Like most people who have ever listened to Desert Island Discs I have collected and changed my selection many times over. A few constants have been Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, Pie Jesu from Faure’s Requiem and the aria Ebben? Ne andrò lontana from Catalini’s La Wally.

I, also, always have a spoken word track which got me to thinking today what would be my Desert Island Poems. Today they are:

1. Dart by Alice Oswald

2. The Four Quartets by TS Eliot

3. The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

4. The Wasteland by TS Eliot

5. A Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill

6. Teach Yourself Mapmaking by Jane Routh

7. A Sea Chantey by Derek Walcott

8. Turning into Whitby by Sarah Hymas

Last week I organised an alternative to Guy Fawkes Bonfire Night. I had asked ( on posters, email and facebook ) for a poem that would celebrate the night/stars/dark or even fireworks. That was my big mistake.

I started the evening at 7-45pm, introduced the first poet and sat down to doodle and make a few notes on the next poet up. I was somewhat surprised when the first person finished their poem and sat down.

I introduced the next poet and sat down to doodle and make notes. She read her poem and left the stage.

You can see where this is going.

By 8pm 5 poets had got up and sat down. So, the lesson is – you sometimes get what you ask for. I should have asked that people include in their 6 or 7 minute slot one ( or more ) poem to do with the theme.

In the next few weeks I’m hosting an event at a local Arts’ Space. I’ve started the Facebook and email notifications and am now considering the flyers and posters.

In the last two events that I’ve organised I’ve spent upwards of £50 on the things and as far as I can tell there has only been one person who has looked at them and as a result come to the evening.

So, is there a point in not only spending the money but also the time going round to libraries, galleries and shops and spending, sometimes, frustrating hours persuading people to take them or take them for consideration by them upstairs.

On top of that - the event is supposed to be Free Entry but that means I finish up well out of pocket. So, I have to embarrass myself by asking for donations from people on the way out.

The answer, for me, is that it is not worth it but I’m still going to have to do it on the off chance that this time the effort will pay off. People expect a poster. It’s just one of those things.

music at poetry events

There’s been about an hour of readings at the poetry event and just when you’re thinking of a break and a drink the mc announces that they’ll finish off the first half with some music. On comes someone with a guitar and proceeds to rearrange the microphone, adjust the seat, explains what the song is about, tunes the guitar, has a drink of something, tunes the guitar again and then sings some song that is unintelligible. Then does this again after that first song and the next.

The average length of time for each poet has been seven minutes. The musician is on for fifteen. And they’ll do it at the close of the second half as well.

If I want to listen to music I’ll go to a concert, folk club, jazz club or whatever. I go to a poetry event to listen to poetry. If the event needs something else to liven it up then there’s something wrong with it in the first place. I can’t ever remember going to a concert of any sort and them stopping so that a poet can come on and read a few poems.

notebooks

The passing of a pocket notebook and the beginning of another is a ceremonial occasion. The old book is laid gently in the bottom drawer with its predecessors. A slight tear is allowable before turning to its successor.

But what successor? Choosing a notebook is not a simple matter. It has to be slim, small enough for the pocket but not so small that it can’t be used to write complete lines. Or lost. It needs to be hard backed, there’s nothing worse in a notebook than creases on a page. It needs another requirement which will be touched upon later.

I have a basket full of notebooks untouched. Bought in a surge of excitement in a bookshop or stationers and which on return home prove to be totally, or frustratingly almost, unusable for any variety of reasons.

Over the years I have come to treat with disdain some of those offered in even well known stores. What, on earth, is the point of those pocket notebooks with spiral metal hoops that are guaranteed to get tangled with normal stuff found in your pocket and dragged out to fall over the floor just as you need to jot something down.

The colour of the notebook is totally irrelevant to whether they are fit for purpose. I’ve had blue, green, black. If it glowed in the dark, I wouldn’t care.

The best notebook I’ve ever had was from a shop in Windermere. A small second hand bookshop whose owner’s mother made them as a sideline. Just that one notebook. I’ve ordered another since but it wasn’t the same.

