Monday night at the Cheltenham, Poetry Festival

I didn't get a chance to post yesterday, but Monday night's online reading as part of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival was a lot of fun.

Los Angeles-based poet Chase Dimock read superbly, and I'm very much enjoying his book, Sentinel Species. His work is disarmingly funny – you're so busy enjoying the wit and humour that the emotional heft catches you off-balance. I'll write more about it once I've read further.

I just wanted to thank Anna Saunders and everyone else at Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and the excellent open mic readers who contributed so much to the evening.

If you want to find out more about what's on at CPF, have a look here.

And if you'd like to read most of the poems I read on Monday, they're available in the above e-pamphlet on sale here, or in my Nine Arches Press collections hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica (available on Kindle) and The Elephant Tests, available here.

What's new at Nine Arches?

This is my regular recommendation that you have a browse at the Nine Arches Press website – it's full of great individual poetry collections (the most recent being Jacqueline Saphra's 100 Lockdown Sonnets), anthologies, books on the process of writing poetry, and Under The Radar magazine.

If you go all the way down to near the bottom of this page, you'll see that my last collection, The Elephant Tests, is still available. I am finally getting close to completing a very belated follow-up to that book, although there's still work to be done. So what am I doing here?

Purple Crow – rewild your inbox

One of my poems, Starlings, from my last collection The Elephant Tests, is featured today on Purple Crow, which you can read more about here and here.

Purple Crow promises to deliver all sorts of wildlife-related content to your inbox, from fact-based features to more conversational pieces, and from top-class photography to poetry that focuses on natural history.

There are paid and free subscriptions available, so check it out.

Now at Nine Arches...

Just my periodic reminder that there's some wonderful poetry available at the Nine Arches Press website, including new collections by Josephine Corcoran, Roy McFarlane and Suzannah Evans, as well as a wealth of back-catalogue titles (which include my own The Elephant Tests).

You can also get the latest issue of Under The Radar magazine, and find out how to submit work to Nine Arches.

My first Nine Arches collection, hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, is available direct from me.

Boom time for poetry sales

Poetry sales are soaring, according to this piece in The Guardian, with both so-called 'Instagram poets' (I don't like the dismissiveness of that term) and everything from Homer to Heaney selling well.

I'm slightly confused by what it says about the boom being fuelled by a desire for clarity and a desire for more nuance. The latter sounds perfectly reasonable, but clarity isn't really what I'd go to poetry for. Nevertheless, it's encouraging, and if you want to keep the boom moving, then I'd be more than willing to sell you a signed copy of either of my Nine Arches Press collections, hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica and The Elephant Tests.

Dream City Blues

I have a poem – Six Ways To Navigate The City – in this excellent volume, Dream City Blues, edited by Mark Howard Jones, out now. It's a book that looks at urban utopias gone wrong, and cities that have become nightmares.

The poem originally appeared in my collection The Elephant Tests, which is still available from Nine Arches Press. While you're at it, have a look at all the other goodies that Nine Arches have available - lots of good present ideas there.

Which waders?

It's time for a birdy ID challenge or two. On September 22nd, Bird Watching Magazine staged a readers' day at Frampton Marsh RSPB, near Boston, Lincolnshire. The weather was fantastic, and because of the extremely high tide on The Wash, just on the far side of the sea bank, there were large numbers of waders (shorebirds, if you're American), present.

Here's a few on one of the scrapes just along from the car-park. The first person to correctly them will get a free copy of my last poetry collection, The Elephant Tests, which coincidentally contains a poem entitled At Frampton Marsh. And should that pique your interest, you can find out more about that book and about Nine Arches Press here.

And Other Poems

Over at And Other Poems, there are now two index pages listing every poem published on the site since 2012 (and of course, you can click through to the poems themselves, too). I'm not even going to try to list the many excellent poets who have appeared there, because to pick any out would be unfair, but have a look yourself and enjoy.

Thanks to Laura McKee, who flagged this up on Facebook, and whose own excellent poems you can see here. Short poems too often get overlooked – it takes an awful lot of skill and nerve to know just how much is enough.

