New writers group

I had only just got back from Berlin, when I found an email from Chelsea Cargill who not only has the good taste to joint the universally ignored Rejection Club but has also founded one of the best sounding writers groups I have come across in a long time.

The genius behind the idea is that sometimes you need the peer pressure of other writers to help you up your game, but you don’t necessarily want to have to go through all that “networking” malarkey, which can be intimidating and time consuming.  The Antisocial Writers Club aims to help.  They meet at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall on Dalmeny St, Leith every Wednesday at 2pm in the cafe.  And what do they do?  They write, and generally ignore each other, although I expect the odd cursory nod might be tossed about occasionally, it’s all about companionable silence.  Brilliant.

In other news I am currently planning the next simultaneous blogging project which will be accomplished by a mix of English language and Spanish language poets.  Keep watching the blog for more information.

The Song of Lunch

So I wasn’t going to post again until I was back from holiday, but I just had to.  Last night I watched The Song of Lunch on BBC2, and it was brilliant.  The Song is a long poem which takes place over a lunch between two old lovers, reunited fifteen years after the end of their relationship.  The poem, by Christopher Reid is expertly crafted and the acting by Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman is outstanding.  After almost ten years of reality TV, which has resulted in me watching less and less television, it is a joy to find such piercing, emotional and understated drama being shown.  It’s even better that it was a poem.

Film Poem

I am a very excited and happy woman today!  A while ago Mr Alastair Cook invited me round to his for a delicious lunch and to record some poems.  His film of my poem -ed can be viewed here.  More of Alastair’s film poems can be viewed here.

The film will also be being shown as part of the Hidden Door Festival in October

The vices and virtues of poets

Last night, after the excellent Kei Miller and Liz Niven launch at The Scottish Poetry Library I was speaking to Peggy Hughes about the need for poets, particular those beginning, to be tenacious.  It started me thinking about what virtues, or vices, poets need to have in order to get on, survive and develop.  The list I have come up with so far is

• Tenacity
• Honesty
• An observant eye
• An inquiring mind

I would be interested to hear readers ideas about what virtues or vices are needed to survive in contemporary poetry…

The sketch of the poet as an wiser, more tanned man

Rob A. Mackenzie continues his journey from poetry reading school boy to a man with a first collection.

In 2005, we returned to Scotland. I heard about an event taking place at the Scottish Poetry Library, the launch of a new pamphlet imprint, HappenStance Press, and decided to go along. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know anything about the two poets being launched, Helena Nelson and Andrew Philip, but I was keen to connect with poetry in Edinburgh. Anyway, the place was packed out and the poetry was terrific, something well worth supporting, and I bought the pamphlets. Sometime later, I picked ten of my poems and sent them to HappenStance (as per the guidelines at the time). I fully expected to wait a few months and then receive a rejection slip. After all, I didn’t know Helena Nelson and she didn’t know me. However, 48 hours later, a letter arrived accepting my pamphlet for publication – that was on the basis of the ten poems alone, several of which didn’t actually end up in the pamphlet – one of those great moments in a poet’s life. Thinking back, Helena Nelson took a big risk with me, as my output was uneven and my audience was more-or-less non-existent, although I did try to work on both aspects.

‘The Clown of Natural Sorrow’ was published in December 2005. I had to work hard to draw people’s attention to it. Sales came at a trickle, but the trickle kept trickling. I had already started blogging months before at Surroundings, and I was going to readings and doing a few readings. Some Scottish poets were really helpful and supportive. I think I imagined I had achieved more than I actually had, mind you. After all, most poetry pamphlets (and books) do well to sell a few hundred copies and although I felt my poems were better than some stuff being published in book form, I would at times come across collections which made my own efforts look pretty second-rate. This still happens – I’ve just read Stephen Burt’s ‘Parallel Play’ (Graywolf Press, 2006), which is, you might say, a standard to aspire to. I don’t think this attitude is a bad thing as long as it becomes a source of challenge rather than a source of despair, but it’s not always easy to separate the two. It also worth realising that admirable work by other people nearly always seems better than your own. Because you don’t inhabit their brain or have their thoughts, it can seem amazing that anyone could ever come up with such poems. It is possible that other people might feel the same way about your own poems. It’s worth persuading yourself of that, in any case…