Obviously, I have Moleskin that goes in the rucksack. The one with the blank pages, elastic band and opens front ways not side. But, surprisingly, it is just too big to fit in a pocket. And for all its virtues that too has one major design fault, one that it shares with every other notebook I have bought or considered buying.

And this is the other requirement mentioned above. Consider what you need a notebook for. It’s not for looking at or for tearing its pages out for bookmarks. You need it for making notes. But no notebook has a slot for a pencil or pen. It’s absurd. The one from Windermere had a space between the spine and the pages into which I could slip a small pen, but that was by accident.

As an aside – the best small pen I’ve found is by Zebra. It’s telescopic and slim. When the case is pushed into itself it is perfect for positioning into the makeshift holder I’ve made on the spine of a notebook. I got it from the bookshop in Carnforth.

The makeshift spine looks awful but it works. Glue a suitable material across the spine of your notebook and it becomes part of the book rather than sticking out.

Joy of joys. I’ve just found a Moleskin that’s small enough. No place for pen. Yet.

Covers

When I’m in a bookshop trawling through the poetry section trying to decide what to buy and I don’t know the poet’s name there are a number of factors which will persuade me to purchase this book rather than that one.

Partly it’s the front cover, partly it’s the size – will it fit into my pocket, partly it’s the title and mostly it’s the bit on the back.

The bit that supposed to attract me. Which is why I can’t understand why so many of these back covers are so poor. I’m not interested in endorsements from well known poets – they could be their best mates for all I know, a picture of the poet is irrelevant and the descriptions of the type of poetry inside usually make my eyes glaze over within the first sentence.

How many ‘he sees things as they should be seen’, ‘an appreciation of the physical world’, ‘unusual personal shadows’. ‘new spaces through language’ need to be written. They are interchangeable.

And worst of all are the ones that make me actually put the book back on the shelf without further thought as in ‘This book is groundbreaking’. As if.

Ironically the type of publisher that makes me open a book in the bookshop ( which is surely the point ) is Faber and Faber who put nothing on the back and only the author’s name and the title on the front.

Korova launch flyer

Hats

Every month or so I meet up with poets Ron Scowcroft and Martin Domleo for chat about poetry. Last week was one of those occasions and the talk drifted, as it does, about recent readings we’ve been to and what’s coming up.

And we discovered that we’d all recently been to events where some poets had been wearing hats. With feathers in them. Which brought the unanimous verdict that this trend was not to be encouraged.

Indeed, I’d take it further and suggest that any form of poetic dress code involving capes, scarves, greatcoats, frills, headbands, waistcoats, cowboy boots or Doc Martens should be reported to the Poetry Society who will be obliged to issue a first formal warning to those wearing such apparel. On further transgressions the poet would be forced to attend the Glastonbury Festival.

Apart from anything else wasn’t the wearing of hats indoors supposed to be rude.

It just so happened that this week I came across a poem by Tony Curtis entitled ‘Hat’ which include the lines: I wanted a hat with gold, purple/saffron, the yellow of a buttercup,/the red of a butterfly:/so that even a stranger,/passing at a distance,/could see the poet in me.

It’s in his book ‘The Well in the Rain’ from Arc Publications.

PPS editorial

Welcome to the summer edition of the Newsletter. Today the sun is shining. I’ll repeat that – today the sun is shining. Another indication of it being the season of the year is that Test Match Special ( TMS ) is back on the radio ( R5 Live Extra or Radio 4 long wave ). You don’t have to like cricket to love TMS because so much of the broadcasts are about familiar, easy conversations between the commentators and summarisers. It’s like listening to favourite old friends having a chat on a lazy day. One of my favourite memories is walking along the Dorset coast as Viv Richards and Tony Cozier discussed the best place to get fish in Barbados.

