Poetry Review: a guest at the feast

I’ll be guest-editing the autumn issue of Poetry Review, the journal of the Poetry Society in London – following the summer issue edited by George Szirtes, out in June, and preceding the winter issue, to be edited by Bernardine Evaristo.

Guest editing: entrance and exit, skipping the whole business of proposing a manifesto and then having to stick to that for years, more. (Should we have guest prime ministers? Guest football managers?) As a guest, it’s not for me to knock down load-bearing walls or turn the back bedroom into a jacuzzi, but I can perhaps rearrange the furniture a little. For anyone interested in whether the autumn issue will have a theme or a slant or an angle, I’ll just mention than when, a couple of years ago, in conversation with a TS Eliot shortlisted poet, I referred to Dalkey Archive (‘one of the best little publishers in the world’: Lezard, Guardian) and she said ‘Who?’, my heart sank. She, if she’d mentioned a particular singer to me and I’d blanked, might have had the same reaction. None of us knows it all, none of us can even keep track. But as well as poetry there is prose and art and film and music and theatre going on out there, and while some poets are deeply interested in other art forms, and may even work in them, I do often suspect that many never raise their eyes from poetry books. With the result that the poetry world can feel like a ghetto. I’d like to relax a few border controls.

Today I went into the office, and brought home a sackful of poems. So many. This editoring thing is an honour, I knew that, and I intend it to be a pleasure, but only as I start reading do I realise how humbling, I think that’s the word, it will be. There are good poems, plenty of those, and some that are more than good.* More intriguingly, among a batch of half a dozen so-sos there may be one that surprises (and this is one of the things magazines, as opposed to books, are for: little gems, and never mind the rest of the work, the oeuvre). Even in a poem that doesn’t work as a whole (difficult, hugely so; why else would we be bothering) there is often a line, a turn of the words, that takes me aback.

* Who’s saying so? Well, in this case, me. It is, for the next several weeks, my job. For the first time, ever, I am being paid to exercise judgement. I bear in mind, always, the words of a minor character in War and Peace: ‘Where there is judgement, there is always injustice.’ We take that on board, we live with it. ‘You just do the best you can’ – that’s a quote from a piece on editing that featured in the first draft of this post, which was attempting to answer the question ‘What does an editor do?’, but it strayed off-track so I’ll keep it for the next post.

Product placement

Just the second post of the month: am I falling behind?

On the Book Trust website there’s a list of short story competitions, each with their special rules (maximum word lengths, deadlines for entries, etc). My favourite is this: ‘must include Italian women in some way’. Elsewhere, there’s a form I could fill in for a week’s residency in a luxury hotel in Sardinia, the condition being that I’d have to write a story set in Cagliari. One story could do for both, I’m thinking, but then remember that a few posts back I said I’d never written anything to commisssion and probably couldn’t, and this would be a bit like that.

Another thing I said I hadn’t done is teach creative writing. Given that almost everyone else – of my generation of writers, the poets especially – has done this, I’m beginning to feel like the one virgin in the whole school year. I talked about this with a friend: we agreed that we didn’t have enough confidence in our own practice to teach, and that we’d go into it thinking that most of the students were probably better than us, so we’d feel there under false pretences.

This is all a bit priggish, words wrapped around my scepticism about the whole concept of ‘creative writing’. (This morning, I heard a writer tell other writers that she taught creative writing ‘with an ambivalent attitude’. A kind of disclaimer: don’t expect exactly what it says on the tin.) Loosening up, I’m happy to believe those who tell me that there are some excellent teachers out there; and it’s really more about enabling than ‘teaching’, and magic can happen; and what students learn from teachers is at least as much about attitudes and passion as it is about particular skills.

So maybe I should stop muttering on the edge and plunge in. Starting with a short story that will ‘include Italian women in some way’. Coincidentally, I’ve just finished reading Among Women Only by Cesare Pavese, which is about nothing but Italian women, and it’s wonderful.

Elp

A little elp is never amiss.

Dream last night: first day in a new job and the best bit was the canteen, in which the food was mostly Spanish and people did turns, e.g. an opera singer at the bar. Then I went for a walk up a winding road with Seamus Heaney, and we found some old buses and coaches in a kind of bus graveyard and people were playing chess inside them, and Mr Heaney showed me his new work, which was a sequence incorporating poems, short bits of fiction, and paragraphs of memoir.

Employers etc complaining that the young don’t bother to turn up on time for their low-paid/unpaid work – but if work was a more congenial place to be, with opera singers in the canteen? The work problem is not just that there aren’t jobs but that most jobs are soul-less and numbingly tedious.

The recorded voice in the lift at Belsize Park tube station – ‘You have now reached the lower level. Exit, turn right and . . .’ – is 1950s BBC Home Service announcer’s, perfectly preserved.

