The fourth and final digital poem I made for my MIMA/Tees Women Poets residency was Voyager, written for Poem Bowl by potter, writer and philosopher Rupert Spira (b.1960). A vast black dish, it is decorated inside and out with a mostly illegible hand-written text that has been incised through the black glaze. Certain words can be made out, and these have been incorporated into the poem.
My inspirations for the imagery in the poem comes from the way the dish reminded me of both a warped vinyl record and a radio dish. Combined with the only partial legibility of the decoration, it led me to play with ideas of decaying signals and transmissions through space. The audio accompanying the digital poem features a short sample from “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Billie Holliday, which was the last message sent by NASA to the Mars Rover Opportunity before it ‘died’ in 2019.
The sound track for this poem was the most complicated, featuring free samples of for example vinyl record clicks and Cold War numbers stations alongside my own voice pushed through echo and distortion effects, and the poem text run through AI voice generators. All of this was put together using free Audacity software, which also allows you to create blocks of static interference.
The digital poem was also the most complex in terms of the kinetic typography, even though it was made in Canva in exactly the same way at 79AD and Origin Story. Drawing on the circular nature of the bowl, and all the images of records, radio dishes etc that are in the poem, I made the typography follow arcing pathways. The sections of text overlap and ‘degrade’, just like the audio. To make the effect of degradation I reduced the transparency of the text by degrees, sometimes in arcs that were offset so the faded echoes can still be read; and once in a fully-aligned circle with text blacked out except for certain selected letters.
I’m really proud of these digital poems! Here’s a reminder of the ceramics that inspired them – a leaning neck vase by Betty Blandino (Origin Story); a tazza by Annette Fuchs (79AD); a bowl by Deirdre Burnett (Egg Fiction); and a poem bowl by Rupert Spira (Voyager).
And here are the finished digital poems in the loop as it appeared at MIMA. Headphones on!
For those that are interested in the sounds, here’s a list of all the sound clips I used – see if you can tell which poems they appeared in!
Unbelievably, I didn’t take a decent photo of the third ceramic piece to become a poem in my Tees Women Poets @ MIMA residency, but here are some examples of Deirdre Burnett’s other work to give you a flavour. The one on the right is closest in colour and finish, but imagine it looking much more like an eggshell. The porcelain is also eggshell-thin, and quite small (ostrich egg?)
Egg Fiction draws on my own memories of collecting eggs and family folklore about witches’ boats. I learned charcoal animation for the resulting digital poem, and tried to keep a childlike feeling to the flow of images. I named the poem Egg Fiction because it is in no way an actual biography of Burnett’s route into ceramics.
The animation was entirely unplanned and freeform. I used a central egg motif, and simply kept doodling in and around it using charcoal and chalk, taking 2 shots every couple of marks made, using the free app StopMotion on my ancient reconditioned iPad mini. I didn’t do separate drawings frame by frame, every frame was drawn on the same piece of paper. Rubbing in, sweeping off dust, erasing, chalking over, layer upon layer over a combined total of around 8 hours, until my desk was grey and grubby! Completely backbreaking, utterly obsessive…
1500 frames later, having made a whole 58 seconds of film, I recorded the voice track for the poem and was devastated to see it come in at nearly 3 minutes long! Nooooo!!!! Radical editing of words ensued, but I was still only half way with the visuals. Physically unable to continue with hand-drawn animation, I came up with an ingenious solution to triple the length of the film. Importing the original animation into iMovies, I duplicated and layered the sequence over itself, using the editing app’s greenscreen feature to set first the darkest parts and then the lightest parts of each frame as a greenscreen. In this way, the rapidly metamorphing egg began to ghost itself…
Here’s the text for this most challenging and enjoyable piece. When I show you all four finished films in my next blog, you’ll hear that the voiceover for this poem is not me speaking. In fact, I had my first foray into AI-generation by using a text-to-voice app. There were many accents to choose from, and male and female voices of different age profiles. When you read the poem below, what voice can you ‘hear’ in your head? What accent would you have chosen in my place?
