Litfest Bookcase

I forgot to mention a couple of things yesterday. Firstly, Litfest Bookcase - a lovely new bookcase-shop, selling poetry and local fiction that is harder to find elsewhere. It's wonderful, such a great idea! I went for the launch on Sunday 25th, closing day of Litfest, and I frantically grabbed up things that I was keen to get hold of but have not got round to searching for.

I bought:
1) Annie Clarkson's Winter Hands
2) Chris Killen's The Bird Room
3) The North - recent issue 43, because it was easier than Preston Borders or sending off for it! 4) Ian Seed's Anonymous Intruder

Looking forward to sitting down and reading, as well as finding time to write.

Also reading:
1) Robert Lowell's Collected Poems
2) Robert Frost's essays
3) The White Road and Other Stories by Tania Herschman

Learning a lot. Making lots of notes. Wishing some of those notes were my own work.

Apologies, Considerations, Submissions and Cake

OK, so I haven't been true to my word to blog after every class. I have however, been writing in the journal. Which is something, right? But I should try harder. I have had an up-and-down week, wondering whether to continue with the MA. Mainly because I am the only poet in the group and I have been worried that I will be a bit isolated. I have mulled this over a lot, spoken to people - asking if it's usual for there to be such an imbalance, seeked reassurance that my learning won't suffer. Everyone has said the 'right' things. For now I am reassured. The group is clearly committed to poetry as well as their own prose and I am sure I have a lot to learn from prose writers. Maybe it will make my own prose better. So I will persevere for now.

Went to the Cake launch today, the new literary mag published by students of creative writing at Lancaster Uni. Shame they couldn't turn off the musical plants and the distracting video streaming on the monitor while people were reading. Also, the kids running around screaming. But all in, it was a nice launch and I am really impressed by the quality of the magazine and of the writing. It's well put together and presents a diversity of work from a variety of students and alumni etc. I'll certainly think about submitting to Cake in the future, and I would like to get involved with reviews.

What else, I have submitted some poems today. Back in the saddle after making tweaks and adjustments to some older poems. Scouring for cliches.

An actual poem

Let down

It wasn’t enough that you thought of me
someone who would be your unreachable star,
as if I burned phosphorescent in the front
seat of a car that you don’t drive.
Not right that you should bevel at the edges,
drawn as a person to the ledge, remembering
tea undrunk, bags floating like bodies on a lake,
while you uncoupled your life from reality.
Neither is it true that when the finding happened
the galaxy shattered into porcelain shards
embedding in you a hellish luminescence, as now.
There were elements, periodic moments
But nothing like the quiet miracle of a standing wave.
To want a beautiful person to light up a room
transforming dead space into a trophy box,
you wouldn’t accept the nights without mornings
mourning’s without recoveries.
No understanding life of those in the wilderness;
uncoloured paint in a tin, hued on opening.

Copywrite R. Allen 2009

Five things I really must do.

1. Start submitting work again. I haven't submitted anything since Flax, tell a lie, I got a lovely rejection from Magma, great feedback and encouragment to try again soon- but other than that I wound down. I've been in a reading phase rather than a writing phase. This is only useful for so long. I think to be a writer then 50% should be about writing. Not 5%. But I could be wrong.

2. Stop writing down good lines and losing them in the wash. literally. Back of a tissue in my jeans pocket is not a good place for storage. Neither is on my phone in the drafts folder. or on the pen drive that keeps crashing. I bought a journal for a reason (See above - new journal and note book as well as pen that was a lovely gift. Writing with a fountain pen is very 1993 Old Skool for me. I love it. Slows me down in a good way).

3. Start learning something from the authors I like. Be more dissecting. Start being influenced. To be able to say 'it just made me feel nice' isn't good enough.

4. Go to Litfest and not sit at home being closeted.

5. Get some exposure on my blog. And do this by writing something interesting that shows some sign of progress. Feeds back to No. 1 Thing I Must Do

In honour of national poetry day...

...I am going to throw myself out there and choose my favourite poets of the last year. I haven't been writing for all that long, so the authors I have read have all been making a real impact on my learning curve.

