Congratulations, Christopher Reid!
I was wandering around a bookshop on Sunday with the Hairy Muse, criticising the shop’s Costa Prize display which featured NONE of the Costa poetry shortlistees, not even the winner, just the prose and anyway (continuing to bitch and gripe), that was typical, no-one paid any attention to poetry, they’ll never give the Costa to a poet, stupid prose-heads etc etc etc. The Hairy Muse just rolled his eyes and nodded his head patiently.
That’ll teach me.
Hurry up and release your album
Hurry up, hurry up, Marina and the Diamonds!
Disappointment part deux
Here is George Szirtes being bracingly unselfpitying and honest about his nomination for the T S Eliot Prize (won, as if you didn’t know, by Philip Gross for The Water Table).
Szirtes is an excellent poet, who makes sonnet sequences and variations thereof look easy – just read his Budapest File - and ih his prime as a poet. His reading (relaxed, fluid, at home on the stage) for the Prize made that obvious – such precise and expansive stuff!
I’m reading (re-reading) the aforementioned Files to help me make sense of some extended pieces I’m writing myself; things about memory, childhood… including a sonnet sequence, which is terrifying and exciting me. When I get stuck, there are the Files. They make it look easy, which at least keeps me hopeful.
Ignorant
Me, that is. I feel so bleedin ignorant!
I’ve just finished reviewing two beautiful books for Modern Poetry in Translation: Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry, edited by Frank M. Chipasula, and The Other Half of History: An Anthology of Francophone African Women’s Poetry, edited and translated by Georgina Collins.
I had a secondary education in the 1980s that acted like Africa didn’t exist, like slavery and colonialism never happened (this was a school that acted as though feminism never happened, either) and I’ve been trying to make up for it and fill in the gaps ever since. And these two books – themselves filling in gaps left by previous anthologies of African writing – have introduced me to a whole range of amazing poets, past and present, who write in a diversity of traditions, languages, aesthetics. It makes me realise I have so much still to read and learn.
What’s really great is that I get to keep the books, so I can. I’ll end this post with an image I was particularly struck by. It comes from an Ancient Egyptian love song, ‘My Love is Back, Let Me Shout Out the News!’:
And heart, pirouettes in its dark chamber / glad as a fish when night shades the pool.
(trans. John L. Foster, Bending the Bow, p. 15)
Keeping faith with it
You know you should be all ‘adult’ and realistic about it, you knew your chances were slim but that rejection is a big disappointment nevertheless. Sounds familiar?
How do you cope with the inevitable rejections and non-responses that attend this writing life? Do you shrug it off and get on with the next project? Have a good old wallow, shake your fist at the sky/imaginary editors/your loved ones and rail against the injustice of it all? A bit of both?
And how much importance should we attach to this aspect of writing, anyway? Should we be purely in it for the journey of self-discovery, the unfolding of our own, particular, linguistic creativity?
Well, don’t ask me. I’m grappling with all these questions myself at the moment. I have had some lovely things happen recently *, but I have also had to face the fact that Publisher No. 1 on my wishlist of Presses-I-Would-Love-to-Publish-My-First-Book is not interested. The specified amount of time has elapsed by which, according to the Publisher’s website, I am to assume my sample of work has been rejected.
I know, it’s crap isn’t it? The presses and their editors are so, well, hard-pressed, that they have neither time nor money to respond to the vast number of submissions they receive. I believe them when they say this, I really do. But it is quite horrible, not knowing for sure, feeling all rejected and insignificant…
…You can tell I’m still at the wallowing stage, maybe? Julia Cameron has some useful advice in her Artist’s Way (you haven’t read it? Do! It’s very useful. I have to admit, I really really did not accept any of her talk about the ‘Great Creator’, and I cringed at what has by now become a very very familiar language of self-help. But despite that, she makes sense, has all sorts of really great suggestions for exploring one’s individual quirks and kinks and creative potential – and is possibly responsible for me changing my life-work balance. Can’t argue with that.)…
…er, sorry. Right. The Artist’s Way. Briefly, she says that in the face of disappointment, we should ask ourselves, “What next?” I suppose that’s a bit like the “Get back on the hoss” attitude. Have a stamp and a shout and a wail, shake a few fists, then get back to the stuff that matters. In my case, I suppose that means get on with the poems.
But also, she has this great story about a director, who tells himself on the opening nights of his films that ” ‘If I can’t shoot 35 mm, I could still shoot 16 mm. If I can’t shoot 16 mm, then I can shoot video….’ ” (p. 137). There are always ways to get your work “out there”. You might have to let go of a few assumptions to do so, but the ways are there…
It is really easy to get wrapped up in the end-product of writing poetry; the giving-readings, the getting-published. But I didn’t start writing poetry purely because of all that outward stuff (though it is fun, I do love it). On my desk at the moment is an old poem to which I’ve returned, that has started mushrooming out into something pretty big, something new-old, something strange and exciting. Something that I really, really want to work on.