Anyway, I kept writing poems, not at all strategically, in hope that a first collection might emerge. I felt I needed to up my game and push myself further, and a sudden leap forward happened again. How that happens in one of the mysteries of writing. If I knew how to make it happen, I’d do so regularly! Andrew Philip was also forming a manuscript and we exchanged manuscripts regularly during this period. AB Jackson was a great help in persuading me to remove some of the blander poems from the manuscript and to trust myself to write what I wanted to, without worrying about reception. That’s an odd paradox. I want readers. I write poems to be read by other people, but I feel it’s vital to be true to myself when writing and to write what I need to write, not what I suspect might go down well either with the poetry establishment or even with notional readers. Rewards in poetry are very few but the best one is when a real reader connects with a poem that was vital for me to write.

Eventually, I submitted my manuscript to Salt. I guess over half the poems in my original draft-manuscript had been replaced or substantially revised by the time I submitted it. Andrew Philip’s book had already been submitted and accepted and I hoped we could both become Salt writers. Through the Internet, I had had contact with Chris Hamilton-Emery, Salt’s director, and knew he had an interest in my writing, but I also knew he would only publish the book if he thought it was a winner. Luckily for me, the response was positive and ‘The Opposite of Cabbage’ was the result, published in March 2009. I am very happy with it. It’s a thrill to have such a beautifully produced book. As to the contents, I can only leave that up to readers to decide.

Sketch of the young man as an emerging poet

I have always liked poetry. Even at school, I enjoyed Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and (especially) Gerard Manley Hopkins. I wrote a few poems in my teens, uniformly awful, but I spent most of my free time in the eighties and early nineties writing songs for my art rock band – music and lyrics – and became an avid reader of literary novels. How that drift away from poetry happened, I’m not sure, because I enjoyed the occasional poems I did read, but I suppose I hadn’t a clue which poets to read and shop bookshelves seemed daunting – where to start? These were the days when bookshops had significant poetry sections.

In the early to mid-nineties, my active interest in poetry began to revive, through Scottish literary magazines like Chapman, Rebel Inc and West Coast Magazine (stocked in the bookshops!), and I began, tentatively, to read poets such as TS Eliot, Norman MacCaig, Seamus Heaney, and (perhaps more unusually) American poet, Charles Simic. I learned from them as much as anything else how poems were structured, how the form of a poem could be a perfect receptacle for the strange imagination, and started to write. My first marriage broke up and this provided me with subject matter. I didn’t often treat divorce directly, but those feelings of loss, failure, and the struggle for hope found their way into poems and they were very much better than anything I had written before. Even I could see this before submitting them anywhere. It was as though I’d made a serious step forward out of the blue and I think that’s often how it happens and keeps happening. Whenever I feel I’m not getting anywhere with my writing, I now convince myself that it’s only a matter of time – the way forward will suddenly happen, not as a gradual process, but a sudden leap. If that stops happening, I’m in trouble.

My first published poems were in New Writing Scotland in 1998 (I think) and I kept submitting to literary magazines through the next few years. I didn’t have many poems to submit, so it was a slow process – all snail mail in these days and sometimes months before editors were able to reply. I became involved with PFFA, an online workshop. Some people dislike it for its fiery negative criticism and prefer a more nurturing environment for their writing, but it was exactly what I needed at the time. I also remarried and moved to Italy, which removed me from the poetry scene I was barely a part of in any case. In some ways, this was good as I was writing unencumbered by trends and fashion. On the other hand, it left me with no audience for my work. On a visit home, I heard Tessa Ransford speak about poetry pamphlets and I remember thinking, “There’s no point in me doing one of those. Who would buy it?” I didn’t know a single person who read poetry and I didn’t know a single poet either.