Egg Fiction
nanna sent her to steal an egg fresh from the straw the darkness clucked
it was the end of the world it was a rite of passage don’t trip! don’t smash it!
don’t smash it too soon soft-boiled children must learn the tap the crack the dip the scoop
now smash the empties! scuttle the coracles so witches can’t sail to sea with their wicked, wicked storms
but that warm, smooth weight had ordained her palm
it’s enough to make her grow up a potter throwing porcelain not to shatter, but to release the paradox- strength and fragility are twins this is the earth whose yolk brews wings
this is the earth that knows fire in the kiln it turns into a little sun little pitchers become themselves or smithereen…
look, this bowl has hatched a dragon! half-shell with a scorched equator
and in the bottom freckle-speckles like the memory of a hen’s egg
The Tees Women Poets are currently open to applications for their autumn residency at MIMA’s Towards New Worlds exhibition. If you’re a woman poet in Teesside, especially if you identify as disabled or neurodiverse, take a look at the info and apply here.
It’s small, about 18cm high maybe? Just looking at it, there is a classical, visual beauty in the proportions and the terracotta. But when you pick it up, the perfection of its balanced weight is breathtaking.
The second of my four digital poems for ceramic pieces in MIMA was written for a tazza, or serving dish on a pedestal and foot, wheel-turned out of earthenware by ceramicist Annette Fuchs. It made me imagine Roman society and murals, which in turn led me to think about Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pliny the Younger described the cloud of smoke that preceded the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD as “a pine tree, for it shot up to a great height in the form of a very tall trunk, which spread itself out at the top”, a description which reminded me of the tazza shape. On this tazza, a pale razor-blade-shaped void has been left in the red surface, perhaps deliberately, as superstitious people will sometimes add a smudge to their make-up so the gods don’t get jealous…
This poem has had a couple of concrete incarnations – the one above, which I made especially for this blog post, and the version in the micro-pamphlet handout produced by MIMA to accompany the exhibition, which had eight stanzas each shaped like a tazza. Can you guess where the stanza- and line-breaks came?
This extract from the visuals of the digital poem should give you a clue!
This is again made in Canva videos, using a textured background duplicated and flipped mirror-image along a vertical axis to enhance the tazza-shape of the stanzas. I then overlaid the texture with a free clip of a puff of smoke, to foreshadow the eruption of the volcano. The film clip was actually in a long, thin, landscape orientation. I have enlarged it, flipped it the portrait orientation, mirrored it along the same midline of the frame, and dialed down the transparency so it is a ghost of its former self…
What sounds would you choose to accompany this digital poem?
I’ll post all four completed pieces, with soundtracks, in my fourth blog. Watch this space for curved kinetic typography, charcoal animation, and weird adventures in Audacity and AI…
If you’re a woman, a poet, and you live in Teesside, then why not apply to be the next TWP poet-in-residence at MIMA’s Towards New Worlds exhibition this autumn? Information and application form here.
Now that my digital poems have finished their run at MIMA, I’m bringing you all four of them with some info on my process.
This first poem was written for a “leaning-neck vase” by Betty Blandino (1927-2011). As the poem states, the piece is made of coiled stoneware and is unexpectedly light when picked up – the rough finish makes it look like a natural stone, so the expectation of weight was there, and I did literally start talking to this pot when I held it.
My first step was to handle the pot, feel my responses, write notes, draw the vase to get its shape into my muscles…(and later use it for some gelli plate experiments, like you do)
Next step was to go away and write a poem from it. After a few edits, this poem then became a short film using a Canva video template (specifically, the Black White Minimalist the End template). I chose it because it features moving, soft focus lights with reddish-orange hues that made me think of the vase’s rusty-orange surface.
It also seemed to fit with an atmosphere of fairy stories/origin stories/when you were just a twinkle in my eye – the feelings of the poem, if not the specific details of the words. I changed the Canva template’s typefaces and text positioning, and played with how and where the text should arrive on each slide, changed the tempo to suit, and downloaded.
