The New Market

YOU ARE NOW ON PRIVATE PROPERTY
reads the flimsy A-frame
at the Western edge
of Spitalfields.

A formless winter sun
splits the Church in two.

And so

I enter

with a limp

and an eyepatch.

Putting together your first collection

I’m running another one of those “So, you think you’re a writer?” sessions for writers’ organisation Spread the Word.

Date: Monday 12 March, 4-7pm
Venue: The Poetry Library, London
£30 / £20 concessions
Info and booking

This is what the blurb says.

Are you a poet looking to put together your first collection; or perhaps you have already prepared a manuscript but are unsure what the next step should be?

Independent publisher and poet Tom Chivers will guide you through the terrors and tribulations of the publishing process, with tips and advice on editing and redrafting your poetry, how to find and present your manuscript to potential publishers, and a behind-the-scenes look at the poetry publishing world. This workshop will also look at ways to develop readers for your poetry, both off and online, and how to promote your book once it has been accepted for publication. We will look at examples of good and bad publishing practice, share knowledge within the group, and you will leave with an action plan for taking your work forward to the next stage.

These kinds of things customarily get slagged off. It’s got nothing to do with poetry, they say. It’s part of a pernicious world of creative writing degrees and ‘professional’ writers which is killing creativity, they say. You’re just doing this to pay the bills, they say (err yes). Etc. etc.

I must confess I have always had some sympathy for this point of view. Seriously good writing will, in most cases, out. And you obviously don’t need a creative writing degree to write, though many find them productive and inspirational.

But some basic education (however you receive it) around the structures and processes by which good writing becomes published writing, becomes part of a network of decision-makers, taste-makers, gatekeepers and, we hope,a community of readers – that, I think, is a useful thing.

As a small publisher, I see SO MANY examples of bad practice in submitting manuscripts, just to take one example of the non-writing side of writing. It seems to me obvious that if you wanted to be published by someone, i.e. open yourself to a long-term and significant artistic and commercial relationship with a company or individual, that you would take SOME CARE in how you approach it. Like look up the name of the editor. Or tell them why you like their press and want your book to part of it (this isn’t sucking up – it shows that the writer actually gives a shit about the list s/he would like to join). Recently I received a submission in which seven other publishers had been CCd. I mean, the guy hadn’t even bothered to BCC us!

The session I’m running for Spread the Word will also draw on my own experience as a new writer, so it won’t just be me mouthing off about the weird emails I get (though there will be a bit of that). I’ve been through that process of submitting various manuscripts, getting rejection slips (or nothing at all), then finally getting published, and arriving in a new and strange land in which everything seems, somehow, different. Through this process, I’ve thought a great deal about my writing, where it sits, what my audience(s) might be, what different publishing methods I might use, why I should bother publishing at all… Indeed, the (poetry) publishing is changing so rapidly, in part as a result of the internet, that a good, serious and new writer might rightly consider whether it’s worth going to the ‘big boys’ at all. Yes, I will try to broach the sticky issue of self-publishing, too.

At the very least, I hope the people attending will leave with a renewed sense of purpose and a few helpful tips.

Just 99p!

This is embarassing. A friend sent me a text message with a photo attached. It’s my book, on sale for “Just 99p” in a second-hand bookshop somewhere. Remaindered after only 2 years. Well, it could be worse: at least whoever had read it considered it good enough to flog on!

Perhaps this is a good time to resurrect an idea I had a while back. I have one hardback copy left of my first book, and I thought I could sell it for a ludicrously inflated price. The catch is this: not only will I sign the thing (obviously); I will also sit down with a sharp pencil and an open mind and annotate every poem with thoughts, background, context and notes. So for twenty-five quid*, say, you will be the owner of a completely unique document of the writing of a book. And a book, that has been scribbled over.

Does this interest anyone, or is it a ridiculous idea? Either way, I could do with the cash.

If you want to spend much less than twenty-five quid on my book, the paperback edition is on sale for £7.99 at Salt.

* Maybe less. Or I could auction it via Ebay?

Conceal me what I am

Winter is starting to creep in amidst the leaderless tent village of St Paul’s. Many of the unhappy campers wear the smiling face of a seventeenth century Catholic [freedom fighter] [martyr] [terrorist] Guy Fawkes as a mask. They are inspired by the futuristic film V for Vendetta, in which a masked genius attempts to dislodge a fascist regime by blowing up Parliament; originally a comic book from the pen of one of England’s great eccentrics and imaginers of an alternate reality, Alan Moore, who refused to be associated with the film.