For more adventures in the poetic journey that is Rob A Mackenzie’s life be sure to read next week…

Published

Not that long ago I let all my readers know that I had been lucky enough to be included in Emergency Verse an anthology of poetry in defense of the welfare state.  The anthology is the brain child of Alan Morrison, who is a strong and forthright believer in the ability of poetry to change things, and to make a difference.

I feel very privileged to be included, because as a relative newcomer to poetry I suddenly find myself gracing the same pages as much more illustrious and talented poets such as Michael Horovitz, Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen, Ken Worpole and Mario Petrucci – yes, people who even those who aren’t poetry geeks will have heard of.  For once the glazed look my non-poetry chums take on when I start gushing about posey lights up with a glimmer of recognition.

The anthology is published by Caparison e-books, and is very affordable at £2.99.  Alan is hoping that in selling enough copies of Emergency Verse as an e-book he will raise enough money to produce it as a bound book.  My excitement at being included is not only to suddenly find myself in an anthology of respected writers, but as much at the blend of poetry and politics it contains.

Having studied media and working in both PR and politics I have often found there is little proper analysis or informed debate about what is happening in British politics or basic political policy – bar texting opinions to whatever magazine show is popular in the mornings.  The sheer bafflement of the media, under pressure to roll 24 hours, at the hung parliament in Westminster was laughable.  Add to this the very little basic understanding of economics there is in our culture and it is both ourselves and future generations who will not so much be reaping the whirling, as extracting themselves from layers of fetid social decay.

Anyway – that’s the end of my political rant, and I don’t expect my readers to share my view or even agree with me.  However, you might like to check out the anthology, and the Guardian article about it too.

3 programmes for your listening plesure

I have to heartily recommend the following three poetry programmes to listen to.

The first two are both from the BBC.  In the first Poetry of the Forgotten People Greta Scacchi discusses the life and work of Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, with friends and family of the poet.  In the second, Bards of Somalia, Rageh Omaar explores what Britain can learn from Somalia, a country where poetry is the main means of cultural communication.

Lastly, but by no means least is a Scottish Poetry Library podcast featuring readings from Kei Miller’s new collection A Light Song of Light. I have become utterly mesmerised by Miller’s reading and have listened to the podcast five times now, and shall be heading up to Word Power Books tomorrow to buy the book.

I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have.

Published and performing

Well it was about time for some good news really, and it came in the form of an inclusion into an anthology, which is a first for me, and very exciting.  I have had a poem, called The Management of Hope included in the anthology from Caparison E-books which is titled Emergency Verse:  Poetry in Defense of the Welfare State and in Support of a Robin Hood Tax on the City and should be available to download in a few weeks.  I have managed to squeeze my way in among some much more well know names such as Michael Rosen, Michael Horovitz, Mario Petrucci and many more.  Political poetry often runs the risk of turning a little lecturous (yes, I’ve just invented a new word) or polemical, however I feel sure that such experienced writers will tackle this issue with great skill.

Secondly I will be performing this Sunday as part of the Free Fringe at Chaos Raging Sweet: 14.40-15.50, Banshee Labyrinth, Banqueting Hall, Niddry Street. MCing are Andrew C Ferguson and Rob A MacKenzie.  Having been initially very pleased to be asked, and having written a poem especially for the occasion my nerves are now beginning to get the better of me and I’m realising why I don’t perform very often.  However, it would be lovely to see and meet any of my readers, so please do come and introduce yourself.

An unusal post…

I don’t normally post poems here, mine or other people’s.  I don’t post mine because it can then become difficult to try to place the poems in magazines, and I don’t post other people’s because I have no wish to turn my blog into a poetry website with me as editor.  I am however occasionally willing to make an exception and I wanted to post this poem by Angus Ogilvy, who wrote here about how writing poetry helped him with his cancer diagnosis.

Remission

I keep my hair short,

breathe long,

count tonight’s

benevolent stars,

not yesterday’s chickens;

In the wet

beneath the trees,

I shelter

from the possibility

of sun,

mindful of

how seeds

may fall.