What has this got to do with poetry one may ask. Well, it’s like this. Those easy conversations are a result of working hard to get to a level where it doesn’t seem hard. And this was brought to mind a few weeks ago when I went to a poetry event ( not in these parts, I hasten to add ) where a group of poets were reading their contributions to a new publication. In the course of the evening they managed to annoy me in a number of different ways which in normal circumstances would have only been mildly irritating. Thus:

1. Most of them had their poems scattered around in books or on separate pieces of paper and they seemed to think it would be amusing to the audience that they couldn’t immediately find their next offering.

2. Some of them mumbled so badly that I had no idea what they were talking about.

3. All of them used a microphone ( with all the adjusting and fiddling that that involves ) in a space where, by merely speaking a little louder than normal conversation, one could be heard.

4. There is absolutely no need for interminable pauses to take long swigs from a large glass of water when one is only on for ten minutes.

5. There is no need to expect applause after each ten second poem.

So, in normal circumstances the evening would have been mildly spoiled but the crucial difference in this case is that I had to pay £5 to get in which went to the performers and that makes it a professional engagement. I don’t care if the poets, or any performers, are not naturally very good at reading in public or that they claim to be writers first and foremost. They are being paid and that is where TMS comes in. They are good at what they do because they have worked at what they do. I heard one of the poets at the end of the evening say that they had never listened to a recording of him or herself. And I know recordings exist. I thought that was disgraceful, how on earth would they get better.

I suppose one other way would be to come along to somewhere like Preston Poets where reading to one and other over a period of time imperceptibly increases one’s confidence and abilities in reading before a group of people, paying or not.

Thanks to Vince Smith for putting the Newsletter together and printing it and to Mike Cracknell for the Puzzle Page.

couldn't resist

Geoff Stevens' Memorial Prize Book Launch

Date: 8^th June

Entry: free

Open Mic Event

Contact: tsqdor@hotmail.com

Winners of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize Julie Maclean ( When I saw Jimi ) and Terry Quinn ( The Amen of Knowledge ) launch their collections on the 8th June at The Barlow Theatre. Julie lives on the Surf Coast, Australia but was born and grew up in Bristol and this retrospective collection sparks through those times. Terry lives in Preston, Lancashire and his everyday language covering ordinary subject matters have a subtext which has become the hallmark of his poetry.

Together they will attempt to find common ground when they tackle similar issues from their books but will also read separately and there will be open mic slots throughout the afternoon.

The prize was instigated by Indigo Dreams Publishing in commemoration of Geoff Stevens, editor of Purple Patch ( national treasure, the Guardian ) Black Country poet and artist and after a break for refreshments Geoff’s poetry and artwork will be on display with selections from his poetry being read. There will also be an open mic for his poet friends to add to their memories with poetry readings.

The event starts at 2-00pm (doors open at 1-00pm) with the evening session beginning at 7-00pm.

Venue Details:

     at Barlow Theatre - 2.00pm

Address: 3, Spring Walk, Oldbury, B69 4SP, GB

anonymous submissions

Over the last few years there seems to be a growing trend for poetry magazines to request that submissions be entered without identification with a separate sheet containing one’s name and address. Well, there is if you count a trend as from 2 to 3. But they are important magazines.

The idea is that editors will not be swayed by receiving poems from poets already known either just to them or with a more nationally recognized profile.

And that’s a good thing. I’ve heard of publications where there is an in-tray with ‘friends’ and an out-tray with ‘get lost creep’.

But. The but is that this anonymous approach does not allow for editors, in more open magazines, to nurture poets as they develop. Good editors will advise people as they get to know their work and suggest that, maybe, the poet should revisit a poem in the light of what they have submitted or had published in the past by their magazine.

Or it may be that the poet is trying something different and the editor can see what is going on and although that particular effort wasn’t up to standard they can urge them to keep trying instead of getting a rejection due to no knowledge of prior work which could then put the poet off progressing.

On balance, my opinion is that there is a need for some magazines to have anonymous submissions. Maybe there should be some more with half and half. But only a few.

What’s the point of going to the Poetry Library in the South Bank, London on a bone chilling winter day if I can’t use it as a piece in something like a blog.