You can read two of my poems from The Elephant Tests – The Mind's Skyline and The Dark Ages – which were published there.

Ouse Muse, 23.11.16

Busy, busy, busy, at the moment, mainly with the day job, so I haven't had a chance until now to blog about last week's reading at Ouse Muse, in Bedford.

Compered by Caroline Davies, and run by Ian McEwen, it's a long-running open mic/reading series, and the venue downstairs at the Auction Room bar, is a good one – cosy and compact, with hardly any noise drifting down from the main room upstairs.

The open mic readers were excellent, too – thoughtful poems in a variety of styles, and (and this is something I love to see at such events), more than one person read poems by well-known poets. I'm really not sure why 'cover versions' of this sort are still so rare on the poetry scene, but it's a great way of setting your own and others' work in context, or just of reminding people of some great work.

My own reading was from hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica and The Elephant Tests, plus one new poem, and I liked the format – after a 25-minute main set, I got to read a couple more poems to close the night, after the last of the open mic slots. The audience were lovely – knowledgeable and appreciative, and

Incidentally, I only have a few copies of each of those books left (and I think Nine Arches Press have the same), so contact me if you'd like a copy – they're £5 each. Now that the print runs are exhausted, they'll probably go to print-on-demand.

Reading at Ouse Muse

Two weeks today, on Wednesday, November 23rd, I'm the featured reader at Ouse Muse, in Bedford. It'll be my first purely poetry reading for quite a long while, so I'm looking forward to it a great deal (not that I haven't enjoyed reading prose).

It all takes place downstairs at the Auction Room Bar, 1 Duke Street, Bedford MK40 3HD, starting at 7.45pm, although you'll need to get there from 7.30pm if you want to sign up for one of the open mic slots.

Admission is £5, or £4 for concessions or open mic readers. I'll have copies of both my Nine Arches Press collections, hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica and The Elephant Tests, available for sale on the night, as well as a few copies of A Sky Full Of Birds.

Summer sale at Nine Arches Press

There's a summer sale on at Nine Arches Press, with 50% off lots of their poetry books, others available for just £3, and free postage – the offer ends on September 1st, though, so hurry. There are collections from the likes of Daniel Sluman, Tony Williams, Mario Petrucci, Jo Bell, Bobby Parker, Angela France, Richie McCaffrey and many more in there, plus several anthologies.

My own The Elephant Tests is there for £4, while my previous collection, hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, is still available at £8.99.

After a long sojourn in the land of prose these last couple of years, I'm finally getting back to writing some poetry at the moment. Not entirely sure where it's going, but then that's half the fun, isn't it?

Words & Ears, 30.7.15

Reading at Jazz & Poetry

This is me reading Magnetite, from The Elephant Tests, at Jazz & Poetry, at the Guitar Bar, Nottingham, in October 2013.

Jazz & Poetry runs from 8 until late on the second Wednesday of each month, October to July, and admission is free.

Thanks are due to David Belbin for putting this up on YouTube - there are also lots of videos of other recent guests up there. Enjoy!

At Frampton Marsh

There's a poem in my current collection, The Elephant Tests, called At Frampton Marsh, written some time after a visit to the RSPB reserve just outside Boston, Lincolnshire, a few years back.

I was there again on Friday, being shown around by warden Toby Collett, and was amazed at just how much it has developed even in the last couple of years. A bird list of 70-odd species included Glossy Ibis, two Pectoral Sandpipers, around 10 Little Stints, 50-plus Curlew Sandpipers, 10 Spotted Redshanks, hundreds of Black-tailed Godwits, Merlin and Marsh Harrier. The particularly high numbers of waders (I've never seen that many Little Stints or Curlew Sands together) were in part due to a very high tide which came right up to the sea wall.

Here's a little group of five Curlew Sandpipers, and a larger gathering of (mainly) godwits, although there were Dunlin and Knot among them.

The Elephant Tests reviewed at Stride

Over at the online magazine Stride, which remains one of my most regular browsing places on the net, The Elephant Tests has been reviewed very kindly by Alasdair Paterson - it's always nice to get a good review from someone whose own poetry you like a lot.