That’s what I really do it for.
* Lovely things: I had a lovely chat with the fabulous Wayne Milstead yesterday, which will become a podcast at some point. I’m teaching at his centre in France in July. Very exciting! I’m working on my review for Modern Poetry in Translation magazine at the moment – getting paid to read poetry! Excellent!
T S Eliot Prize 2009
Wow. I felt sure they’d give it to Christopher Reid, but Congratulations to Philip Gross, for winning with The Water Table. It was clear, at the reading on Sunday, that this was a poet confident and committed, alive to the ebb and flow of his verse. I’m predisposed to like his book, since you can see the Severn, the estuary, the Channel – and the two bridges – from my old home. I’m curious whether he mentions the old Magnox reactor across the river from us – you can see it quite clearly, walking down from my Mum and Dad’s in Yorkley Slade to my sister’s in Oldcroft.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading the book – and the others on the shortlist. I only know the Sharon Olds collection, which I liked for its daring. The War poems – and the end of the book, about her mother – I found exciting.
But the best thing about this prize can be found on the BBC website’s article about it. They have renamed one of the judges as “Simon Artimage”. Isn’t that great?
Here’s to artimages everywhere!
Edited in: Typical! They’ve corrected it, now, so he’s an Armitage. But it was there earlier, honest. Artimage. And I’ve just been to the shops to buy books…A Scattering, which I admired (the bits and bobs from it that have popped up on websites etc) and Jane Draycott’s Over, which I’d been meaning to get, but hadn’t. She gave a beautiful reading (amongst a whole crop of really fine readings) at the preview event. But really, I’m going to have to buy all the books on the shortlist…
Wild Boar! Wild Boar!
(to be shouted in the manner of Duran Duran)
Well, as if my family hasn’t enough to worry about, what with the slidey, snow-covered hill down to the A48 when they’re trying to drive to work, the A48 itself (an apocalypse of a road, with floods, roadworks, tractors, dodgy bends, concealed turnings AND snow) and the impairment of my nephews’ educational chances (due to closures, due to snow – not that the boys mind, of course)…there’s THIS. Your lovely online Guardian informs us today that:
Residents in the Forest of Dean have had close encounters with hungry wild boars that have sneaked out of the woods to forage in bins.
Apparently, the snow has forced them out.
Great. Let’s hope my sister’s dog Andy (yes, that’s right, Andy. He’s a lurcher.) doesn’t pick up the scent and decide to have a go.
And so it begins…
To The Lamb yesterday (lovely little pub, great selection of beers) for the first of the year’s workshops, organised by the fabulous Kathryn Maris. It felt good to be reading people’s work again, arguing the toss over the use of “the” vs. the use of “a”, near- vs. full-rhyme…all those nit-picky things that poets get into.
I stomped purposefully back to the tube afterwards, through wet streets and sleet-trying-to-be-snow (it’s definitely 1 or 2 degrees warmer in Central London than the ‘burbs). I felt invigorated! Let the new year newly begin!
Next weekend I’m sketching with some friends around the British Museum – a new thing to try for me. I’m really looking forward to it.
Snowday
Today, I went for a long walk. Here’s where I started.
Behind the Friends Meeting House
I’ve never seen the ice on the ponds this thick.
Looking down the Avenue, with the playing fields and tower blocks on the right.
I heart Leytonstone. Happy Snowday!
A Belated Happy New Year
And how does 2010 find you? Speaking for myself, the word I would use is distracted. Too many possibilities, too many plans and hopes* and ideas for the fresh new year…
I spent much of the holiday season quietly at home with the Hairy Muse, so maybe that explains my current mad-dog-straining-at-the-leash state, now that I’m out in the world again. Anything an everything catches my eye. Just this morning, on the tube, reading everyone else’s newspapers over their shoulders (too distracted to concentrate on my own book), I discovered that
1) December 2009 was the coldest December for 25 years
2) There is a Russian variety of dandelion that contains rubber molecules in its sap.
We left Leytonstone for a few days in between Christmas and New Year, to visit my family in the Forest of Dean. Our end-of-year visits always coincide with those of The Mayor and Mayoress – dear, long-standing family friends, more like an Uncle and Aunt, really – who always make up a Christmas quiz. This year, the Hairy Muse and I made one too – and so did the nephews. We all went a bit quiz-mad. So maybe that’s another reason for being distracted – the glitter of all that trivia!
Back home in London, I am astounded at renewed tightness of my jeans. Eating your own bodyweight in confectionary and lying around watching telly makes you fatter – who knew?! But I won’t be making any resolutions just yet – see the Word Sauceress for why.
Here’s wishing you a very happy (not to mention warm) 2010!
* No. 1 hope today is that Thames Water sort out the 2+ burst pipes in our road so that there’s enough water for me to have a cup of tea when I get home tonight. No. 2 hope is that the forecast snow holds off enough – or at least doesn’t screw up transport too much – for me to get home in good time. It’s all me me me…