In fact the actual title of the place is the Saison Poetry Library and it contains the most comprehensive and accessible collection of poetry from 1912 to the present day in Britain. It also has the hardest chairs – but I think I’ve mentioned this before.

When Alan Dent gave a talk on how to get published during a recent Preston Arts Festival  he brought along a selection of the magazines to be found at the Library. He stressed – as all editors do – that one of the major factors in getting a magazine to take your work is to be familiar with both the magazine to which you are sending the poems and a knowledge of contemporary poetry.

I can’t emphasise enough that any magazine worth its salt will be found at this Library. Depending on how fast you read and how many coffee breaks you take you should put aside about an hour minimum and two hours maximum to trawl through old favourites and the newcomers onto the market ( including the inevitable thick, glossy table breakers that remain a complete mystery to me – how do they get the funding, who reads them? ).

One of the interesting aspects of browsing through the collection is coming across the magazines that you ( well, me actually ) wouldn’t touch with a quill the size of a barge pole. Anything that contains the word ‘experimental’, for instance, is guaranteed to bring on nausea. Silly line drawings don’t do much. Big glossies ( see above ). Stand magazine. Front covers that mention the word ‘Faeries’. The list is not that long thank goodness.

What was slightly depressing is that there doesn’t seem to be any new magazines coming onto the market – in paper form anyway. There are various emagazines around now and the Poetry Library does have a list of those that follow the traditional editorial policies of printed magazines. I’ve had a few poems published in this type of format but it just doesn’t seem the same.

'not previously published'

About ten years ago I was involved in a vigorous online discussion on the poetry magazine Iota’s website regarding the policy of most, if not all, poetry magazines requiring that any poems published in that magazine be ‘not previously published in any other magazine’. I was arguing that this was self defeating for the future of poets and various Editors responded by saying that purchasers wanted new material and their magazines would go under if that wasn’t the case.

This argument raised its head again in a recent edition of ‘South’ where a comment column made much the same points that I had been putting forward those years ago.

The main and most important point is that this policy severely restricts the opportunities for poets and poems to become well known. As both the columnist and I argue Poetry must be the only art form where a previous publication/exhibition/concert/cd means that it can never be realistically seen again. Can you imagine the situation where if the Beatles had been first heard on Radio Merseyside then no other radio station would play their music. Or David Hockney’s paintings had been shown in Harrogate so the Tate would not place them on display.

Who knows whether a truly great poem has been published in some obscure magazine with a circulation of dozens and lost forever. Why not have something like a ‘Top of the Pops’ where a good poem gets into national significance by being read in many magazines. Maybe the magazines would benefit as well due to their having a mix of new and previously published work.

The columnist makes the further points that aspiring poets only submit their best work to magazines with large circulations so cutting off the input to smaller magazines and also that ‘famous’ poets have little incentive to bother submitting to small magazines when, as a consequence, they will dramatically limit their audience by so doing.

One of the ironies of the columnist’s article is that underneath the piece is a statement from the magazine’s Editorial Board that ‘not withstanding these comments it is still South’s policy only to accept previously unpublished work’

The other week I was in Waterstones in Manchester and remembered that I'd lost my copy of Eliot reading 'The Waste Land'. The memory was triggered by me spotting a cd of Ralph Fiennes reading the poem. When I got home the cd went straight into the cd player. And within a few minutes straight out again. It was truly awful.

 

Don't get me wrong - Ralph Fiennes is a wonderful actor. But the key word is actor. It was a performance. The poem was totally subjected to the actor's performance. The voice was swooping and deeply emoting when all that was needed was the words.