So far, everything I’ve used has been free and easily accessible. This was the result.
Now, that is not the final version of the digital poem – all four poems had soundtracks added before they were shown at MIMA, but you’ll have to wait because I’m going to talk about that, and show you the final looped installation, in a few blogs’ time! You could subscribe, if you like, then you won’t mis any of them?
But I will show you the last iteration of the poem right now, which is as a concrete poem. This was printed in the programme that accompanied the screening, with the following artist’s statement:
Origin Story was written for a coiled stoneware vase with a ‘leaning neck’ made by Betty Blandino (1927-2011). Handling this pot was a sensory overload for me, as it looks like a stone, feels like weathered rust, and is unexpectedly weightless. The shape is reminiscent of an amphora, a pot made specifically to store foodstuffs like wine or oil, but it is kept hollow, and sonorous. I found myself speaking to it like a sentient creature, and continued that conversation into the poem, imagining myself telling the vase myths about itself like bedtime stories for a child. Little pitchers have big ears.
The observant among you may notice that there are some differences between the texts of the two versions, which just goes to show that poems are never quite finished.
Watch out for the next digital poem, which will be 79AD, written in response to an earthenware tazza by Annette Fuchs.
11.01 Northbound, the song of the rails And footie fans
Bright tongue-punch of tamarind – I’d go miles for pani puri
New builds on brownfields Fennel glades, teazels, finches Unhomed
Kestrel’s cliff scraped clean of roots Bloody cranesbill
Street food, not sawdust In the covered market; ghosts… Skinned hares, white tripes
Kittiwakes scream from the bridge No-one wants a terraced house
Everyone is fine Talking to thin air these days – Pods. Buds. Our blue teeth.
Shop fronts like cast shells Waiting for crabs
Guts hanging out Sliding doors wedged open Cataract windows
The Laing’s a drum, deaf with rain Paintings sign to each other
Bloodlust and faith Objects in oils and suspense Gilt-framed
Gulls after a lightning strike – The Age Concern social group
Do you paint? Used to. But the girl I showed them to Never loved me back.
Sap green Scorched earth
Where you see a storm I see a girl tucking in To a ham sandwich
Things, alone in their thingness But, a field of attention
Smashed rainbow The old snooker hall windows Be Gay, Do Crime
Three white clouds; the blossom trees Next to Manors car park
Tall cakes, short coffees In your head, they’re still fighting – This cafe has changed
The basic anatomy Of buildings eludes my pen
I am surprised By the skyline we worked for; Its absences
Ten years in the mirror That body is lost to me
The hotel shower – Skylight in a downpour Headful of pictures
Looks like she ate all the pies Exhibition in a bathtub
Close to shame Wouldn’t do that one (After grabbing)
Shit on the pigeon netting Echoes fall down Dog Leap Stairs
Cities are dreams People too are mostly dreams, New builds on goldfields
The waters of Tyne… They run between me and me
Continuing experiments with renga, though this doesn’t really count as not many people believe a single poet can write a renga – you need at least one other person with whom to collaborate. Let’s say this is me collaborating with the ghosts of former selves as I take a writing day around Newcastle, where I lived and worked for twelve years.
I’ve now lived in Hartlepool longer than I lived in Newcastle, but of course with it being just up the road it’s still very current for me, so the disconnect is not as strong as I might find going back to other old haunts in search of psychogeography. I filled half an old journal with sense impressions and random free writes over the day, then pulled these fragments out. Like emptying your pockets after a foraging walk.
Residencies for poets are few and far between. At one end of the scale, a residency offers time and often a dedicated space away from home life, in which to explore your craft and make progress on new work. Most of these will be a commercial proposition where the poet is the one that pays. Sometimes it’s subsidised, and with hen’s-teeth rarity the poet is paid just to be a poet – living the dream!!