The Leveson Inquiry: a man called Murdoch who owns TV stations I don’t watch, newspapers I don’t read (the TLS, admittedly, is a little problem here), is a person I’m interested in? Rich and powerful people in one another’s pockets, telling lies in public, riding horses that do not belong to them, is news, is scandal? Plenty things more worth sorting out than that; that so much time, money, attention is devoted to this is exactly why so many don’t bother voting. (Meanwhile, that a couple of writers I’ve been reading – Alfred Hayes, Renata Adler – are currently out of print is a scandal.)

White sheets, bruised men

This week’s new arrivals include Beverley Bie Brahic’s White Sheets, a PBS Recommendation, collected in boxes from the printer this afternoon, and I wasn’t sure how the peachy orange was going to sit on the brown card but it’s fine, oh yes. Then home, a little fiddle with the website, and it’s available from there NOW.

And earlier in the week, the book I’d asked for last December for Christmas in this post, which is about Alfred Hayes, who died in 1985 and was my discovery of last year and probably this year too: after reading The End of Me a couple of days ago, I’m still feeling knocked sideways. Paul Bailey: ‘Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences.’

Plus and minus

The plus was that yesterday eve I was paid to go to Chichester to speak on a ‘Publishing Panel Event’ and that despite the rain the room was packed and it was all impeccably organised by Karen Stevens, who teaches creative writing there, with taxis from the station and wine and sandwiches provided, and who am I to complain.

I’m not exactly complaining. Nor was anyone else. But there was something awry. The panel: one London literary agent and two representatives from other London agencies; one editor from Hamish Hamilton/Penguin; Debbie Taylor, founder and editor of Mslexia (she was great); me (the oldest). The audience, as far as I could tell: some students, some ‘general public’, many of the latter over a certain age. The Q&A session: some inconclusive waffle about self-publishing (with questioners being reassured that no, self-publishing didn’t disqualify them from possible later ‘proper’ publication); a silly amount of time spent on the ‘covering letter’ to agents, wordcounts or no wordcounts, synopses ditto, how much to send, etc.* Because of the make-up of the panel (I was token small press, Debbie, I think, was token ‘alternative’) the whole thing reinforced the traditional model: write, send to agents, then – even if you’re taken on – wait around for two years (the period given by one of the agents present) to be placed, or not. The publishing industry (a word used yesterday without any irony) professionals brought down from London to speak from on high: this felt, to me, inappropriate to the audience.

There are now many other publishing models than the one involving agents. And for those in yesterday’s audience who had perhaps thought of self-publishing but didn’t know where to start, the know-how is becoming more widely available. See, for example, this service, started by Bobby Nayyar of Limehouse Books.

* There is no ‘submissions guidelines’ button on the CBe site because there are no guidelines. If anyone wants to send material, just send. You’re a grown-up; you don’t need me to tell you how to make a cup of tea, how to start talking to another person.

Settling down to write (2): reading into writing

Among the letters I sent home from boarding school in the early 1960s and that my mother kept in shoe boxes, there is a list of ‘books read in the last year’. It’s not dated, but from the chronology of the shoe boxes I think I was eleven or twelve when I wrote it. There are 46 titles. Shakespeare scores three, and so do Jack London, Conan Doyle and John Buchan; Dickens, Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells score two each. Alastair MacLean and Hammond Innes score only one apiece (though another year, when I was in the sick room with mumps, I binged on Hammond Innes). There are two titles featuring dogs and three about the war. Easily the winner is C. S. Forester, with ten.

I started on Forester early. When, aged eight, I unpacked my trunk on my very first day at that school, there was a copy of Lieutenant Hornblower, hidden by my mother among the bundles of name-taped socks and underwear to distract me from any soppy homesickness. I started coming with out with naval expressions such as ‘Damn your eyes’, and the next term I got the Bobbsey Twins, but it was already too late for them.

In part this was a numbers game. The Shakespeares were, I think, a cheat – we probably read them in class – and the Dickens were not the big ones. But for the latter, I was spoilt: the experience of reading him on the page has never matched up to James Birdsall, the English and Art master (and brother of the cartoonist Timothy Birdsall, who died in his early twenties), reading Dickens aloud in Saturday morning lessons, doing all the voices.

Conspicuously, only two titles in the list are by women: Baroness Orczy and Rosemary Sutcliffe. And Sutcliffe’s The Eagles of the Ninth is the only book that was specifically written for my age-group. ‘Young adults’ hadn’t been invented. Nor, of course, had PlayStations and Xboxes, which left a lot of time to fill, and reading was one of the things you did. In the holidays, a mobile library van – two-tone: cream and sort of beige – parked once a week at the end of the road. At school, the library was there every day. One book in that library that stands out in memory is a red hardback edition of Notebook of Anton Chekhov, edited by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf. It’s full of snatches of dialogue, ideas for stories, random observations. ‘The dog walked in the street and was ashamed of its crooked legs.’ ‘A lady looking like a fish standing on its head; her mouth like a slit, one longs to put a penny in it.’ It’s exactly the kind of book I now enjoy publishing.

