False dawns (or where it all went wrong)

I used to win prizes, but it all seems so long ago. The first was for prose in 1988. I note in this press cutting that I said I was a "computer science research analyst". Umm. I didn't really think in terms for literary trajectories then, so I just plodded on. In 1991 I came 2nd in the same competition.

I won 150 pounds for a poem in 1992, after which I tried more seriously to reach the next level. I entered pamphlet competitions, getting as far as appearing in Poetry Business anthologies of runners-up, but only that far. I rationalized my failure by claiming that I no longer wrote competition poems, and I may have had a point. I often don't like the poems that win prizes nowadays - the shortlist usually contains more interesting work.

With prose I've fewer excuses for failing in competitions. Some of my pieces aren't mainstream but a good few are supposed to be. I've tried competitions big and small. I usually see merit in the winners of open competitions. It wasn't until 2007 that I won something else - short Fiction's competition. By then I had enough stories for a collection, and tried entering Salt's get-a-book-published competitions. No luck. Another false dawn.

But then, in December 2010, my poetry pamphlet came out. I tried to capitalize on it, approaching festival organisers and entering pamphlet competitions again. In 2011 I came 2nd in the "Purple Moose Poetry Prize". First prize was pamphlet publication. Perhaps that was the turning point - so near yet so far. The pamphlet remains unpublished. All was not lost however, because in October 2012 my story book appeared. Again I looked for gigs, I kept on submitting to magazines and sending follow-up books into competitions. I even tried an editor or two. No luck. I'm not even treading water: my appearances in magazines are scarce now - I'm in the longest rut of rejections that I can remember.

Somewhere along the line I was hoping for an appearance in a Forward or Salt anthology, or something more thematic - Oulipo maybe. When I read anthologies I usually think that my best eligible piece is better than the anthology's worst (I suspect many other writers think that too, with some validity). No luck.

So what went wrong? Why was I never able to go to the next level when I needed to? Why did I keep losing momentum? Needless to say, I don't write enough or well enough - trying to keep a career afloat writing only a dozen poems and four stories a year is doomed to fail, even if all the pieces were publishable (mine weren't). I had a rather rigid idea of the stages one must progress through before trying to publish a book. Also I didn't seek opportunities to get into forthcoming themed anthologies, send books to publishers, or visit enough festivals and events.

Poetry success!

On 17th April I went to the launch of Fiona Moore's pamphlet. Now, less than 2 months later, it's sold out. Recently in his blog another Happenstance pamphleteer, Matthew Stewart, wrote about selling books at readings. His "Inventing Truth" has nearly gone too. So poetry does sell!

Other than quality, what's the secret? Matthew's done 8 readings. Fiona surely hasn't had time for that many, though I think she's done 2 or 3. Are they infernal bloggers/tweeters? No. Have they had glowing reviews? Well Matthew's had some decent ones in print. Fiona's had none yet as far as I know, though some online reviews have been very encouraging. Is the poetry accessible? Well it's not obscure, but it makes no concessions. I'd say it belongs to the literary mainstream but it's not easy reading by any means. Maybe living in London helps? Fiona lives there, but Matthew works much of the time in Spain!

Happenstance authors might well buy each others' publications, and there are many Happenstance authors around nowadays, but that's only part of the story. Several Happenstance pamphlets are in short supply. I think last year's "After the Creel Fleet" by Niall Campbell has gone already, so I guess you should visit the happenstance shop and grab what you like before it's too late.

And my other publisher, Nine Arches Press, has 2 poetry collections nominated for the 2013 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize - Alistair Noon's Earth Records and Maria Taylor's Melanchrini are both on sale from Inpress. Bloodaxe and Carcanet are amongst the competition.