 

I was thinking about writing about this when I came across the article below which explains the phenonomen exactly. It is by Peter Pegnall in the Telegraph dated March 29th of 2012:

 

I couldn't agree less with Lord Saatchi that actors make ideal readers of poetry. Given the chance, I'd expel actors from my poetic republic, on pain of hearing an endlessley repeated reading of Tennyson's 'Break, Break, Break', given by Donald Sinden. Because, for the most part, they just don't get it. Their oratorical training lends them power, charisma, grandiosity and flashes of the craftily sincere, but also a tendency towards what Basil Fawlty described as the bleeding obvious. Those silken or trumpeting tones belong in the auditorium or on the screen: they are so rarely equipped to touch on the the idiosyncratic mysteries of the poem.
Some years ago, there was a Radio 4 reading of Keats's 'The Eve of St Agnes' by Michael Maloney. It should have been a rare treat, to hear the whole of a great poem at three o'clock on a weekday afternoon. It wasn't. Maloney's enunciation, his intonation, his abrupt, non-metrical pauses, his obtrusive sense of himself were all so acute that the effect was emetic rather than scary, sensual, forbidden and delicious. No inner life: all display.
On another occasion I witnessed Fiona Shaw reading Eliot's 'Waste Land', a show that won golden acclaim. She can be a fine actress, certainly; her performance in Beckett's Happy Days was breathtaking and that is, of course, a supremely poetic play. But what she inflicted on 'The Waste Land' failed to capture its fragmentation, its repressed torment, its distinctly conservative apocalypse. Pound knew what he was about with his editing and what he didn't aim for was melodrama. Listen to Eliot's own reading and you will overhear the true timbre of desperation. Especially on Margate beach.
This may be the point. There are so many available recordings of poets reading their own work that it seems otiose to dragoon thespians – let alone Bono – for the privilege. The flaws in a poet's reading are very often an aspect of the poem's dark corners and infuriating ambiguities. Liste to Ciaran Carso, who speaks with a stammer and will, occasionally jerk himself into fluency with a brief tune on the flute. He chooses to write in long lines so, in a sense, courts anxiety. Take Simon Armitage on the West Yorkshire attack; Jackie Kay a burst of sunshine, a growl of rage. Seamus Heaney, that gentle, tough, tentative bear of a man. Or the deceptively offhand Don Patterson, the mischievous vitality of the late Michael Donaghy, the quirky, stubborn, slightly bonkers Selima Hill, the much-more-acerbic-than-she-seems Wendy Cope.
I also believe that many poets would do better job than most actors with dead writers. There would be a fusion or collision of signatures, the words of a dead man modified in the guts of the living, as Auden put it. How grand to hear Tony Harrison as John Clare, Sharon Olds as Emily Dickinson, Andrew Motion as Edward Thomas. What about Billy Collins as e e cummings? Poets read well because they have not been trained to do so: they proceed from the inside outwards. And there is another danger. Actors may be able to dignify and drape lousy work. At the Brighton Festival, Timothy West and Prunella Scales gave a reading of a 90-minute-long poem about Nietszche. Yes, 90 minutes. Yes, Nietszche.
It goes without saying that there are exceptions to my irascible rule. I recall hearing Alec Guinness read 'The Four Quartets' over forty years ago and I experienced a connection with the music and the circular time scheme more fully than any 15-year-old might hope or expect. I have, more recently, rejoiced in almost anything read by Juliet Stevenson, especially Carol Ann Duffy's work.
But I'll stick to my guns. Stroll along to your nearest reading, whether it be by the deft, pithy John Hegley, Brendan Cleary, the Irish card, or even Les Murray, the scarcely audible depressive giant. You will listen to thoughts, feelings and bewilderments which elude stars of stage, screen and colour supplement.

Performance/Page Poets

In February of this year there was a masterclass course with the title 'Get Heard, Get Seen, Get Noticed'. It was in Manchester and being run by Apples and Snakes ( Arts Council grant for 2012/13 £400,000 ). The advert stated that it was appropriate for poets at all stages of their careers, from those who are just starting to seek paid work as well as established artists who want to get up to speed with the best ways of maintaining and growing their profile.

It happens that this sort of course was just what I was looking for as on June 4^th the book contract I won as a result of being joint winner of the Geoff Stevens' Memorial Prize ( with Julie Maclean ) is due to come to fruition with the publication of 'The Amen of Knowledge' published by Indigo Dreams Press.

