses: Durs Grunbein, Helena Nelson

Poetry Centre Stage: Selima Hill, Philip Gross

StAnza Slam: MC Bob Holman

Poetry Cafe for Breakfast: Translation

Border Crossings: Emily Ballou, Katrina Naomi

What else? Oh yeah. The New Writing North Showcase with Sophie F. Baker, Stevie Ronnie, Anna Woodford and me!

Massive thanks are due to Claire Malcolm at New Writing North for thinking of me as a last minute replacement when one of the original poets had to drop out for the NWN showcase. Nothing like being in the right place at the right time. Also huge thanks and appreciation to everyone at StAnza for making us all feel so welcome and for putting on an amazing show. 

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?