The lessons of psychology

Psychology has more than its fair share of silly research and surveys conducted just to get in the papers, but the following findings come from reputable sources like The Psychologist, The Rialto, and Mind, Brain and Narrative

• Make them smile! - If you read a poem while holding a pen between your teeth, you'll view it more positively than if you hold the pen only in the lips. This is because holding a pen between your teeth makes you smile, and your facial expression affects your emotion. Apparently there's substantial scientific evidence for this
• Reading fiction's good for you - "The results showed a positive correlation between exposure to narrative fiction and performance-based measures of social ability ... Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between exposure to non-fiction and social ability"
• Poetry might not be so good for you - During a recent research project into reading habits conducted at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, a cross-section of the public nominated poetry to be the most annoying category of book currently published .... after a sustained period of reading poems, thirty six complained of headaches or migraine, twenty-seven suffered indigestion, and two became argumentative resulting in violent exchange .... eighty-two of the hundred people tested did fall asleep for prolonged periods at some point during their reading of poetry. ... Of the twenty [sic] that were reading only first collections, forty-five became tense and highly agitated, thirty-eight were lethargic and dulled and three were recorded as feeling nauseous, while one particular man became sexually aroused and had to be physically removed from the building.
• Why do you write? - Simon Kyaga et al (Karolinska Instiutet, Sweden) has compared the occupation of over a million mental health patients over a 40 year period. The conclusions were that "In contrast with creative professions as a whole, focusing only on authors revealed a far stronger link with mental illness. Authors, compared with controls, were more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, drug abuse, and to take their own lives"
• What does your writing reveal about your state of mind? - predictors of health are ... (1) high levels of positive emotion words, and moderate levels (not high or low levels) of negative words ... (2) increases in the use of causal words ... (3) switches in the use of different pronouns"
• Don't worry about illegible texts - Under the appropriate circumstances, a text that induces less fluent reading should result in deeper processing. This seems so when typeface complexity is increased but not for increased syntactic complexity.
• Happy families? - Parents are no happier than childless couples. In fact, once the children leave home, parents are sadder.
• Know thyself - "People appear to know other people better than they know themselves, at least when it comes to predicting future behaviour and achievement. Why? People display a rather accurate grasp of human nature in general, knowing how social behaviour is shaped by situational and internal constraints. They just exempt themselves from this understanding, thinking instead that their own actions are more a product of their agency, intentions, and free will"

The State of UK Poetry .. again

Salt's decision to no longer publish new single-author poetry books has helped precipitate a wider ranging discussion. I've little to add to the debate other than agreeing that the growth of the Creative Writing sector is happening faster than the rest of the UK poetry world can cope with. Here are some articles that are worth a read

• Why is poetry not popular? ("Poetry is not popular, and in its current form, it can’t be. While the novel performs every aspect of its story-telling function, from reading in the airport to studying it at university, poetry has become a marginalised aspect of its original purpose" - the Judge)
• So. Farewell then / Salt poetry books ... ("A free-market capitalist system is no less bizarre, in its dealings with literature, than any old-style communist regime that favoured socialist realism and sent other forms underground" - Charles Boyle)
• The Health of Poetry ("We seem to be moving towards a model where people are kept ‘emerging’ for as long as possible – preserved in a kind of hopeful limbo, where they can gain lots of encouragement and support, but also spend lots of money on mentors and Arvon courses and MAs and competition fees and retreats" - Clare Pollard).
  ("When Arts Council England made its last round of funding decisions, support for writer development was massively increased at the same time that presses like Arc, Enitharmon and Flambard were told their annual funding was to be scrapped … Print on demand isn’t compatible with promoting poetry to a wider readership" - Neil Astley)
• Ripples on a smooth sea, or storm in a teacup? (Adrian Slatcher)
• Mapping Poetic Emergence 1.0 (an "attempt to describe some of the significant stages which are usually observable during the process of poetic emergence.")

Raiding the Loft

There was only one box of mine left in my parents' loft when I rummaged this week. Inside were some certificates, maths worksheets, pictures/postcards, computer game archives, and a few personal belongings. Nothing literary at all, though I've used some of it as source material.

I found three pictures of Quixote. I can't recall him ever being a theme. Maybe I just liked the paintings.

Here's a front cover of a computing magazine, and a review of my game. The review begins "Cricket is one of those rare finds - a decent simulation game that conjures up a feel of the real thing. It even has some of the tedium of a 5 day test match". Fair enough.

I wrote the assembler code with a pen initially (the code here controls the bowled ball's trajectory, I think), and sometimes hand- assembled it to produce the machine code.

I designed the graphics pixel by pixel. The pictures here show some frames of a moving bat - in those days, you could only use colour by going lo-res, making the pictures blocky.