On the other end of the scale, you are paid but the emphasis is firmly on delivering a set of outcomes for the venue who is hiring you, whether that be an agreed number of poems in a prescribed format, and/or a set number of participatory activities for groups of people important to the venue. The more participatory the brief, the more likely it is that you’ll be working with children, families, and possibly with groups that have specific access needs of various kinds. For this kind of residency to be a residency rather than a short-term hire or a commission, there should be some wiggle room to make new work on your own terms, but there is a real need to align your professional ambitions with the needs of the host – and the host is probably thinking in terms of foot-fall and engagement.
An ideal residency should have elements of both valuable outputs and independent creative experimentation, and an expectation that the exact methods of delivery might be decided through co-creation and negotiation between artist and staff teams. You still need to pitch a good idea, though, and that can feel a bit like having to be telepathic, guessing at what the venue might really need or having some experiential knowledge of how commissioning organisations operate on a day-to-day basis. For example, is their staff team small and overwhelmed, might you need to foreground your ability to self-manage or include social media activity in your pitch?
looking at archive materials – slides of work by Betty Blandino
Eva Masterman teaches us about ways to approach a materials-led, decolonized curation of ceramics
amazing piece by Ian Godfrey, called ‘votive’ – it smelled of burnt wood from the firing process
my sketch of ‘votive’
making a little clay seal in response to ‘votive’
the MIMA staff team get hands-on with different types of clay
a detail from the ceramics collection that delighted me – a ‘fingerprint’ in the base of a vase
getting to grips with the nature of clay
my set-up for making a chalk & charcoal animation for a poem inspired by a Deirdre Burnett bowl
Playing about with ‘artist’s headshots’ in MIMA cafe
photo in MIMA archive of Betty Blandino, whose ‘leaning-neck vase’ inspired one of my new poems
My current residency at MIMA for Tees Women Poets has been a real joy. The expectations of the host venue were clear – create digital poems in response to the Contemporary Ceramics collection in a format that could be used on a flat screen within the gallery, within a very specific timescale. Be able to self-organise and meet deadlines to present the work at MIMA Art Social #17 on 20th June. Offer two workshops to ensure the public and the TWP are getting developmental benefit, but also develop my own creative practice by learning new skills.
What does that look like in terms of my activity? It’s involved
an in-person pottery handling session with the curatorial team
my attendance at a workshop about de-colonializing ceramics curation, again with the staff team (see the slideshow above)
several days of writing and editing poems in response to handling pots
delivering a creative writing workshop with exercises inspired by the ceramics
making film-poems from participants’ work in Reels
delivering a round-table discussion about residencies for TWP members who would like to apply for future opportunities
learning how to make kinetic typography digital poems in Canva
learning how to make charcoal animations
experimenting with AI-generated voice-overs
learning how to create soundtracks in Audacity
the creation of four digital poems ready to reveal in June.
To find out more about my process and poems, please come to MIMA Art Social #17 on Thursday 20th June, 5.30-8pm at MIMA, and I’ll reveal all!!
Last month I led my first renga, or rather my first “quarter-renga”. We didn’t have the minimum five hours it takes to lead a group of poets through the collaborative creation of a linked chain of twenty haiku-alternating-with-couplets that is the shortest possible version of a traditional renga.
Now, I have a lot more learning to do about the intricacies of different renga patterns and how to lead people through them skillfully. They remind me of increasingly complex versions of card games – draw the Queen of Spades and pick up the discard, red sevens reverse the direction of play, mention the season once and you must mention it in the next 3 verses, only one verse about the moon per page.
The not-even-quarter renga we created in the sun-warmed vestry at 17nineteen in Sunderland (otherwise known as Holy Trinity church) cherry-picked some of the rules. We opened by establishing a sense of place, then deepened it in the next couplet. Then we allowed the moon to peek into a verse, before closing with a couplet open to any theme. As renga-master, those were the choices I made about the poem’s direction of flow. Four verses took just over an hour.
In keeping with the traditional method of renga, once the direction had been said for the verse in hand, everyone wrote, and everyone then read out the previous verse plus their new addition. As renga-master, I then chose the verse that would take us forward as a group. For the first two, I combined lines from two or more contributors; for the second two, the “correct” verse arrived fully-formed from a single source.