Also reviewed are Angela France, Patricia Debney, Richard Skinner, Jennifer Copley, and Ian Brinton & Michael Grant - that's pretty nice company to be in, too. There's a lot of food for thought in this piece, and at least a couple of books to add to the 'To Buy' list.

London calling

I was down in London yesterday, mainly to visit the Geological Society in connection with a poem for an anthology project from Worple Press. It's to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the creation of William Smith's geological map of the country, and I was able to see the map itself. Seen full-size, on the wall of the Society's offices in Piccadilly, it's really an imposing and impressive piece of work. It was great to meet and have a drink with Michael McKimm, who as well as being a very fine poet, works at the Society and is co-ordinating the project.

I also managed to fit in a visit to the Viking exhibition at the British Museum, a bit of research for another literary project (of which more very soon), and some book-buying - Karen Solie's Selected Poems, Hugo Williams' I Knew The Bride, and Christopher Isherwood's The Condors and the Cows. I also couldn't help noticing, in Foyle's, two copies of The Elephant Tests. You'll have to forgive my delight at finding one of my collections in a London bookshop for the first time - it was nice to be sandwiched between WS Merwin and Hilary Menos.

I ended a great day by catching up with an old university friend for a quick drink before the train. It had been far, far too long.

Argentinian interlude 3

At the Bristol reading on April 11th, a gentleman bought a copy of my book The Elephant Tests on the strength of a particular poem, A Long Dry, which is set in Australia's Northern Territory. He wanted to send it to his daughter, who lives out there.

When I visited Northern Territory a few years back, one of the first birds I saw at Fogg Dam, not far outside Darwin, was the Jabiru, a large and hugely impressive stork. Even though the name sounds rather Australian, it is in fact named after the above bird, the original Jabiru, seen here in the Ibera wetlands.

A poetry blog tour

The excellent Roy Marshall invited me to take part in this tour of poetry blogs. How does it work? Well, I answer four standard questions about my own work, then link to the blogs of three more poets, who will answer the same questions over the next few weeks.

Now, you'll notice that there are just two links posted so far - to Gill McEvoy and Tim Love. That's because most of the poets I know had already been approached. If you'd like to take part, then, drop me a line, and I'll add your link. Anyway, here goes...

What am I working on?
I've been working with a photographer, Phil Harris, on a project looking at landscape and particularly the landscape of John Clare's poetry, although it's started to take us down some quite different routes, too. It's been a really exciting and challenging way of working - neither of us wants to end up effectively illustrating each other's work, so we've just been figuring stuff out as we go along.

I've also got a long-standing sequence that I've been working on, and that I'm thinking of polishing up and sending out to pamphlet publishers some time this year.

Alongside both of those I've been writing some very occasional occasional poems, but it's pretty slow going (for reasons that will become clear later in this post).

Finally, I'm planning a prose project - if it gets approved, it would certainly feed into my poetry, I think, so I'm looking forward to working on it.

How does my work differ from others in the genre?
Hmmm. Difficult, and probably not really for me to say. I'm always slightly conscious that, not having done an English or Creative Writing degree, my reading of poetry has been a bit haphazard (although voracious), so maybe that shows up in my own work, but I'm not sure. I do tend to write a lot of nature poems, too, and for the most part I tend to dislike enlisting birds or animals or whatever for obvious symbolic or metaphorical effect, but having said that my latest book, The Elephant Tests, contains several very obviously symbolic elephants (I know next to nothing about the actual animals).

Why do I write what I write?
Well, I suppose I'd say because I have to, although that can end up sounding a bit pretentious. I do get physically uneasy when I have something I want to write but work or whatever else is getting in the way.

As regards subject matter it does tend, for the most part, to be rooted in the subject areas I know most about, although I'd also say that by doing so I find out more about them. I'm interested in the potential of all the arts to change attitudes about environmental issues (this is something that New Networks for Nature has pioneered), so that has been increasingly important in driving my work, I think, but it is very much about the poetry first and foremost - I don't like the idea of browbeating readers at all.