As the Occupy movement makes a radical theatre of the city, the bankers continue as if nothing ever happened, stuck in their own fictional, multi-screened universe, in which greed is not good – just normal. St Paul’s, on the other hand, continues to sink under the weight of its own indecision, trembling at the moral outrage of people who in most other circumstances wouldn’t give two figs for the state religion and its nice old men in robes. Meanwhile well-meaning poets pontificate on Question Time, wallowing in smug soundbites. The politicans have little constructive to add. Everyone is searching for truth, or at least that’s what they’re telling us. Perhaps the only authentic position now is confusion.

As I walked to the local chippy on Bonfire Night, explosions and the artillery sound of fireworks ratteld the night. A fine mist descended, turning the already gothic streets of the East End into a foreboding landscape of shadows, dead ends and flickering sodium lights.

Desert Island Discs: No.6 ‘Magnum Mysterium’

Continuing with my obsession with choral music, though this extraordinary piece of contemplative liturgical music is by a modern composer – Danish-American Morten Lauridsen. It helps that this recording is from Westminster Cathedral and is high quality (for Youtube).

One to play with the lights off, and no interruptions.

Poem Set in a Remote Outpost of the British Army

**

We go to bate the jauntier hun,

the pearl that grows in the wadi.

One jaunt leaves half the team

without toenails,

just shims in obis sucking up toxic puds

and fingering the pearly hafts of their rifles.

So we spar amongst ourselves,

eke out our wraths in full gillie, knees against

the dashboard of the van. Moods darken.

We grow fins, detox and

finally we cede the zone.

Spare us, ay, if you so desire.

***

This poem is constructed entirely out of words placed during a game of Scrabble.

**

Indy, cover your heart!

Yes, I am involved in co-organising this brilliant and brilliantly silly homage to Indiana Jones – celebrating this year its/his 30th birthday.

It’s Saturday 22 October, from 7pm.

Jazz star Gwyneth Herbert will open the show with a rendition of “Anything Goes” from Temple of Doom, poets including Jack Underwood and Kirsty Irving will perform new Indy-themed work, Richard Sandling will give us some historical VHS context, Siddhartha Bose will do something very dark in the basement, we will restage the giant boulder scene from the start of Raiders and much, much more.

Tickets are a fiver if bought online in advance.

My own contribution is a particularly florid poem which I will perform accompanied by music by Youth Lagoon (thanks Spotify!) and some mashed up clips of Temple of Doom. Fun!

Hope you can be there, dear reader(s).

Combs

Seven plastic combs glued to the head of a model

in Christopher Shannon’s London Fashion Week show

is like a mitten crab attaching itself to a knuckle of iron

three feet below the swashing potage of the Thames.

To attempt to remove one comb from this krypton henge

would be like playing Jenga of the skull. We never know

how deep the teeth have bored and let me say

unequivocally I would not want this cluster of antennae

sprouting from my misshapen bonce. No kitsch quiff

or po-mo pomade will do for this triple-crowned dome,

a crown for each of my three wives I’m told

by the Sylheti barber I used to visit before my single wife

acquired a pair of clippers and took over, once

mistakenly removing a two inch clump from the back.

You needed that like a hole in the head, she said,

and tucked a stick of gammy kryptonite behind my ear.

Everyman

Your shaven pate has the hue of a whole economy

chicken in the freezer cabinet though not corn-fed

with the yellow almost foreign tinge and you are not

kettled because you do not care though you are trapped

inside the centrifugal force of this one-way system

and a mediaeval subway through which I used to pass

though nowadays I favour the sky caving in above the city

and if you with your frozen chicken skull your naked mask

were caught beneath the wheels of an articulated truck

lost east of Leman Street I might stand by you and love

yes love might flood the vaults we share those newly-minted

magnificent and sunken plots.

The Herbals

3:AM Magazine has published a poem of mine: The Herbals. Thanks to Poetry Editor SJ Fowler for that.

Written last year sometime, this piece now seems strangely prescient. Then again, you can stretch a poem pretty far.

In any city or text-based
practice to be confined
in such articulated coffins
collapses desire & its
attainment causing

sweat
to
gush.

Read the full thing here.