Eight poets took part, and although the final words only derive from five pens, all of us are considered to be co-authors of the resulting work, because it takes everyone’s energy, focus, and revealed words to weave the invisible field of connection in which the renga gestates.
It is a sacred space. It needs space.
With each circuit of the table, alternative poem-chains open out, fractal branching, seedlings of all possible poems grow ghostly, pale and eventually wither. Like my amateur gardening, I feel guilt and regret with every verse I thin out, death of so many. A smile when someone’s words are chosen, against their expectations. My inner wince away from too-clever, too-polished; my confused frustration when people get caught in syllables and don’t quite open the door to the poem – can you feel it? Like a birdcall, words at the right moment, and never too many. The unchoreographed sigh of recognition from everyone when the right lines arrive, when I choose correctly, when we are becoming the hivemind that spins together.
My approach to creating the conditions for the renga to arise was firstly to run two previous workshops about haiku, to provide renga participants with some insights and practice in the form. But several people turned up for the first time for the renga! So I also used Alec Finlay’s book Shared Writing and had us read out some 20-verse renga. I have two copies of the book, so we could do it in pairs, call and response, which was a beautiful way to hear how this way of writing unspools dreamlike dialogue resonant with association, echo and surprise.
A demarcated physical space really helps. Ours was a room, other projects have used a canopied platform. There is something qualitatively different about joint effort within a dedicated space, our combined attention builds an invisible structure that needs the trellis of a protective physical space up which to climb. I believe it would be possible to carry a mobile platform of stakes and flags, or meet in the wilds and create the space with foraged rocks or marks made in sand.
I also set up the energetic space for the renga by leading some brief meditation, and setting aside time for participants to move around the entire venue in silence in order to open their senses and minds to the latent poetry all around us. Even though the writing was done in the vestry, everyone brought with them details of everything from the wind in the trees outside to the halo lamps above the nave (white moons shining down).
In previous workshops I’d been able to do some basic qi gong with the poets, drawing on a previous life as a shiatsu/qi gong practitioner – it’s a useful, possibly essential preparation for poets who may be more used to starting with a focus on inner turmoil than on the observable world. Though makers in other disciplines would no doubt use the metaphors most related to their practices (haiku alternates with couplet, warp and weft, ones and zeroes) for me the rhythm of the chain felt very much like a walking qi gong where the weight must shift to the side before stepping forward. A quieter verse may make the better stepping stone. Not all can be Alpine grandeur, some must be saxifrage and gentian.
Here is what we wrote:
Three Gold Heads
Bright sunlight / Through high windows/ Inside, three gold heads
Water splashed on infants / Bless you, darling
On the dark side of the garden / A broken teacup saucer / In finger-nailed soil
The daffs need deadheading / Let’s leave them another week
And here are some favourite lines that didn’t make the cut – what would you have made with them?
Sun warms the wood / for centuries, this drawer / is it locked?
Sparrow chirp / ricochet on brick
Like the sky / my blue and white top / is colder than it looks
The lid of the poor box / is so heavy
Corinthian columns / the silver birches can’t quite touch / the window
Cholera corpses / standing room only
Lungs and moon full / I rub sleep from my eyes / another lonely night
They are small, but contain vast spaces – like an atom.
They are a practice.
Last Saturday I led a workshop on writing them, in which we played with fridge magnet haikus to get that old 5-7-5 syllable counting thing off our chests before going out into the world for a walk to find our seasonal signifiers, our moments of subtle intersection with (urban) nature.
Here are some thoughts from that day…
Really do cut out words if they’re only there to make up the syllable count. Up to 17 syllables is fine – if you do this, you will find an expansive sense of ambiguity and open up the poem to reader interpretation. The space created when you cut an unnecessary ‘is’, ‘but’, or ‘that’ is much more haiku than finger-counting the dum-dum-dum.
Two things that don’t go together. Put them together. Do not try to build a bridge with words. Allow the reader to make the bridge for themselves, with resonance. Two things striking each other, like wind chimes. The poem is the note; the note is the white space.