How does your writing process work?
It's changed quite a bit over the years, and continues to change. I make notes for poems all the time, and although I like a Moleskine as much as the next person, I scribble on any scrap of paper to hand. More and more I also make notes on my phone or iPad. More and more, too, I remind myself to write something, anything, including blog posts, diary entries, etc., rather than waiting around for inspiration. I mine a lot of my other writing for poetry 'prompts' and ideas.

Having done that, I usually write the first full draft by hand, then later put it on my PC. I've been trying to take far longer over revising poems, giving myself a set period to let them 'mature', so I'll then go back to a piece a few times over several months. I generally have quite a few poems on the go at once, so I don't worry too much if one gets abandoned for a lengthy period - last week, I went back to a piece that had sat untouched for four years, and reworked and 'finished' it within 10 minutes. I think the time away just made its flaws so obvious, as well as the potential solutions.

In physical terms, while I make notes all the time, I tend to do all the hard work in the evenings and at night. I'm not sure why, but I struggle to write poetry much before 6pm. I can't listen to music while I write, and I stay away from Twitter and Facebook, but I sometimes quite like having something undemanding on the TV or radio, such as cricket or snooker, that I can dip in and out of.

The blogging tour continues...
For more answers to these questions, see:
Gill McEvoy, http://redbotinki.blogspot.co.uk/
Tim Love, http://litrefs.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/a-poetry-blog-tour.html

New look for Nine Arches

Nine Arches Press has a new-look website, which is the perfect excuse to remind you that you can buy my latest collection, The Elephant Tests, here.

There's also a wealth of other individual poetry collections, the magazine Under The Radar, short story collections, and the anthology Maps and Legends, which is a great sampler of the best of Nine Arches' poetry output in the last five years. Have a browse, and I hope you'll find something there to ancourage you to dip your hand in your pocket.

Don't get me wrong

Several initially unconnected trains of thought have come together this week, and now I'm going to subject you to my efforts to string them together.

I tend to like poetry that leaves itself open to the reader's own imagination*. I don't mean deliberately ambiguous or obscure, or so vague as to defy any attempt to impose meaning, but poetry that doesn't set out to shepherd the reader down one particular route. It isn't the old mainstream/alternative divide, I don't think, because looking down my bookshelves I can find good examples of this in both camps.

So, I also like it when, in a review, say, my own poetry gets read in a way that hadn't occurred to me, or that at least hadn't been the initial driving force behind the poem. This happened recently with Roy Marshall's review of The Elephant Tests in Hinterland - his reading of a couple of the poems makes more sense, now, than what I had assumed would be the 'obvious' reading.

I was thinking about this at Monday's Shindig, and afterwards. I enjoy hearing poetry read or recited a lot (at least, when it's being read by the poets themselves), but do I like to be able to read the poems later too, if at all possible, because there are always going to be nuances that you miss (my hearing isn't the greatest, either, which doesn't help).

Then yesterday, I started thinking about pop songs that, even after years, continue to be misinterpreted, no matter how often journalists or their writers point out the 'real' meaning. I don't mean misheard lyrics, but things like Ronald Reagan's attempt to co-opt Springsteen's Born In The USA as a patriotic flag-waver, rather than the outburst of disappointment and disgust that it is, or the way that Every Breath You Take is trotted out as the sort of romantic 'our tune' that gets played at weddings, rather than the stalker-ish creepfest that it is. In both those cases, and several more, the song's huge commercial popularity probably depended to a great deal on being misunderstood, although neither make any particular effort to hide their true 'meaning'.

So I started wondering a couple of things.
1 Whether there are any poems that have become popular in a similar way (in as much as poems ever become popular these days)?
2 Why there's the difference between poets and songwriters in this respect. The former generally say they want their work to remain open to the reader's interpretation, while the latter are more prone to pointing out the real 'meaning', yet the latter seem to get misinterpreted more often (partly, of course, because most of us don't sit down to read song lyrics very often).

* There are exceptions. Some of my favourite RS Thomas poems (and there are few poets I like better) seem to me to do an awful lot of telling, rather than showing. By rights, I oughtn't to like them, but I do.