I have no background in the publishing or literary world. Leaving the NHS when I did last year was partly so I could concentrate on writing poetry – a sort of change of career. This class seemed to show the way to how to get readings, generate publicity, learn how to read properly in public etc.

Well, it did and it didn't. The problem was that it was restricted to a group of poets who are termed Performance Poets as opposed to Page Poets ( those are Apples and Snakes words ).

The query then is what makes a Performance Poet. I go to poetry events and read. I've heard many examples of poets who, I presume, class themselves as Performance Poets who are nowhere near as good as, for example, Simon Armitage at putting on a performance.

 

Which wouldn't matter as much if the funding bodies didn't have to cut as they have been over the last year or so. It's not the time to be discriminating between different ( if they are different ) types of poets.

podcasts

Mike Cracknell, Glenda Charlesworth and myself have been presenting the Arts Scene programme on Preston fm for the last 7 years. It is a weekly, hour long show which, as the name suggests, covers the arts in Preston. What the name doesn’t suggest, however, is that our guests come from all over the world. If they are in Preston they will be interviewed – and without exception they have been terrific. We try and balance local with regional and international. So we might have the Preston Lacemakers in the first half of the show and Vasily Petrenko in the second. We’ll intersperse them with appropriate music, a Poem of the Week and end up with our What’s On guide.

Which brings me to the point of why mention this on terry quinn poetry uk. Well, we have a podcast facility and if you want to listen to an interview with Billy Collins or Sarah Hymas, Alan Dent or Sophie Hannah then click on the link.

And I’m mentioning it now because I’ve just put an interview with Chris McCabe, the Librarian at the National Poetry Library, on it. I think you’ll enjoy the twenty minutes or so. Though I wish I’d mentioned the hard chairs.

Lancashire Evening Post features Preston Poets

Why a viewpoint

Whilst looking around the various web sites and blogs of poets in readiness for setting up a terry quinn poetry uk blog it soon hit me how much I missed Geoff Steven’s Gossip Column in Purple Patch.

The poetry was the main reason for subscribing to the magazine but I don’t know anyone who didn’t turn to the Column first to read what Geoff had to say about the various goings on in the poetry world. He loved to puncture the pomposity and moral values of that world from his home in West Bromwich.

But if it was a good poem or a poet showed promise he would print their work regardless of ethnicity, political persuasion or class.

So, from the looking around, it became clear to me that a blog or website should have an opinion. It doesn’t have to follow Geoff’s path, what could, but what’s the point of wasting space on a biog and a picture.

I’ll call it a viewpoint rather than a rant. Though who knows.

Reading by Tony Curtis

Last week I went along to Hebden Bridge for a reading by Tony Curtis at the Crown Inn organised by Arc. If you're going to be left with an hour to spare in cold, windy, snowy conditions - then Hebden is not a bad place to be left in. One of the best Mochas ever in one of loads of cafes.

Tony doesn't so much read as envelope an audience in his own world which takes in so many places around the actual world that it seems quite normal that one should go out and find oneself driving along a small country road in Kansas, or whatever, trying to find an Old Peoples' Home and ending up in a mansion.

His imagination, in his poetry, is such that a Pony Society asked him to write a book about their breed of pony. He replied he didn't know anything about horses - which wasn't a good start. They said they didn't care as they were sure he could do the book. And he gave a few examples from the eventual book which proved their point.

Charisma can be a derogatory word but in Tony's case it fits. He's not putting it on. I heard him as I was getting off the train and he was exactly the same as when as in front of an audience. You'd love to have a few beers with him in the pub after.

To prove a point - the reading was taking place in the main bar of the Crown and people were coming in just for a pint. They looked a bit bewildered at first but all of them stayed to listen.

And thanks to Arc for holding the event.

two hours later

Well, this happened next. And that's thanks to a splendid video from War Beats. The name is a bit of a misnomer as it drops knowledge.

the start

Hello and welcome to my blog. This is a test so bear with me. Let's see what happens next.