Of all poetics, haiku care the least about what you mean. Stop meaning. Start looking and feeling simultaneously. In a glass building, having a complicated conversation, watching pigeons fly through their own reflection.
I say feeling, but this is not about getting it all out on paper. How Western! Stay still a little longer, the ivy may have something to say about that.
My next workshop on 13th April is going to be a mutual exploration space looking at how to bring haiku into film, using Reels. I’ve been trying and I have no firm conclusions!
This was my favourite out of the 5 haiku I wrote myself that day – why?
Forgive me, for I have sinned, it’s been FOUR YEARS since my last blog! (Really? Really??)
Sorry to keep you waiting. I know you must have been desperate to hear from me. How am I? Yeah, good thanks, you? What have I been up to? Oh wow. How long have you got? …well, I set up a national network for women poets for the Rebecca Swift Foundation, did a big bunch of community art commissions, set up a new literature organisation for Teesside women during pandemic, ummm, what else? Wrote my first libretto, for Tall Ships, that was…yeah, words to music…mmhmm. Got longlisted for an eco-poetry prize, that was – what? no, didn’t win, but… oh yeah but I did I just literally just win a competition for the first ever ClassicsFest…a response to Ovid’s Heroides…yeah Ovid? Greek myth. Mmm. Old. But still relevah…what? He-row-id-ease. Mmm. And what else, let me see…ah…Oh, you’re just on your way to…oh yeah, sorry, Yep, yep, sure, okay well I’ll let you get off then…sure…sure…let’s do a proper catch-up soon…absolutely! Nice one.
Might be time to keep tabs on myself, what do you reckon? Re-committing to meeting myself and my professional practice here is something I’ve been struggling to do, but I see amazing women, poets, people putting their thoughts out there into the world and I’d like to be among them. So, give me a steer – what would you most like to read?
On Hallowe’en I dressed up as a Poetry Expert, and took my place on an international Zoom session organised by the ever-entrepreneurial Middlesbrough author Kudzai Pasirayi. I was asked to speak about common mistakes when writing poetry, which felt/feels like massive hubris!! What follows is a rough summary of what seemed to be the most helpful points, judging by the questions and conversations that ensued with some of the young writers tuning in from Zimbabwe.
Common mistakes that poets make:
Thinking you can make a living just from selling poetry books
Yeah, not a reality for 99% of us, even the acclaimed or famous ones. I’ve published two books, and have a third collection coming out in February, but I make my money by teaching, and setting up funded community arts projects that have poetry somewhere in them. For example, I’ve just been writer-in-residence at a local festival, where their usual public parade has been replaced by a COVID-safe self-guided trail of art in people’s house windows. I wrote A Glossary of Lights – haikus that appeared as cut-out paper panels illuminated by people’s lamps. About one-tenth of my time has been spent writing poems – the rest is all about talking to people, cutting out the paper panels and installing them. But actually, poetry for most people is still very much what it’s always been – something to do in the time they have outside their day job. This includes many, many poets with a good public profile for their work.
The glamourous life of a poet – cutting out haiku panels on the kitchen floor
2. Thinking getting published by a press is automatically ‘better’ somehow than self-publishing
Hmm, yes and no. There is a definite advantage to being published by a recognised press, even a small one, if your aim is to build a reputation as a poet. A good publication track record can then lever in more work in the form of commissions, appearances, and teaching. If poetry is your career, its likely you’ll be aiming at a serious press sooner or later. But if you just want to make a beautiful book, then why not go for it? My first collection was published by an award-winning indie press, but I still had to buy my own copies at cost price and sell them myself at gigs – I barely broke even. My second book was ‘assisted’ self-published, meaning I bought the services of a proof editor and also bought my own copies to sell. It was a collection of illustrated poems that I’d already put out on my blog and I’d built an audience for the poems through social media posts. I crowdfunded the entire cost of publication through pre-sales and sales of bespoke illustrations, and every copy I sell now is clear profit (if you forget about the value of the time I’ve put in being my own marketing department). So which approach is mistaken?