At the next school, I began forcing the pace. I read Under the Volcano before knowing what it is to be drunk. With a resigned sigh, my mother posted to me, wrapped in plain brown paper, the Updike novel I’d asked for, with a picture of a naked female on the cover. Back at home, we sat together on the sofa watching a Pinter play on television, and during one of his trademark pauses she remarked, looking at her watch and having decided she wasn’t getting enough words per minute, ‘You know, he’s being paid for this.’ So playwrights earned money even for the bits when no one is actually speaking? This was worth knowing.

I began writing plays. (Chekhov: ‘Anyone can write a play which might be produced.’) One of them was about a boy who ran away from school; the part was played by a boy who, on the day of the first (and only) performance, ran away from school. The authorities weren’t sure what to make of this – was I aiding and abetting? – and nor was I. Shortly afterwards I ran away from school myself, but only as far as my cousin’s house a few miles away. I remember my cousin’s partner, who had been to Oxford, telling me that part of the culture shock of going there had been this: realising that people who wrote books were not that different, to look at them and even to listen to them, from everyone else. At university my interest in drama briefly continued – with a megaphone, I played Aeneas in a production of Troilus and Cressida in which the Greeks were dressed as businessmen and the Trojans as hippies, and the battle scenes were filmed in a local quarry – but then I went through an anti-social phase and holed up in my room with fat black Penguin Classics in translation.

I came relatively late to poetry, but not too late for the Penguin Modern European Poets and the Fulcrum Press (still an overwhelmingly masculine landscape, Lorine Niedecker the only woman on a list of twenty-four Fulcrum poets). Across and down, across and down: the eyes track in the same way, but with poetry at a different speed and with a different kind of attention – this was like learning to read all over again. Shapes and sound and rhythm stepped forward, story took a well-earned break. The tricky words were there not just to be read but pronounced, not like the names of characters in Russian novels. And if I wanted to have a go myself, the attractions were obvious: you don’t have to fill the whole page; and poems are sprints (they’re not, actually, but they look as though they might be) rather than marathons, which means you should be able to carry on with the other things you like doing too. Such as reading.

More recently I’ve been attempting to write fiction. Not in the manner of Buchan and Forester, et al – with poetry, I’ve enjoyed writing only those lines that I’ve wanted to write, and I’m not now going to embark on paragraphs describing the scenery or what people are wearing. But something from the old boys – whose company has expanded over the years to include at least as many old girls too, possibly more – will be in there. Flowing the words from one page on to another, and then another and maybe another, feels like a release, but it’s a struggle too and I often pause over the syllabuses of the creative writing courses that offer me help with point of view, with first-person or third-person narration, with when and why and how to switch between narrative and dialogue. But the private ones are prohibitively expensive (Chekhov: ‘What? Writers? For a shilling I’ll make a writer of you’), and when I look at the prices of the Faber Academy courses and the Guardian Masterclasses I always translate those sums into the number of books I could buy and read.

Settling down to write (1): playing truant

The girl is my mother, the dapper man is her father (who died long before I came along). The photo was taken in the 1920s in Bridlington by, I think, a beach photographer. They’re on holiday. She’s as happy as can be; he, though he’s keeping it under his hat, is no less proud.

Hers wasn’t a particularly churchy family, but they were Methodists, and she always jokingly, but half-seriously, blamed her strong sense of duty – work before pleasure, even though this meant the latter might be endlessly deferred, and putting others’ needs before her own – on her Methodist upbringing. For good or ill (both, probably), I’ve inherited some of that. Others who’ve known me at certain times will laugh, but it feels to be so, and it has coloured, even shaped, my own habits of writing.

Between the time I left university, early 1970s, and 2005 I was in full-time 9-to-5 employment. Writing was something that got done in the interstices, in the small hours – an activity that took place in despite of the official timetable. I’ve been freelance since 2005 but even now never a whole day, rarely a half-day, is given over to writing, which still gets itself done in the gaps – between the hackwork jobs that pay the bills, between the shopping and the cooking and the regular putting of food on the table. The latter (thank you, mum) is the real work, and comes first.

Writing has been a way of playing truant from the work of the world, or the way the world works. Other than the very occasional book review, I’ve never written anything to commission, certainly not poems or stories, nor do I think I could do so – it would be a job, which is what writing isn’t. Last year I went to a writers’ place on an island in the Baltic where I had nothing to do for a whole month but write, and I came home with a few paragraphs, no more; the rest was walks by the sea, saunas, talking, watching films – in other words, in a situation where I’m supposed to be writing, I play truant even from that.

At the time I started, writing-as-playing-truant was the only way on offer. Painting, sculpture, the other arts, were different: there were art colleges, a support network built into the system. Writing has now caught up: you can do BA degrees, MAs, PhDs, in creative writing, and then you can go on and teach others. Writing, you could say, is now a profession. This isn’t a wholly bad thing. I missed out on a lot of good things that writing students now get: exposure to a wider range of literature, chances to play around and mess up, influences, inspiring teachers, the daily company of others for whom this thing, writing, is pretty damn central. But for me the term ‘professional writer’ remains a contradiction in terms.