1) Carol Ann Duffy - a predictable choice I suppose, but when I saw her read in the summer just after she had become the Laureate I felt really inspired to keep writing, and her poems just came alive as she read them out. She didn't read them with bells on and a huge fanfare, just read them fairly dryly - and this reassured me that it doesn't always have to be a theatre production. She also signed my poetry notebook which I thought was fab. Oh and my first poem was published on her daughter's birthday apparently. Who knew.

2) C K Williams - one stanza of one poem really made an impact on me (see earlier blog post). He was recommended as a poet that uses the long line and reading him made me feel more at home.

3) Paul Farley - he writes about geology. Enough said.

4) Laura Webb - a poet who just popped up for me in the last week or two. I have only read two of her poems (one in The Rialto and the other online from a competition win) but they have made me want to quit writing, as I feel it's unlikely I'll ever write as well! She seems to have acheived what I set out wanting to write just over a year ago. Now my mission is to track her down and find out more.

Week One Campus MA

Today was the first seminar for the campus MA. I've decided to blog after each session and I am part-time so this will be every tuesday. This could become overkill because I am already writing it into a journal, and various notebooks. Perhaps by writing about it in a variety of places, something new will come out each time. Nice thought.

Paul F. started us off by reading and discussing prose poems. What are they? what makes them both prose and a poem? Do they work?

The main conclusion was that they were all on a sliding scale and some of the group favoured those at the prose end, while others favoured those at the poem end. I like the lyrical and surreal poem end of the spectrum. As it moves towards prose, I start to see it morph quickly into flash fiction. I am more comfortable with the notions of poems, prose that is poetic and flash fiction. I haven't got a well honed ability to decipher poems that are pretty much prose. I wouldn't say I am black and white, but I like transparency. Sometimes i think I have written a prose poem based only on the fact that it was clearly nothing else. But then I read someone really good at it, and I can see where the form came from. After having a bit of a discussion about what worked and what didn't, we moved on to a discussion about the huge amount of work written from photos. This was an interesting exercise. Nothing radical and unthought of, but nevertheless it prepared us for writing our own prose poem based on a randomly assigned photo.

Most of us received Victorian sepia photos of ladies and gents, while a couple of us had more modern photos: a herding family with reindeer, and a man with a fish and a lemon. I found it really hard to be inspired by my photo of a blank looking woman (I wish I had taken a photo of it for uploading here) just looking into the distance. No expression. No background. No date. I actually would have preferred the man with the salmon. But alas, we were given half an hour to write a prose poem and then read it out to the class. Herein lies the point of this blog. It was a bit scary. We had barely learnt each others names (no cheesy ice-breakers or sticky badges) but just had to reveal our inability straight out! We all gave the obligatory intro statement about how 'mine is crap, really!' and 'i never do this sort of thing' but eventually got down to the business of sharing. This was my offering.

The blur is not from the capturing, the blur was there in you, softening your edges as a chalk over the years, till you were merely a soft-focus of heart and hair and eyes in an empty chair. You weren't the prettiest, but the last light of us reflected in the cubes of your eye - as you watched the leylandii inch away to the sky, over my shoulder, silently through the back. Those pinched needles straining to overshadow it all. The roots creeping easy round your ankles. Mary, your sepia hair was gold to me, my evergreen.

I was worrying about exposing myself as a vulnerable and pathetic writer, fearing the silent judgement of others, but really I think everyone was way too busy thinking the same thing of themselves to be worried about my nervously read botch job. It's not easy to write on demand, let alone share it on demand a few minutes later, but we all did it and I couldn't really tell you now about anyone's, other than they were all fine. There were no howlers. I can only say that it was a lesson in growing a thick skin quick, if not to protect you from others, but to protect you from yourself.

A little video showing the songwriting skills of others

Here is a wee song by the esteemed Karl Percival that's a bit sad, like everything he writes. This was recorded at a recent social and therefore is a bit 'unprocessed' i.e. excuse the interference, passing bodies, half-hearted band accompaniment. The lyrics of Karl's songs are awesome. Rich, lyrical and thought provoking. He writes them, composes the music and performs them. Watch this space for more.