Here's my first self-employed tax form - quite a lot of money in those days.

I used to spend some nights in a London house where somebody collected ducks. I don't think I ever contributed.

I went through a phase when I knew some (ex) art and/or performance students. Here's some art by me

And I collected art by others. This is the design for an art project where the student decided to make their mother's house visible from as far away as possible by putting the divorced father's swivelling shaving mirror in an upstairs window. I also borrowed their postcards if their fathers sent them messages from South Tunisia.

Miscellaneous lit quotes

I've been clearing out my mailbox (1000s of posts). Here are some lit-related fragments -

• From "New Walk", issue 3
  Patrick McGuinness: The real issue for me is that the poetry reviewing culture is so poor - the only reviews you see are positive, exercises in approval and rubber-stamping
  
  Philip Morre: But you're hardly a noted practitioner of the scrutineering review yourself, are you?
  
  Patrick McGuinness: Since you ask, perhaps not, but I've written some reviews that were evaluative rather than just log-rolling, I think. I even sent a negative (commissioned) review to Poetry Review a couple of years ago, was thanked profusely by the editor for my honesty and told that it was exactly the sort of review she was after. A few months later it was dropped, and I was told by the same editor that it was for my own sake sake, that I might regret it, etc.
• 2011 rates -
  

  New Yorker	$460/36-line-poem
  Paris Review	$75/poem
  Ploughshares	$25/page
  Poetry	$10/line

• Burnett's edition includes "all of Larkin's poems whose texts are accessible." These texts, meticulously checked against primary sources, are offered under four rubrics:
  • the four volumes published in Larkin's lifetime "preserved as collections" (117 poems);
  • other poems published in the poet's lifetime but not included in any collection (36 poems in order of publication date);
  • poems not published in the poet's lifetime (403 poems in chronological order determined by the date on which Larkin stopped working on each poem);
  • and undated or approximately dated poems (10 poems).
• "As the pseudonymous Harvey Porlock noted, 'Reading reviews of modern poetry is like attending prize-giving in a small, caring primary school: everyone has done terribly well, it's all absolutely marvellous'"
• We fray into the future, rarely wrought/ Save in the tapestries of afterthought - Richard Wilbur

George Szirtes on the sonnet

On April 23rd, George Szirtes and some open-mikers gave a standing-room-only Cambridge CB1 audience an entertaining evening of sonnets. The sheer volume of Szirtes' output can be intimidating. His 2008 "New & Collected Poems" is 520 pages long, and he's kicked on since then, extending his range. Focusing on the sonnet only restricts him somewhat - he said he's written over 300 of them!

He highlighted the longevity and flexibility of the form. Those two features are probably related, but there might be psychological (or even physiological) reasons why the sonnet endures. Don Paterson in his "101 Sonnets" was prepared to include "any poem with fourteen lines". "The Reality Street Book of Sonnets" cast its net wider (download the Introduction). Szirtes didn't want to be pinned down to a definition, instead suggesting that a sonnet is like a room, with certain expectations of scale, proportion, purpose and intimacy that the poet can choose to ignore.

He studied Fine Art in London and Leeds, and was asked in the Q&A if there was a strong visual element during composition. After all, many of the sonnets he read were about colours. He replied that there was always a dialogue with words, each line/word capable of changing the course of the poem. Rhyming in particular can take you where you didn't plan to go. You need to be ready to follow. Curiosity and a non-doctrinaire openness to impressions seem to be a source of word production for him - liking a youtube clip, a colour, or a goal may provoke him to wonder what there is in the phenomenon that's interesting him.

I sometimes look upon the sonnet as a franchise. You buy into it to take advantage of the image. You might add some local variation (curried burgers maybe) but go too far and the parent company might disown you - you have a duty to the brand as well as your customers. I have trouble writing sonnets. Finding them a technical challenge I become too much of a slave to the brand. According to my notes I've published 9 sonnets. I don't recall most of them. Two are acrostics, of which I'm unjustly proud (one, called "Going down", reads "Cambridge Blues" down the left margin). I've recently entered a sonnet for the Ware Poetry Competition but only because the content determined the form. So like a fool I followed.