Illustration from my self-published book, ‘Utterly Otterly’
3. Writing in a vacuum
You’ll hear this from absolutely every poet who has a halfway decent career – to write good poetry, you need to read good poetry. None of this ‘keeping my voice pure and untainted by influences’ bullshit. You won’t end up sounding original, you’ll end up sounding lazy, self-indulgent, old-fashioned or just plain mediocre. There, I said it. You can do almost anything with your poetry, but please have a reason for the choices you make – of words, of line breaks, of layout, of poetic form. Don’t rhyme for rhyme’s sake, especially if you have to twist your syntax to achieve it. Don’t go free verse without considering if a form would serve you better, either. White space on the page is not neutral, it should be ‘read’ as pause, beat, silence; and a good poet will position it in such a way as to draw the reader’s attention to an important word, or thought where they want you to pause. You can learn how to do this well by reading other poets and asking yourself – why did they make this poem in this particular shape?
4. Dispensing with editing
I think another possible mistake some poets make is to assume that their first or second draft of a poem is as good as it can get. I’m not saying you should agonise over something for years, or refuse and mistrust the gift of sudden inspiration, but really good poets tend to have a habit of close editing. They also tend to have a habit of seeking ways to get good critique, to push them to become better – attending masterclasses, or a really good writing group, or joining a collective, or investing in getting a mentor to read your work. It would be a mistake to think you can ever reach the point where there’s nothing left to learn; after all, you don’t want to become a pastiche of yourself.
Working with, and learning from, other poets will make us all better and happier poets!! Here are performance poets Don Jenkins, Steve Urwin, Sky Hawkins and Ellen Moran
5. Some pitfalls of publishing
Finally, a not-entirely serious word about publishing, and the hierarchy of prizes and publishers. England is inherently snobbish, even when we try not to be, so there definitely IS a hierarchy. A “perfect” career for a poet might go something like this:
Be discovered as a teenager, having attending one of the hothouse development programmes like Foyle Young Poets or the Roundhouse.
Win a Foyle Young Poet award.
Get multiple poems published in PAPER magazines, not just online ones – especially magazines with the word Poetry in their title (Poetry London, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry Wales, just Poetry) or magazines that have been around for a long time (Magma, The Rialto, The Stinging Fly, Frogmore Papers) or are produced by people who also publish poetry collections (Under The Radar by Nine Arches Press).
Write a pamphlet and have it either accepted by a reputable press during one of their free reading windows, or have it win a pamphlet competition. Slightly more kudos to just get accepted without all the grubby business of paying money to enter a competition.
Win an award with that pamphlet.
Write a collection, same procedure.
Win an award with that collection – if you’re young enough, make that an Eric Gregory Award. So if you’re already over 30, tough luck, or maybe try to win the Felix Dennis prize for best first collection. Whatever you do, MAKE YOUR FIRST COLLECTION AS INCREDIBLE AS POSSIBLE.
Get taken up permanently by one of the Big Presses – Faber, Carcanet, Cape, Bloodaxe, Nine Arches.
Write several more acclaimed collections, end up winning the Forward Prize and the TS Eliot Prize and as many others as you can manage.
Still have virtually no money.
Ok, so of course I’m joking! For everyone else, you and me and the many, many poets I know, this kind of poetry journey is neither possible nor relevant, and your greatest mistake would be thinking that it’s the only way to go, or the only measure of whether or not your work has value. Your work always has value. You might find it inspirational to read some interviews with the very compassionate and non-competitive poet Ocean Vuong. And to quote Miles Davies “It takes a long time to sound like yourself”. There are LOADS of poetry festivals, readings, open mics and supportive online communities out there who are waiting for YOUR words. So really, your biggest mistake would be giving up. But you’re not going to do that, are you?
Some resources and links to get you started, but just look for #poetry related hashtags on your socials and you’ll soon get a sense of what’s out there for you.
Kirsten Luckins 